Powering agricultural transformation: Mandulis Energy’s innovative path to sustainable electrification

Mandulis Energy, a Ugandan mini-grid operator, leverages cutting-edge technologies to deliver affordable, reliable, and sustainable electricity to smallholder farmers while driving broader socioeconomic transformation. By boosting farm productivity, creating new revenue streams, and enabling farmers to secure better market prices, their approach goes beyond energy access to redefine rural economic potential.

Operating across five countries—Botswana, Cambodia, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia—Mandulis Energy has pioneered a transformative solution to the energy access “trilemma” of affordability, reliability, and sustainability in off-grid rural regions. At the heart of their innovation is an Agrivoltaic Solar-Biomass Gasification-Biogas Hybrid system. This zero-waste, circular economy model transforms agricultural waste into sustainable electricity, cooking fuel, and soil enhancers. By addressing energy poverty, boosting agricultural productivity, and building climate resilience, their holistic approach tackles multiple challenges with a single integrated solution.

Mandulis Energy’s work serves as a powerful blueprint for sustainable rural electrification, showcasing how innovative design and circular economy principles can unlock significant socioeconomic opportunities in underserved markets. To explore their journey, Energy Catalyst spoke with the Mandulis team to uncover the evolution of their unique business model, key lessons learned, and advice for emerging clean energy innovators.

Q1. What prompted Mandulis Energy to enter the sustainable energy market, and how did this decision influence your business model and value proposition?

A: We entered the sustainable energy market driven by a commitment to address the pressing energy access “trilemma” of affordability, reliability, and sustainability. Starting in Uganda, we pioneered the deployment of on-grid and off-grid renewable energy infrastructure that goes beyond simple carbon offsets. We decided to focus on carbon removal while developing innovative technologies and business models that could deliver 24/7 clean, reliable, and affordable electricity to rural communities. This approach fundamentally reshaped our business model by focusing not just on rural electrification, but also environmental sustainability through carbon removal strategies.

Q2. Could you describe Mandulis Energy’s business model and highlight the distinctive features compared to alternative approaches?

A: Our business model integrates multiple renewable energy technologies to process agricultural waste and generate electricity for rural communities. The key components are:

• Biomass gasification: We convert dry agricultural waste (e.g. rice husks, maize shells) into hydrogen and methane, producing biochar as a byproduct. When we speed the decomposition of these residues through intense heat in our specialised gasifier cookstoves, we achieve a remarkable 4:1 conversion ratio of Kyakula pellets to biochar. These pellets retail at approximately 25% less than traditional wood fuels, providing immediate cost savings for households.
• Anaerobic digestion: We process wet agricultural waste to produce biomethane, with a nutrient-rich organic bioslurry as a byproduct.
• Activated biochar fertiliser: We then combine biochar and bioslurry to create a premium eco-friendly fertiliser, with a market value that provides a self-subsidy mechanism that ensures the sustainability and scalability of our company.
• Electricity generation: The methane generated is used in gas engines to produce electricity, supplemented by solar power and battery storage. This approach guarantees 100% uptime and maintains a low cost per kilowatt-second, again saving household costs.

This combination of solar and biomass technologies allows us to create a closed-loop system that maximises resource utilisation, minimises waste, and creates affordable energy for farmers and rural communities.

Q3. What specific areas of your business have experienced most growth, and how has this shift contributed to your overall mission?

Our primary mission is to support smallholder farmers with affordable and sustainable products, whilst maintaining our own financial viability. Entering the carbon market and leveraging carbon credits allowed us to innovate with our financing and offer more reliable and cost-effective energy solutions in rural areas.

Our most significant growth areas have been:

• Clean cooking solutions: We’ve developed biomass gasification cookstoves that produce biochar, which can be effectively used for carbon credits. Each stove costs £50 to purchase but generates £50 in carbon credits annually over seven years.
• Health centre electrification: We’ve diversified into providing electricity to health centres, enabling quicker cross-sector project implementation by unlocking renewable energy access and carbon credit opportunities in a sector with high social impact.
• Productive use of energy in digital: We’re expanding into digital productivity applications such as data centres, AI, and blockchain. These technologies help us to optimise energy use and improve carbon credit quality.

These growth areas directly support our mission by enhancing rural electrification and providing sustainable energy solutions that tangibly benefit smallholder farmers and communities.

Q4. Can you tell us more about Mandulis Energy’s circular economy model and the advantages it provides for smallholder farmers in terms of sustainability and economic resilience?

Our circular economy model integrates agricultural waste management with energy production and soil enhancement. It works through three interconnected stages:

First, farmers bring their crops for processing, and the waste (husks, shells, cobs) is used for energy production. The farmers benefit by getting their processed crops to market at more affordable rates and securing better prices for their produce.

Second, the biochar and bioslurry byproducts from the energy production process are combined to create an activated biochar fertiliser, which is returned to the farmers’ fields to improve soil quality and crop yields.

Third, the energy production process enables us to provide low-cost milling services and electricity to farmers, who in return supply agricultural waste. We also distribute clean cooking stoves that produce biochar, which can be used to generate carbon credits.

This model takes a comprehensive approach to environmental and economic sustainability by reducing waste, improving soil health, and providing farmers with energy and cooking solutions, thereby increasing their resilience against future market and climate shocks.

Q5. Could you tell us about the challenges you faced while developing the Agrivoltaic Solar-Biomass Gasification-Biogas Hybrid System, particularly in relation to affordability and reliability, and how these challenges shaped your overall strategy in the carbon market?

The main challenges in developing the hybrid system included:

• Financial structures: High interest rates in countries like Uganda made traditional financing unviable. We addressed this through asset financing – borrowing equipment upfront instead of seeking capital – which lowers financial risks and costs.
• Carbon credits:  Carbon credits are a critical source of income, but conducting carbon studies to verify offsetting is costly, with each study costing at least £75,000. This makes it prohibitively expensive to fund multiple studies simultaneously.

We developed a strategic approach: despite our commitment to 12 sites, we focused intensely on establishing one initial project to secure carbon credits. The proceeds from this project’s carbon sales would fund subsequent projects. Once the first project is established, we then raise significant investment through carbon sales and use these income projections to secure bank loans for scaling the business. We also generate Renewable Energy Credits focussed on solar energy provision, which further contributes to funding our long-term carbon credit projects.

In a nutshell, the challenges we faced led us to innovate with financial instruments, leveraging carbon credits to make our projects financially viable and scalable.

Q6. In what ways has your support from the Energy Catalyst programme influenced your approach to innovation in the renewable energy sector, and how do you see this impacting your position in the market moving forward?

Support from the Energy Catalyst programme provided us with the funding, time and flexibility to innovate across financial and technological dimensions. Key impacts include:

• Innovation-focused grant funding: Energy Catalyst’s “innovation-first” philosophy allowed us to explore unconventional solutions for rural energy access. This enabled us to create innovative carbon instruments and develop hybrid technologies.
• Holistic approach: Energy Catalyst supported a holistic approach that allowed us to integrate clean cooking, agricultural services, and electricity generation into a comprehensive and affordable solution.

By testing our systems at multiple pilot sites, gathering impact data for carbon credit analysis, and exploring dissemination opportunities, Energy Catalyst supported our technology development, which helped us refine our entire business model.

Q7. What metrics or indicators do you use to measure success, and how do these reflect your impact on both local economies and broader climate goals?

We’ve developed a nuanced approach to measuring success that balances quantitative and qualitative metrics. On the quantitative side, we track traditional indicators like kilowatt-hours deployed, operational hours, energy utilisation, and the number of homes connected. These provide a clear measurable view of our technical performance.

However, we’ve found that truly understanding our impact requires looking beyond these numbers. Our qualitative metrics have become increasingly important. We now pay close attention to changes in local economic dynamics, exponential increases in energy demand, and non-traditional indicators like social and psychosocial impacts.

These metrics reflect our impact on local economies by allowing us to measure how improved energy access supports secondary economic activities and contributes to broader climate goals through the provision of sustainable energy and carbon reduction.

Q8. What’s next on the agenda for Mandulis Energy? Do you have any exciting plans coming up in the foreseeable future?

We are passionate about increasing electricity usage in rural communities to 100%. To achieve this, we’re exploring two cutting-edge technological integrations.

First, we’re developing edge data centres—decentralised computing facilities located closer to end-users. Unlike traditional centralised data centres, which are often situated far from users, edge data centres bring processing power and storage closer to where data is generated and consumed. This proximity reduces latency, optimises bandwidth, and enhances the performance of applications and services that require real-time data processing.

Simultaneously, we’re creating AI compute hubs as anchor loads. These will be centralised infrastructures equipped with powerful computational resources like GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), designed specifically for AI model development and deployment.

These initiatives represent more than technological expansion. They’re about democratising access to advanced digital infrastructure, bringing computational power to rural communities that have historically been left behind.