"Solar for every Juan" was not a marketing line we reverse-engineered from a strategy deck. It was the answer to a question we kept being asked in Dumaguete: can I have this too?
By 2023 Magnus was building megawatt-scale arrays on factory and mall roofs. The economics of those projects are straightforward — a large daytime load, a large roof, a counterparty with audited accounts. None of that describes a bakery, a small resort, a provincial clinic or a household. Those customers face the same electricity rates, often worse, and they are the ones for whom a monthly bill is a genuine constraint. What they do not have is a few hundred thousand pesos of capital sitting idle, or a credit profile that a bank recognises for an energy asset.
The lease-to-own programme was built for them. Magnus funds and installs the system; the customer pays monthly over a term of six to twelve years, and at the end they own it outright. No capital outlay at the start, and an asset at the finish. We ran it alongside a Spark Project crowdfunding campaign, which let people who wanted to see solar reach households rather than corporations put money directly behind it.
More than 150 customer systems have been delivered across our commercial lease and residential programmes.
The campaign shaped how we work at the other end of the market too. A residential lease teaches you things a megawatt EPC contract never will — that the monitoring portal has to be legible to someone who is not an engineer, that a service call has to be answerable from the same island, that trust compounds.
Source: Spark Project campaign (2023)
