The Sun Exchange happens to be one of the most interesting investments I’ve made recently. They do some amazing work providing solar power to businesses, schools and now retirement homes. As much as the last option there seems odd one out, it turns out to be quite prescient and profoundly important.
The Sun Exchange has an interesting business model in that businesses can apply to get equipment needed to generate solar power making them less reliant on grid electricity and more self sufficient. People like you and me, can crowd fund that capital investment and we get paid a divided once the solar power is installed and the business is then generating revenue. The Sun Exchange itself acts as a facilitator, obtaining the funding from us, obtaining the solar equipment, installing it and then managing the process. This is a solidly brilliant idea for us here in South Africa because we have go lots of sunshine to leverage.
The Sun Exchange have taken it a step further now, where you’ve got an online platform to see which entitles you’ve invested in (bought solar panels) and you can also see your divided payout as well. What I really like about it is that they’ve integrated crypto currency into as well. Last year they had an ICO to raise funds and I bought into that too, but here’s the really cool thing; your payout can be in fiat currency or Bitcoin. Obviously I decided to go with bitcoin as my payout. It’s not much that I’ve that invested, and the payouts aren’t that large at the moment, but its so cool to see this confluence of ideas that I believe in, come together in such beautiful ways. This is exactly what our government should have been doing for decades as there is nothing special that the Sun Exchange is doing. All the Sun Exchange is doing is bringing together technology, people and solutions that are in abundance. Government should do on a national scale and hopefully they will see the light.
With this latest project they’re trying to fund, I’m even more impressed. Their last set of projects were solar enabling schools, but the current project is for a retirement home in Cape Town which it set to go on sale 4th of Jun 2019. This is important because people don’t realize how much demographics affects us. In more modern places like UK, Japan and Canada, the older generation is beginning to make up a greater share of the populace. Countries becoming wealthy have had the unintended consequence of people having less kids, because that’s what you do when you increase your wealth. Once you’re middle-upper class, you have less kids, but you invest more in them. However, this can prove problematic for a countrys’ long term stability, because then you have a young smaller economically active population servicing and larger older population. This is due the fact the younger generation services the older generation via taxes, pension funds, etc. For example your pension fund that you contribute to, are effectively payouts for the older generation who are retiring -admittedly a very over simplified explanation but that’s the general idea. This then spells disaster if there more older people than younger people. Especially when you consider that, old people live much longer now due to improved medical technology and lifestyles. The simply answer to the problem is get national migration policies right so that younger folks can move to countries where they are needed. But within the context of anti-migration sentiment in the air this is unlikely to happen.
So one way to mitigate this problem is to have seniors be more self sustaining. And if electricity as expense can be removed from them in the form of solar energy, then that make brilliant sense. It’s one less thing they and young folk need to worry about. And that’s why I really love this new Sun Exchange initiative and why you should too.
Look, practically all of us are going to get old, and we already know just how expensive the cost of living is. Putting in place solutions like these makes a world of sense. Ultimately governments ad corporate aren’t going to do much to resolve the challenges, but when opportunities like this come around, you jump on board and you contribute. This here is real Shared Value! I’m very happy to have invested in Sun Exchange and I’m very keen to investment more in the future.
Photo by Alexander Shustov on Unsplash