UNDP Partners With Crypto Startup on Solar Power Pilot

Blockchain startup Sun Exchange has partnered with the United Nations Development Programme on a pilot program that seeks to bring solar power to a university in Moldova.

The solar panels will be owned by individuals around the world and leased to the recipient university, which allows the school to save on the costs of building the equipment, according to a blog post.

Notably, the panels' owners will be paid exclusively in cryptocurrency.

Sun Exchange chief executive Abe Cambridge said the university would lease the panels for 20 years, during which time whoever owns the panels would receive some amounts of bitcoin, solarcoin and the startup's own crypto token as compensation.

The "Buy-to-lease" platform allows these individuals to pay for the cost of building and the installation of the panels, which sell for under $10 apiece.

While the UN blog post mentions the Technical University of Moldova as a likely recipient for the pilot program, the actual school has not yet been determined, Cambridge told CoinDesk.

The panels are scheduled to begin generating power within the next three months.

"Our goal is to tokenize the solar cell so they can be traded on exchanges. That's going to be a non-fungible token and for the moment we can't see that working under the current state of blockchain development [but] we want the solar cells to be accessed and referenced by digital transfers."

UNDP project manager Dumitru Vasilescu, who is overseeing the pilot program, told CoinDesk that the "Decision to partner with Sun Exchange is based on our understanding of the replicability of their model."

CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.