In 2025, Biodun Ogunleye, Lagos State's commissioner for energy and mineral resources, said that about 30,000 deaths occur annually in the state from exposure to carbon monoxide. For Deborah Fadeyi, the figure described a danger she knew firsthand. Generators were an accepted part of daily life throughout her childhood in Nigeria, where unreliable grid supply makes self-generated power a daily necessity — even though their fumes could prove fatal. In 1999, the risk became personal when she lost a friend to carbon monoxide poisoning from generator exhaust.

“I was young, but that experience stayed with me, and Nigeria still hasn’t gone past that phase,” Fadeyi told TechCabal in a September interview. “We still hear in the news that people are dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. Generators were so normal growing up that nobody really questioned what it meant for people to depend on them for something so fundamental as electricity, until it began to kill them.”

Two decades on, Fadeyi founded Vectar Energy, a climate finance company registered and operating in the United Kingdom. The company began as a maker of solar-powered portable power stations designed to displace small petrol generators. Its core product today is ecoWise, a platform that pools small solar projects into a single portfolio and helps them reach carbon markets they could not enter on their own. Carbon markets pay projects for verified emissions reductions, but for small, distributed installations the cost of certification and monitoring can outweigh the returns, which is why aggregation has become an important model in the sector.

Day 1: She wanted to build a better generator

If petrol generators were the problem, Fadeyi set out to build the alternative. Long before Vectar Energy became a climate finance business, she was testing how to make solar power practical enough to take the place of petrol generators.

Her first attempt came in 2019 through an earlier venture, YettyFlames, under which she built locally fabricated solar-generator systems while learning about the energy needs of Nigerian households and small businesses. She described those early units as crude next to what Vectar would eventually produce, but said the work gave her direct contact with the people she hoped to serve.

“That part of the business was super important to us because it put us directly in front of the customers, and it helped us to challenge the realities that they were facing,” Fadeyi said.

By 2020, she had resolved to turn the work into a more structured company. She founded Vectar Energy and began building it on her own. The first product was the Vectar Eco, a portable solar power station intended to replace the small petrol generators Nigerians commonly call “I better pass my neighbour” generators.

“The idea was simple: create a practical solar and better battery alternative to the small petrol generators that homes and businesses used every day,” she said. “Getting from that idea to something commercially viable was much less simple.”

Turning that ambition into a product people could buy required money, and Fadeyi said Vectar Energy was raising funds to develop the solar power stations. The team also had to master the practicalities of hardware manufacturing: selecting the right battery configurations, sizing the solar panels, testing components and designing a unit that was portable yet powerful enough to run the appliances customers relied on.

What kept her going, she said, traced back to 1999.

“I told myself that I hope this doesn’t happen to someone else,” she said. “I guess this is the part that I’m playing to enable that future that I once dreamed of, where it became a responsibility from my best friend losing her life because of something that could be avoided.”

Day 500: Making solar cheaper and building it are different

Reaching the market forced Vectar to rethink how it produced its power stations. Fadeyi said the team realised that locally fabricated units could cost more than their target customers could pay. The design was taken to China, and the company began importing semi-assembled units that were completed in Nigeria.

By 2023, Vectar was ready for the market. It had paying customers in Nigeria and was earning revenue from its portable power stations. The company built out different capacities, including the Vectar Eco and the Vectar Eco Mini, reflecting the reality that a household, a trader and a small business did not share the same power needs or spending power.

Yet even customers who recognised the benefits of switching from petrol to solar struggled with the upfront cost, Fadeyi said. Vectar explored partnerships with lenders such as Credit Direct and AltPower to offer instalment payments, but many prospective buyers could not meet the credit requirements.

“The credit landscape in Nigeria is still developing. People would go to such platforms in the hope that they would get [credit], but they would be laden with different and stringent requirements that they might not be able to meet,” Fadeyi said.

The company then tried offering its own non-interest instalment plans to customers in Lagos and Abuja. Even so, spreading payments over time did not make the stations affordable enough for many of the people Vectar wanted to reach, according to Fadeyi.

“We realised that we were solving the problem, but not at the scale that it needed to be solved,” she said.

In 2024, Vectar Energy began work on SUNWISE alongside Vectar Eco. SUNWISE was designed to make portable solar systems accessible to nano and small businesses without full payment upfront, with rent-to-own arrangements starting at ₦2,000 ($1.49) per day. Rent-to-own and pay-as-you-go structures have become a common way for solar companies across Africa to reach customers who cannot pay full price upfront. That April, Habeeb Mustapha formally joined Vectar as chief technology officer, strengthening the technical team; he would later become a co-founder.

Fadeyi was also starting to examine whether the environmental benefits of the solar systems could themselves generate revenue and bring down the cost of solar.

“We had begun asking whether the environmental value produced by solar systems could itself help solve the affordability problem,” Fadeyi said. “If a solar system displaces petrol or diesel and avoids carbon emissions, could that environmental impact become another revenue stream? Could that revenue lower the cost of the system or help finance additional installations?”

For Vectar, 2024 became a year of overlap. The company was still building and selling physical solar products while also developing the technology that would eventually carry it into climate finance.

Day 1000: Selling the evidence, not the equipment

After years of trying to make clean energy affordable for Nigerian households and small businesses, Fadeyi concluded that the real opportunity might lie in making the environmental benefits of solar projects earn money.

“What if the individual installation did not have to be the unit entering the carbon market? What if we aggregated many installations and eventually many independent developers through one common infrastructure?” she said.

That thinking produced ecoWise, Vectar’s carbon-market infrastructure platform. ecoWise pools smaller solar projects into a single portfolio, tracks the electricity they generate and the emissions they avoid, and helps their developers access carbon markets. The platform supplies the infrastructure needed to navigate carbon certification and credit sales collectively.

For the model to work, Vectar had to produce evidence that carbon-market institutions and buyers could trust. That required building the technology to monitor installations and understanding the requirements of carbon standards.

“ecoWise increasingly became about assurance infrastructure rather than simply an emissions calculator,” Fadeyi said. “It was also during this period that we began doing the much less glamorous work required to create an actual carbon programme: methodologies, eligibility criteria, developer agreements, carbon rights, monitoring plans, safeguards, Gold Standard requirements and the programme architecture necessary to aggregate independent developers.” Gold Standard is one of the main voluntary certification standards for carbon credits, and its requirements cover exactly the kind of programme-level groundwork Fadeyi described.

Fadeyi describes 2025 as the year Vectar shifted from being principally a solar product company to a climate finance and environmental-market infrastructure company. By early 2026, the legacy solar product business had served more than 150 customers and generated roughly ₦80 million in cumulative revenue. Fadeyi’s focus, however, had moved to helping solar developers earn additional revenue from the electricity they were already producing.

Vectar says it has onboarded 35 megawatt-peak (MWp) of distributed solar projects across Nigeria, with a 50 MWp cohort being prepared for validation and verification. Fadeyi expects the first carbon-credit payout to participating solar projects in January 2027.

The technology behind the programme has matured as well. Vectar is developing ecoWise as a hybrid digital measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) system that combines physical Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring with virtual and API-based integrations, allowing it to gather data from solar installations running different inverters and monitoring systems.

“We realised quite early that distributed solar is too heterogeneous for a single monitoring approach to work for every developer,” she said. “Different projects have different inverters, monitoring systems, data formats and operating environments, so the infrastructure has to be flexible enough to accommodate that diversity while still producing consistent, auditable evidence.” That auditable evidence is the backbone of any carbon programme, since standards issue credits only against verified monitoring data.

Fadeyi said carbon credits from the projects could sell for as much as $50 each, depending on the market and the quality of the credits. She also said Vectar is working with MSCI, a global financial data and research company that provides independent ratings of carbon projects. In 2026, Vectar entered the International Renewable Energy Certificate (I-REC(E)) ecosystem, giving qualifying projects another route to environmental-market revenue by letting buyers substantiate claims about their use of renewable electricity.

Vectar is also preparing to set up operations in Sierra Leone and Madagascar in 2027, with ambitions to replicate its infrastructure across other African markets. How the 50 MWp cohort fares in validation and verification, and whether the first payouts arrive as Fadeyi expects in January 2027, will show how quickly aggregated small-scale solar can turn avoided emissions into developer revenue.

The company has travelled a long way from the portable solar power station it began building in 2020. Yet the underlying problem — making clean energy a viable alternative to the generators that power homes and businesses across Nigeria — remains the same.

“Day one, we started with how do we make clean energy affordable enough to replace generators,” Fadeyi said. “Now we’re asking the question: how do we build the financial infrastructure that makes our energy transition scalable?”