Beyond the lamp count
Could PULSE, a new Paris-aligned carbon credit methodology, unlock additional revenue for off-grid solar enterprises?
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Off-grid solar (OGS) has reached millions of lives in hard-to-reach communities, replacing candles and kerosene lamps with clean light, allowing children to finish homework, parents to work past dark, and freeing up money once spent on fuel. Carbon Finance has helped make a portion of that possible, and much of the finance has run through a handful of small-scale methodologies under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). For solar lanterns and portable lights, the main one was AMS-III.AR.
First developed in 2010 under the United Nations’ CDM and revised several times since, AMS-III.AR helped kickstart the off-grid solar industry to great effect. However, AMS-III.AR suited a narrow group of large companies with the sales volumes to make the accounting worthwhile, and it was designed for a carbon market that has since changed considerably, both in what buyers expect in terms of credit integrity and in the way generated credits can interact with the evolving carbon market landscape.
Now, a new carbon market is emerging under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. To enable the OGS sector to take part, Gold Standard has published PULSE (Powering Universal Lighting via Solar Energy), a methodology that gives them a route to high-integrity, Paris-aligned carbon credits. PULSE is a direct output of technical assistance provided under Acumen’s Hardest-to-Reach initiative, to help portfolio distributors engage third-party carbon developers. Gold Standard’s published methodology acknowledges the support of Acumen and AGS Carbon in its development.
“PULSE isn’t a lighter version of the old methodology — it’s a more accountable one,” said Abhishek Goyal, a partner at AGS Carbon Advisory and a key contributor towards the development of the methodology. “We refined what counts and how it’s measured because the market it now serves, Article 6, expects nothing less.”
The new methodology can be seen as a step forward, one that credits the light households actually receive and holds the sector to a higher standard. But we also recognize that greater rigor carries trade-offs. Here is our perspective on what PULSE changes, where we see opportunity, where we see risk, and what comes next.
What gets counted
Until now, a company earned credits for the lamps it sold. The calculation was straightforward: Count the units sold, then apply a fixed emissions value for the kerosene lamp each unit replaced. That was the claim. PULSE keeps that route but adds another. It credits the light delivered instead. If a household system provides at least 1,000 lumen-hours of light per day, broadly aligned with the World Bank’s Tier 1 threshold, it can qualify through this new route. That threshold is equivalent to about five kerosene lamps’ worth of light, so a system that clears the bar is credited as replacing five lamps, whether it has one bulb or four. In other words, one well-made portable light can now count the same as five did under AMS-III.AR.
PULSE also applies more deductions. Two are applied to the baseline itself: a fixed allowance for uncertainty and a country-specific adjustment that reduces the baseline over time, in line with national climate targets. A third covers so-called embodied emissions. Those from manufacturing the device, principally the battery and solar panel, are deducted from the credits it generates. In effect, the system’s own production footprint is set against the emissions it avoids. Two smaller deductions apply conditionally, one where displaced kerosene lamps are not collected and destroyed, and another where the device can also be charged from the mains.
The net effect on credits per household is therefore not determined by the methodology alone. It depends on the system’s service level, the adjustment factor set for the country, and whether the company can demonstrate that the displaced lamps have been removed from use. There is no blanket sector-wide multiplier or figure.
Where we see opportunity
Carbon revenue as an affordability lever. PULSE states that its suppressed demand provisions, which credit the service a household should have had rather than the fuel it could afford to burn, are intended to direct carbon finance toward households whose fuel use has been low because they are poor. Where fuel spending was low because a household could not afford more, the accounting no longer treats that as fewer emissions to displace.
Access to a different kind of buyer. Credits issued under PULSE are designed to be eligible for use in Article 6 transactions, subject to the host-country authorization. The significance lies in who the buyer becomes. Obligated demand should prove steadier than discretionary demand, which matters for distributors looking at revenue predictability rather than headline prices.
Existing PAYG infrastructure can do double duty. Companies already running pay-as-you-go telemetry can use those logs as their monitoring record rather than building a separate survey program. For distributors that have invested in digital systems, a meaningful part of what PULSE requires is already in place.
“Carbon finance has long struggled to reach the households most vulnerable to climate change,” said Susie Wheeldon, director of knowledge and insights at GOGLA. “PULSE recognizes that every family deserves enough power to study, work and stay safe after dark, and it credits projects on that basis. With digital tracking of every device and strong rules on battery and panel waste, it gives buyers the confidence to direct carbon finance to the communities that need it most. Unlocking that finance for off-grid solar can help lift millions more families out of extreme energy poverty.”
Where we see risk
Authorization sits with governments, not companies. Article 6 host-country authorization is a sovereign decision taken on government timetables. Developers can build compliant projects and still find themselves waiting, sometimes indefinitely, on a signature that is not theirs to control. Early and transparent engagement with the ministries running a country’s Article 6 arrangements and its nationally determined contributions will be critical.2
Carbon should not carry the business case. Credit prices are volatile and Article 6-market demand is still being tested in practice. PULSE also treats carbon income as temporary by design. At each crediting-period renewal, most activities must demonstrate that they still require carbon revenue to operate. Any distributor or investor treating such income as core, rather than a valuable but variable supplement, is taking on more risk than the instrument can currently support.
Consensus is not the same as certainty. PULSE was built to earn broad agreement across a diverse set of stakeholders and largely achieves it. But questions will remain about the methodological choices underneath: where baselines are set, how far monitoring requirements should go before the cost outweighs the accuracy gained, and how any counterfactual can be established with confidence. Those debates are healthy, and the sector should expect them to continue.
What happens next
Could a Paris-aligned methodology open new doors for OGS enterprises? For companies able to meet its requirements, likely yes. New markets, more pricing power, and a stronger claim to legitimacy are all positive developments. For smaller and less-resourced distributors, that door may open more slowly, or only with additional support. What that support looks like is the open question: who builds and holds the monitoring systems, who carries the cost of running them, and how are the resulting revenues shared. That is the conversation we’re eager to have next.
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