The second Off-Grid Power Conference was held on June 10th, 2010 in Munich during the Intersolar trade fair.

It focused on:
Quality assurance for products and services

International speakers have presented their experience in controlling and maintaining the technical quality of solar components and systems but also the quality in after-sales and finance services.

Mark Hankins from Kenya opened with his keynote speech by remarking that often, quality is a big misunderstanding between those who design an off-grid project and those who are the beneficiaries.

Anil Cabraal, who has over 15 years experience with Worldbank funded projects, emphasised that quality requirements must be enforced along the whole chain of donors, suppliers and beneficiaries.

Otmar Werner, from the German KfW, presented the manifold control mechanism in the Bangladesh SHS project that were build in to achieve high reliability in the finance part of the project. International standards on solar products are applied and controlled by the local technical committee to ensure product quality.

Amongst other speakers, Ms Christine Namazzi (Uganda) and Ms Indrani Hettiarachchy ( Sri Lanka) highlighted the need and importance of after-sales service structures that are going alongside with micro-credit marketing channels.

In the discussions with the audience it became clear that customers in rural communities often are not aware of product quality features and values (and thus cannot demand for). Other players may have different requirements on the quality. The donors are interested in long-term projects to achieve high impacts and implementing organisations try do minimise costs in short and middle term.

At the end it was stated that quality requirements are so diverse and dependent on the player's point of view that participation is need along the players chain during all steps of the project.

Around 90 participants visited the off-grid power session, which will be held again June 7, 2011 at the Intersolar Europe, Munich.