The Solomon Islands faces an acute challenge to address its national electrification targets. The archipelagic nation of 750,000 people, third largest in the Pacific, has a population scattered across 147 inhabited islands and today, 87% of its population is living without effective access to electricity. The nation has a 2050 target of 100% access to energy, with a 40% off-grid (rural) target by 2025.  The small number of micro and mini-grid projects are prone to failure without an embedded revenue model to support project sustainability. This means that approximately 75% of the population living in rural villages of mostly 25 to 100 households scattered across the archipelago are today without electricity and face an access to energy scenario without a viable pathway to electrification and to basic, affordable, reliable energy services.

Project Establishment is Expensive and Complex

All off-grid projects require multiple parties to come together. A project involves:

1. A community or local business who aspire to have energy services. Sometimes communities will have advocates like NGOs , community leaders or government representatives working on their behalf to pull a project together.
2. The company providing the equipment – this is ultimately coming from outside the country.
3. The local company providing installation and maintenance.
4. Commercial and donor investors to provide the project capital to establish the project.
5. The expert project designer and developer.

As it stands, for one off-projects it is complex and expensive for these parties to find each other and for a project to proceed. Transaction costs are high for what are small scale projects. However, we have some of the key ingredients for a market to flourish namely:

1. A high aspiration for communities, and the associated willingness to pay for modest but appropriate energy services.
2. Capital availability from governments and their donor partners as well as commercial investors for renewable energy projects in The Pacific,
3. Technology companies looking to enter new markets like The Pacific should access to projects be made easily available. 

Archipelago Energy in partnership with the Solomon Islands Government is working to create a renewable energy services hub, a one-stop-shop where all parties can more easily find each other to access the project partners and services needed to create new projects. The one-stop-shop will also enable project service aggregation, multi-village projects and other approaches to achieve scale efficiencies which will serve to activate a national pipeline of off-grid renewable energy projects in Solomon Islands.