A couple of weekends ago, I had an early Saturday morning video meeting with a business acquaintance in Brooklyn, New York, and he remarked that one of the recent developments in 2020’s never-ending parade of horrors for people in his neighborhood was that they could now smell the smoke from the wildfires in the western US.
Here in the Philippines, for example, the government has proposed a 30-percent increase in the budget for its climate-mitigation and risk-reduction convergence program — P152.3 billion for 2021 from P117 billion this year — and President Rodrigo Duterte has, somewhat unexpectedly, said he would give serious consideration to a proposal from Greenpeace to declare a “climate emergency” in the country.
Although some rate corrections have since been made by the likes of Meralco, power costs remain high and are still problematic for households and businesses on reduced incomes, sustaining demand for alternative solutions. As anecdotal evidence of this, one of the first businesses to reopen in my own neighborhood after the lifting of Metro Manila’s first major lockdown at the beginning of June was a local retailer of home solar photovoltaic systems.
While anyone offering any sort of “simple, sustainable and resilient” solution has found new demand, the situation seems to have worked out particularly well for SunSmart. It offers a wider variety of useful systems than most distributors, including solar-powered generator units, off-grid and mini-grid solar power systems, and solar and solar/wind hybrid outdoor lighting systems, among others.