PowerUP. Electric cooking for the Global South. Funded by carbon.
Clean cooking · Carbon finance · At scale

Electric cooking for 2.1 billion people. Funded by carbon.

PowerUP builds carbon-ready electric cooking for the Global South — sold to distributors and developers, backed by our standalone metering and cloud platform, and proven by a Gold Standard carbon project of our own. Designed and built in Kampala.

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90,000+
devices deployed
8
countries
400k+
lives improved
100%
metered usage
PowerUP customer cooking
Metered devices for traceable credits
Standards, partners and integrations
Gold Standard logo Atmosfair logo MECS logo CLASP logo UpEnergy logo Upya logo ANKA logo PEEDA logo
01 The problem

The Global South's cooking crisis is the largest unsolved climate and health problem.

2.1 billion people cook with biomass: charcoal, firewood and animal dung. The consequences are enormous and concentrated on the poorest households.

Electric cooking solves four at once — climate, health, time and money. Carbon finance is what makes it affordable.

~3.2 mln Premature deaths each year from household air pollution, mostly women and children (WHO)
300–400 Mt CO₂e a year is creditable from clean cooking — the non-renewable share of roughly 1 Gt of gross biomass-cooking emissions
Clean cooking's emission reduction potential is roughly the size of the United Kingdom's entire annual emissions — 367 Mt CO₂e, every year.UK figure: net territorial GHG emissions, 2025 provisional (DESNZ).
3–7 hrs Lost daily by women and girls to fuel gathering, fire-tending and slow cooking
Rising Fuel costs across the board. Charcoal prices climb as deforestation lengthens supply chains, while LPG remains volatile, FX-exposed, and increasingly unaffordable as subsidies retrench
02 Our impact to date

A measurable climate business. Already at scale.

PowerUP's devices cook without smoke or soot, cut household fuel bills, and save up to two hours a day.

90,000+
Devices deployed in kitchens across Africa and South Asia
400k+
Lives directly improved (based on ~4.5 people per household)
8 countries
Active deployment across four sub-regions
100%
Of credited electricity metered at the device — no sampling, no extrapolation
“I sell charcoal for a living — but I cook with the EPC.”
Allen Kavuwo · Charcoal trader, Uganda
First Gold Standard issuance expected Q3 2026, subject to verification. GS12536 — Gold Standard Certified Design →
03 What we do

A business model built for scale.

PowerUP is the measurement layer for clean-cooking carbon. We build the hardware, run the dMRV stack that turns its usage into audit-grade data, and prove the whole system on a project of our own.

01 · Devices

Carbon-ready cookers, sold B2B.

Rugged, metered electric cookers designed in Kampala, sold to distributors and to the carbon developers who build projects on them — reaching households through pay-as-you-go microcredit and carbon subsidies. This is where most of our revenue comes from today: developers buy PowerUP hardware because it arrives already able to measure itself.

02 · Metering + cloud

The measurement layer, sold on its own.

Our metering technology and dMRV cloud as a standalone service — live usage data, audit-grade trails, an API — for developers who already have hardware in the field. A young line today, and the one we are building for: as measurement becomes the binding constraint on cooking carbon, the layer that measures it is the layer that scales.

03 · Our own project

Proof the stack works end to end.

Uganda GS12536 is our own Gold Standard project — the demonstration that runs the full chain, from metered kitchen to issued credit, on our own hardware and data.

Why a household can afford one

Two streams of money meet in the kitchen — and neither works alone.

Down payment + PAYG

Households already buy charcoal in small amounts, several times a week. Pay-as-you-go microcredit matches that rhythm — a small deposit, then payments sized to a budget that already exists.

+

Carbon financing

Every device meters its own use. That metered usage becomes carbon credits, and the credit revenue brings the price of the device down.

=

Clean cooking, on a charcoal budget

Neither half works alone. Together they put an electric cooker into kitchens that could never have bought one outright — and keep it cooking long enough to matter.

04 Our products

A platform of connected cooking devices.

Every device is metered and PAYG-ready: a cooker that records the electricity it uses, on board. Add GSM and it reports continuously. Designed in Kampala for the realities of Global South kitchens, grids and supply chains.

PowerUP Electric Pressure Cooker EPC

Electric Pressure Cooker

Highest-efficiency electric cooking, localised for staple dishes.

Metered and GSM-ready, with dedicated programmes for local dishes. Cooks beans in 40 minutes without soaking.

Households that switch fully from charcoal save up to about USD 5 a week on cooking fuel.Full-switch potential (MECS Uganda, 2022; UGX 3,660/USD). Most stack the EPC with charcoal at first, so real savings build as usage deepens.
“I set the timer, get back to work, and the food is ready in 40 minutes.”
Peace Mubunga · Hairdresser, Uganda

Induction Stove

A simple transition to clean cooking. A 1:1 replacement for charcoal and LPG.

Metered, GSM-ready and PAYG-supported, with four power settings and a boil-water function. No smoke, no soot, no burns.

A clean, one-to-one replacement for charcoal and LPG — and a lower, more predictable cooking bill.
PowerUP Induction Stove Induction
PowerUP CLOUD GRID PowerUP METER · MK1 12.4 kWh THIS MONTH PWR GSM TX PU-M100 · 220–240V · 16A 00:40 ANY BRAND ANY COOKER Meter

Electric Cooking Meter

Make any electric cooker a dMRV-ready carbon asset.

Sits inline between the socket and any electric cooker — any brand, any model — and meters it without touching the appliance. A built-in GSM chip streams the data straight to our cloud.

Remote usage insights, for carbon projects and grid management alike.
05 Data platform capabilities

Don't just measure usage. Move it.

Track usage device by device. Assess which kitchens are cooking and which are drifting back to charcoal. Then influence it — while the credit is still there to earn.

01 · Track

Every device meters itself.

On-board metering records the electricity each cooker uses — every device, not a sample. Connected devices report continuously; the rest log locally and are read directly.

02 · Assess

Raw kWh becomes a usage picture.

The platform turns meter data into something you can act on: which households cook daily, which are drifting back to charcoal, which cohorts go quiet after the first months.

03 · Influence

Then you do something about it.

Reach the households that need reaching — follow-up calls, recipe coaching, PAYG nudges, an agent visit. Not a fleet-wide campaign: the specific kitchens that have gone quiet.

Usage is what carbon pays for. A verification report tells you what you earned; live usage tells you what you can still change — and a device used more is a device worth more.
PowerUP Cloud
Devices Fleet Carbon Payments Reports
Serial · PU-UG-•••704 ▾
Status
Online
GSM · last sync 2 min ago
Total energy
846 kWh
▲ metered on board
Daily energy
1.39 kWh
trailing 30 days
Total cooking
896 hrs
53,775 minutes logged
Household
4 people
baseline survey, 2025
Preset usage · share of sessions
Fry
53%
Boil water
31%
Beans
7%
Potatoes
5%
Rice
2%
Other
2%
Usage per 24h · sessions by preset
0006121823
Payments overview · cumulative PAYGUGX 240,600
MAR 2024JUN 2026
Baseline survey · Mar 30, 2025
DistrictKampala
Baseline fuel stackCharcoal
Electricity connectionOwn Yaka meter
Carbon waiverSignature captured
Appliance serialPU-UG-•••704
Illustrative view of the PowerUP cloud dashboard — a real, anonymised device from the Uganda fleet.

On-board metering

An on-board electricity meter with 12 months of local data logging. The foundation of our Gold Standard MRV.

PAYG integrations

Native integrations with Angaza, Paygee, Upya and PaygOps. Distributors plug us into their existing stack.

Cloud data platform

Live usage dashboards, MRV-grade audit trails and a full API for distributor and buyer integrations.

Designed in Africa

Hardware engineered in Kampala for the realities of African and South Asian kitchens, grids and supply chains.

06 Carbon

High-integrity carbon credits. Measured, not modelled.

100% of the electricity consumed by devices in PowerUP's carbon project is metered at the device and traceable to the household that used it. No sampling, no assumed adoption rates.1

1 Metering removes the largest uncertainty in cookstove crediting — how much the device is actually used. It does not set the emission factors. fNRB, baseline stove efficiency and fuel stacking are methodology parameters, not measurements. We apply the CDM TOOL33 v03.0 national default for Uganda (39%) — the national value rather than a regional one, because our cohort displaces charcoal in urban and peri-urban kitchens. We net the Ugandan grid emission factor as project emissions, and publish our baseline survey design.

01 · Article 6.2

Inside the first authorised Article 6.2 e-cooking activity.

Our electric pressure cookers are named in the Mitigation Activity Design Document for Building Pathways to Electric Cooking (BPTEC) in Ghana, published by Ghana's EPA Carbon Markets Office. Ghana and Switzerland signed Letters of Authorisation in December 2025; ITMOs are contracted to the KliK Foundation and part-financed by the World Bank's USD 200m Clean Cooking Outcome Bond.

02 · Our own project

Uganda GS12536 — Gold Standard Certified Design.

Our own domestic Gold Standard project, at Certified Design stage. First issuance expected Q3 2026, subject to verification. It is a voluntary activity — not authorised for Article 6.2 transfer.

03 · MRV

Every credit comes from real usage.

Every device we ship is metered — it records the electricity it uses, on board. Every carbon credit we issue is based on that measured usage: no sampling, no extrapolation, no assumed adoption rates. Devices sold to carbon developers log locally and are read directly; those partners choose their own methodology and substantiate their own reductions.

“I cook everything with the EPC now. I only go back to charcoal when the power is out.”
Mulungi Annet · PowerUP customer, Uganda — the usage our metering records

Looking for high-integrity cooking credits at scale?

We work with compliance buyers, voluntary corporate offtakers and carbon project developers. Multi-year forward agreements available.

Discuss offtake →
07 Where we operate

Eight countries. Three commercial models. One platform.

Uganda is our own Gold Standard project. In four other markets, PowerUP devices are the metered hardware behind carbon projects run by third-party developers — including the world's first authorised Article 6.2 electric-cooking activity, in Ghana. Three markets are in active pilot.

Own carbon project
Device supplier
Tanzania · Ghana (Article 6.2) · Madagascar · Nepal
Pilot deployments
Kenya · Zambia · Ethiopia
08 Beyond carbon

Carbon is what the market pays for. It isn't the point.

A credit is the one slice of this a market prices today. What actually lands in the kitchen — lower bills, hours returned, air worth breathing — is larger by an order of magnitude, and none of it shows up on an invoice. The Gold Standard registry lists 8 estimated SDG impacts for our project. Carbon finance pays for the device; the household keeps the rest.

SDG 07Affordable and clean energy. Clean cooking becomes accessible to low-income households through carbon-subsidised pricing.
SDG 03Good health and well-being. Zero indoor smoke, zero soot, no burn risk. Replacing the leading cause of household air pollution.
SDG 05Gender equality. PowerUP cooking frees up hours per day for women and girls, who typically gather the fuel and cook.
SDG 01No poverty. Cooking fuel is one of the largest cash costs in a low-income household. Switching from charcoal frees up a material share of the budget.
SDG 13Climate action. Reduces deforestation pressure and CO₂ emissions, measured device by device.
SDG 08Decent work and economic growth. Local manufacturing, distribution and service jobs across the markets where we operate.
SDG 12Responsible consumption and production. Efficient electric cooking replaces charcoal and firewood with metered, accountable energy use.
SDG 15Life on land. Lower charcoal demand eases pressure on forests and land.
09 Company & team

Built by operators. Based in Kampala.

PowerUP was founded in Kampala in 2022. Our team of 17 builds, deploys and maintains the PowerUP platform from East Africa. Hardware engineers, embedded systems developers, carbon specialists and commercial operators, living and working in the markets we serve.

Kato Kibuka
Kato Kibuka
CEO & Co-founder
Former Head of Product at Engie Energy Access.
Wim Witdouck
Wim Witdouck
CTO & Co-founder
20 years in product engineering and software.
Eva Zalwango
Eva Zalwango
Head of Finance & Operations
CPA. Former CFO at Prudential and Jubilee Insurance.
Bart-Jan ter Haar
Bart-Jan ter Haar
Head of Commercial
10+ years in commercial leadership at Philips, KLM and others.
10 Get in touch

Let's talk.

Whatever you're building (a carbon portfolio, a climate fund, a development programme) PowerUP is built to be a serious counterparty.

For carbon buyers & developers

Buying credits or developing a project?

High-integrity cooking credits, measured device-by-device. Multi-year offtake available.

Discuss offtake →
For investors

Evaluating PowerUP for investment?

Intro calls available for qualified impact and climate investors.

Request intro call →
For grantors & partners

Working on clean cooking or energy access?

We partner with DFIs, foundations and programme implementers across Africa and South Asia.

Start a conversation →
For everyone else

Different question in mind?

Distributor, technology partner, researcher, or press. We're happy to hear from anyone working across clean cooking, carbon, and energy access.

Get in touch →