Vectar Energy Shifts From Solar Generators to Carbon Markets

Vectar Energy, a UK-registered climate finance company founded by Nigerian entrepreneur Deborah Fadeyi, has moved from selling solar-powered portable power stations to building carbon-market infrastructure. Its core product is now ecoWise, a platform that combines small solar projects into a single portfolio so they can reach carbon markets they could not enter alone.

From a personal loss to a product

Fadeyi says her motivation dates to 1999, when she lost a friend to carbon monoxide poisoning from generator fumes. In 2025, Lagos State's energy commissioner, Biodun Ogunleye, said about 30,000 deaths a year in the state are linked to carbon monoxide exposure.

After early experiments with locally fabricated solar generators in 2019 under an earlier venture, YettyFlames, she founded Vectar Energy in 2020. Its first product, the Vectar Eco, was meant to replace small petrol generators. A smaller Vectar Eco Mini followed, reflecting the different power needs and budgets of households, traders and small businesses.

Affordability was the obstacle

Local fabrication proved too expensive for target customers, so Vectar moved to importing semi-assembled units from China and completing them in Nigeria. By 2023 it had paying customers. But the upfront price remained a barrier. Partnerships with lenders such as Credit Direct and AltPower fell short because many buyers could not meet credit requirements, and Vectar's own interest-free instalment plans in Lagos and Abuja did not make the units affordable enough either.

In 2024 the company worked on SUNWISE, a rent-to-own scheme for nano and small businesses starting at ₦2,000 ($1.49) a day. Habeeb Mustapha joined as chief technology officer in April that year and later became a co-founder. Around the same time, the team began asking whether the avoided emissions from displacing petrol could become a revenue stream that lowers system costs or finances more installations.

Why it matters

That question led to ecoWise. Rather than having each small installation enter the carbon market individually, the platform aggregates many installations, and eventually many independent developers, under one common framework. For small solar projects in emerging markets, that could open a revenue source otherwise out of reach.