Mauritius Reports 253 Home Solar Kits Offline, 191 With Inverter Faults

Mauritius's energy minister has reported that 253 installations under the Central Electricity Board's Home Solar Project were out of service as of 25 August 2026, with defective inverters accounting for 191 of the cases. The figures were given by Energy and Public Utilities Minister Patrick Assirvaden in response to a parliamentary question, according to a 1 November report by Mauritian newspaper L'Express.

The disclosure puts a measurable maintenance problem alongside the government's continuing programme to provide households with photovoltaic equipment. L'Express reported that the Central Electricity Board, or CEB, had installed 4,667 kits since the programme began, while 193 installations had been removed at beneficiaries' request. The 253 nonoperational installations were a dated snapshot, not a confirmed count of failures still outstanding in November.

The newspaper said the minister identified several causes of outages, including electrical protection devices tripping, surge-protection failures, damaged cabling and inverter defects. The 191 inverter cases represented the largest specified category. Assirvaden said the faulty inverters had been sent to the contractor for replacement and that the utility was taking corrective measures. The report did not establish that all 253 units were irreparable, that a contractor breached its obligations or that public funds had been lost.

The maintenance question is significant because the CEB's own public description of Home Solar Project Phase 2B says eligible households receive rooftop solar kits without paying installation costs, while the utility bears investment, operating and maintenance costs. Under the scheme, participating customers are offered the equivalent of 100 kilowatt-hours per month in electricity-bill credit for 20 years. Those published programme terms provide institutional context but do not independently establish the minister's August fault counts.

Assirvaden also described a transfer of ownership of photovoltaic kits to approximately 1,000 households under the 2026–27 budget measures, according to L'Express. Beneficiaries would take on basic upkeep such as panel cleaning and fault reporting, while continuing to have access to CEB assistance. The report says ownership transfer would allow those households to retain all electricity generated by the systems, rather than the earlier 50% arrangement.

The key outstanding accountability question is how many installations have since been repaired, how long beneficiaries were without working systems and which warranties or maintenance obligations cover each fault. TFNOS has not obtained a unit-level repair register or the complete original parliamentary answer. The reported figures should therefore be attributed to the minister's parliamentary disclosure, not described as independently audited failure totals.