The grid tariff went up 15 % on 1 May. Nobody can tell you what it will be in 2046 — not the CEB, not the government, not us. The one thing we can tell you is what you will pay with Solar Rent.
The first sets out what Solar Rent is and the place it occupies within the Mauritian electricity system. The second sets out why the cost of grid electricity cannot come back down. They do not address the same reader, and they do not offer the same kind of proof.
A solar purchase is mainly compared by equipment and price. With Solar Rent, you choose a twenty-year energy service: equipment, maintenance, battery and a rent increase capped at 6% per year. The choice is therefore not only about panels, but also about your budget and peace of mind over time.
Two indexations start from the same point. The area between them is what Solar Rent saves you from paying.
Structural base-100 trajectories illustrating the mechanics of two indexations. They do not represent the price of any particular offer: that depends on sizing and, above Rs 15,000 of monthly billing, on the Technical Study Contract.
The question is not whether you will pay more for your electricity. It is whether you are prepared to be subject to its price.
This section contains no forecast. Only situations that are established, published and verifiable.
More than 80 % of Mauritian electricity comes from imported fuels, heavy fuel oil and coal. The tariff passes the fuel cost through. Your bill is therefore an open position on a market you do not follow, on a commodity you do not buy, shipped on vessels you do not know. You cannot hedge it. You can step out of it.
The increase of 1 May 2026 was explicitly attributed to the surge in world fuel prices. The link between international tension and your domestic bill needs no demonstration: it was written by the supplier and billed to subscribers. The February 2023 step, from +19 % to +29 % depending on the band, establishes that this is not an isolated episode.
Your last increase was attributed to a conflict you did not start. So will the next one.
If the energy transition is carried through, the investment estimated at USD 1.35 billion by 2030 enters the tariff base before fuel savings materialise: the tariff rises to finance the exit from fossil fuels. If it slips — and it is slipping, with the renewable share back below 25 % and the 60 % target pushed from 2030 to 2035 — fossil dependency continues: the tariff rises because nothing has changed.
There is no scenario in which grid electricity becomes cheap again. Neither the success of the transition nor its failure produces a decrease.
Eight years of reserve accumulation without renewing the generation fleet, then a collapse over two financial years when the fuel bill arrived. The physical trace is measurable: roughly 230 MW of turbines aged 15 to 37 years still cover 36 % of national demand.
| Year | National utility reserves |
|---|---|
| 2014 | Rs 894 million |
| 2022 | ≈ Rs 7 billion |
| 2024 | − Rs 5.9 billion |
The announced increases therefore do not fund a better service. They catch up on deferred investment — and the deficit remains after the May increase, to the tune of Rs 1.8 billion.
You did not create this backlog. Nothing obliges you to fund catching up on it through your bill for twenty years.
Our simulations assume nothing deteriorates beyond what is already committed. They include neither pressure on maritime freight, nor a supply disruption, nor a shock on fuel prices. They are therefore low assumptions.
This decision is not a simple equipment purchase. It should be assessed through its effect on the household budget, savings and energy security.
Rent capped at +6% against a CEB bill that may rise provides twenty-year protection against energy inflation.
Rental avoids tying all household savings to equipment installed on the roof. The family keeps a reserve for projects and unexpected expenses.
Capping the rent increase helps your household plan its energy spending, even if CEB rates change.
Performance, maintenance, equipment replacement, degradation and obsolescence remain the lessor’s responsibility during the contract.
Residential simulations compare rent, avoided CEB bills and surplus value so that the monthly effort is clear for each offer.
Several engines fail simultaneously at the Savannah and Belle-Vue power stations. The national grid runs a 55 MW deficit. Red alert is declared, and fourteen hotels switch to their generators. Without them, the whole island went dark.
So it was private, decentralised capacity, sitting on customers' premises, that held the public system up.
Those fourteen hotels did not provide a free service. They burned fuel, ran generators, and billed those kilowatt-hours at a high rate — legitimately, given the real cost of generator output. No amount has ever been made public. The expense was nonetheless incurred, and it ends up, by construction, in the utility's accounts and then in the tariff.
You are already funding the grid's fragility. You do not know it, and you get no protection from it.
A system with storage puts you in the position of those fourteen hotels, with three decisive differences.
One objection is regularly raised against renewables: a grid designed for centralised plants cannot absorb a large share of decentralised generation without considerable investment. The argument fails for generation consumed on site with storage: it does not draw on the transmission grid, it reduces the load at the delivery point. Better still, the battery carries the evening peak on energy stored during the day — precisely when the system is most stretched.
Every installation with storage relieves the grid at the exact moment it is threatened. Distributed solar is not a burden on the system: it is a distributed reserve.
The electricity bill is the only household budget line that rises without the family having decided anything or consumed more. Capping makes that line predictable for twenty years, on the timescale of a home loan.
Our parameters are not commercial estimates. They are measured values, and we set them out.
This is the actual yield measured in Mauritius: about 4.8 production hours per day, four in winter, five to six in summer depending on the district. Not to be confused with the 2,500 hours of irradiation, which count daylight hours. Sizing on irradiation overstates production by roughly 40 %.
This is the exact net metering rate, the regime we operate under: only the surplus is exported and credited. The higher rates sometimes quoted belong to gross metering, where all production is sold and all consumption bought back. The two regimes are not comparable.
Rent progression is contractually capped at +6 % per year. We write "capped" and never "fixed", because the two words do not commit to the same thing.
Above Rs 15,000 of monthly billing, the case goes through a Technical Study Contract with a technician visit. This is not a generic quotation: it is a sizing established on your site.
It is whether you want to choose by how much.
The facts set out on this page are public and verifiable.
Simple, governed, accessible to households and businesses
Moving to solar with storage is a substantial decision. Direct purchase requires a high investment, the technical competence to size the system, a judgement on equipment durability, and the organisation of maintenance over twenty years. Solar Rent replaces that purchase with a long-term lease bundled with the full service: the client gains access to the generation, not responsibility for the equipment.
These questions are legitimate. The model was designed to answer them through the contract rather than through commercial assurance.
Solar with storage must not remain the preserve of those able to buy outright. By replacing purchase with a governed lease, Solar Rent opens access to a far wider clientele: households without investment capacity, and businesses that would rather keep their capital and borrowing capacity for their core activity.
The reasoning differs from a household's. A company weighs tying up its balance sheet in a roof against preserving borrowing capacity for its trade. The lease is an operating expense, consumes no debt capacity, and transfers both performance and obsolescence risk to the lessor. The catalogue covers seven sectors, from offices to industry, each with its own operating hours and tariff regime.
An energy service lease, not disguised credit
The distinction is fundamental and shapes the whole contractual structure. The client does not take on credit in order to acquire a solar system: they enter into a lease and energy service agreement covering the provision of an installation, its installation, monitoring, maintenance and contractual governance.
The heart of the model is not the delivery of a set of equipment. It is a continuing service across the whole term of the contract.
Legal certainty rests on documentary coherence: each instrument answers one precise question, and the set follows a single logic.
The rent is not fixed, and the contract does not claim otherwise. It is contractually capped at a maximum increase of 6 % per year, which constitutes an undertaking by the lessor on the trajectory of the cost, not a promise that it will never move. This wording is identical across all our materials, out of a requirement that the commercial account and the signed instrument agree.
A contribution to the stability of the Mauritian system
A proliferation of solar installations is a risk where it is disorderly: mismatched equipment, undocumented configurations, no monitoring. It becomes an opportunity once it is standardised, monitored, maintained and integrated into a grid logic. Our purpose is to make the roof a governable, documented component of the electricity system, not an accumulation of isolated installations.
In the medium term, a portfolio of several thousand hybrid installations — residential and commercial — mutually compatible, monitored and under contract, constitutes a collective energy asset. That is the technical basis of a virtual power plant, whose value lies not in installed capacity but in the ability to dispatch it.
For the grid, a dispersed but homogeneous and monitored fleet is worth more than a set of high-performing yet ungovernable installations.
Distributed infrastructure serving the general interest
The programme is not to be understood as competing with the CEB or with established producers. It constitutes distributed infrastructure, residential and commercial, enabling Mauritius to accelerate its transition, strengthen its electrical security and turn consumers into governed producers.
The Renewable Energy Roadmap sets a target of 60 % renewable electricity, now aimed at 2035. A target of that scale cannot rest on a few large producers: it presupposes a dense network of technically governed prosumers, each contributing a modest share while the aggregate is considerable.
Solar Rent is a private response to an objective of general interest.
Both propositions must be held together rather than set against one another. The transition is indispensable, and we contribute to it. But the investment it requires enters the tariff base before fuel savings materialise: the grid tariff will rise to finance it. That is precisely what grounds the usefulness of distributed generation — it adds renewable capacity without passing through the tariff, and shields its holder from the very increase it helps to avoid. The macroeconomic reading, available from the second view, sets out this mechanism in detail.
Why the roof complements large producers without replacing them
Independent producers have played a decisive part in building Mauritian generating capacity, and their contribution remains necessary: ground-mounted solar, biomass, agrivoltaics, large industrial projects. But the transition cannot depend on them alone, since they address neither local resilience, nor storage at the point of consumption, nor peak shaving closest to use.
| Actor | Role in the system |
|---|---|
| Centralised independent producers | Bulk generation, industrial projects, purchase agreements, large capacity |
| Distributed Solar Rent | On-site generation, local storage, self-consumption, resilience at the point of delivery |
| CEB | Grid coordination, connection, security, national balance |
We do not set ourselves up as an adversary. Large producers are necessary to centralised generation, Solar Rent to distributed generation, the CEB to coordinating the whole. Mauritius needs all three levels to succeed in its transition, and none substitutes for the others.
Independent producers
Centralised bulk generation
Solar Rent
Distributed generation with storage
CEB
Grid coordination and balance
The second view of this page sets out the national supplier's accounts, its deficit and the decade that produced it. That account is not aimed at the institution: it describes the tariff mechanism the institution is subject to. An operator whose generation depends on imported fuels for more than 80 % does not control its cost of supply, and passing that exposure through is its only accounting recourse. We document the constraint because it determines what the consumer will pay, not to arraign those who bear it.
Every installation is sized against your metered consumption, the available surface and your autonomy objective. Above Rs 15,000 of monthly billing, a Technical Study Agreement provides a bespoke assessment with an on-site engineer visit.
Solar Rent is a dedicated project company, a subsidiary of Solar Center.
