For decades in Tanzania, social services have been provided by a complex assemblage of government agencies, foreign multilateral and bilateral donors, NGOs, and private companies. This paper focusses on electricity and explores the recent market-driven push to electrify rural Tanzania, where over ninety percent of people are without access. It draws on on-going fieldwork in northern Tanzanian with solar energy companies and consumers, examining the ways in which people are gaining access to electricity, as well as appliances and even financial services, through pay-as-you-go arrangements. The model is in many ways a familiar neoliberal one, in that social services are brought under the realm of the market. But rather than proceed with a simple denunciation, this paper explores what it means for the different actors, from product designers to engineers to rural customers, to facilitate access to a social service through the market. What does the public good mean in Tanzania? In what ways might energy, including new forms of solar, be considered part of that good? Are market payments for services in opposition to these ideas of the public good, or do they absorb into each other in any way? This paper explores these questions, as part of a broader endeavour to understand what the public good means in Tanzania, and what it means to contribute to it.