Tired of his increasing electricity bill, Miguel Estrada Campos decided to search for alternatives. “I had already heard that solar panels could be an interesting solution, so I decided to research this field,” he says. “I had already been told that Purasol´s panels were a little more economical and that they offered quality products so I decided to ask them to calculate what I needed and how much it would cost.”

Miguel Estrada Campos owns the supermarket La Flor in Mercedes de Cajón, in the southern part of Costa Rica where he works together with other relatives. This involves hard work and as he had no time nor desire to deal with all the paperwork to request the interconnection with ICE, he left this in the hands of Purasol. “That really saved me,” he admits. “Purasol took care of all the paperwork to join the ICE´s Plan Piloto. This means my supermarket is fed by public electricity at night and during the day its consumes the electricity generated by my own panels. Too bad that it took ICE almost a month to connect the system to the grid after Purasol had finished the installation. That´s why my electricity bill only went down 30,000 colones this month because we only had been running on solar energy for a short time; but my electrical bill that usually is around 600,000 colones should be much lower next month.”

“If the 120 panels work well for this supermarket, I think about installing photovoltaic panels at my other two supermarkets. The main reason for this investment was to bring down my electricity bill and they calculated that there would be a return on investment in about 10 years. But that might as well be sooner because ICE rates rise continually. Another reason is that I like the idea of ​​using this type of energy: solar energy is a clean energy that doesn´t contaminate our environment.”