Demand forecasting and battery dispatch for solar mini-grid operators in West Africa
Solar mini-grids serving rural towns run their batteries flat at night when demand spikes, so operators fall back on diesel generators that cost up to five times more per kWh. Load shifts with market days, harvest season and newly connected grinding mills, yet most operators still plan dispatch from monthly spreadsheets. A typical 60 kW site burns about 1,800 litres of diesel a month that better planning could avoid.
Nsoro Grid reads smart meter and inverter data every 15 minutes, forecasts each site's load and solar output for the next 48 hours, and sets battery charge and generator schedules automatically. It flags customers close to their tariff limits and suggests when to connect new productive loads such as mills or cold rooms. Sites keep working over SMS and 2G links when the internet drops.
Mini-grid operators and rural electrification developers across West Africa; thousands of mini-grids are operating or funded in the region, most run by operators with 10 to 200 sites.
Monthly subscription per site (US$90–US$180 depending on capacity), plus a share of verified diesel savings for operators who choose the performance plan.
Akosua MensahCEO and co-founder
Kwesi BoatengCTO and co-founder
Ifeoma NwosuHead of Field OperationsRather than one large model, they forecast per site with shared seasonal patterns, which suits towns with a few hundred meters and patchy data. Treating new productive loads as events instead of noise is a smart detail. I am less sure the per-site models cope when the rains reshape load, since no back-test yet covers a full wet season.
What sold me was walking through an operator's fuel invoices before and after Nsoro: generator hours roughly halved across their sites. The performance plan aligns pricing with savings, which matters to operators running on thin margins. Akosua and Kwesi have spent long stretches on these sites; the SMS fallback and site-level detail are not things you design from an office.
Our produce cold room near Kpandu is one of the large loads on an operator's Nsoro site. We now get an SMS the afternoon before a tight night, so we pre-cool during the solar peak instead of running compressors at 21:00, and spoilage has dropped. The tier change notice came with little warning, though, and our bill rose before we could adjust.
I visited a site in the Volta region where the operator now gets a dispatch plan on his phone each afternoon, even on a 2G signal. The market-day forecasts were spot on. Coverage of inverter brands is still limited, so some operators would need to swap hardware to use it.
Reply from Akosua Mensah, CEO
Two more inverter brands go live this quarter, which covers most of the sites on our waitlist.
Coming soon. Testimonials are invited by the founder and shown separately from open reviews.
Coming soon. Follow Nsoro Grid to hear about product and funding updates when this launches.
