D.Light aims for 1 million solar units in UP and Bihar

In a project currently under registration with the CDM board, D.Light is targeting to sell 1 million units of Nova solar lanterns in Bihar and UP over the coming year.

At 1W per unit that the Nova lamp uses, this would translate into an offgrid generation capacity of 1MW. Based on the PDD, the project expects to generate 300,523 of CO2e worth of reduction over a 5 year period, which is the rated lifetime of the Nova lamp series. At prevailing prices of the CERs, this would translate into 3.6 million Euros or US$5.2 million over the life of the project.

This project opens the way for other micro-initiatives that could leverage the CDM mechanism as a means of reaching scale. Consequently, D.Light as a pioneer also bears the weight of seeing through the projections made in the PDD and ensuring the verification procedures are complied with annually.

It should be clarified that all the numbers are only projecttions and would form a small part of the overall project. The current price of the Nova product seriers is between US$10 and US$25. Hence the CDM financing would cover only a small part of the project rollout. Out of the US$5.2 million over the project life (or $5.2 per unit over 5 years), one would have to assume a steep discount rate and factor in the cost of generating the credits (verification, monitoring, intermediation, etc).

The baseline has been prepared by Ecofys Netherlands BV and to calculate the amount of GHG reduction, it has assumed that all the users that adopt Nova are currently use a  hurricane  kerosene lamp for their lighting needs. This is conservative since the vast majority of households use self-made kerosene lanterns without a glass cover which are less efficient due to wind disturbance and very basic design.

For more details on the D.Light CDM application click here