NFE

Author: Aaron Tushabe

  • Go-live: Pilot at Sezibwa Rental Homes, Phase 1.0

    “Even a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step”
    ~ Ancient Chinese Proverb

    Location

    In September 2025, we deployed our first microgrid to a small community of 10 customers in a small densely populated town called Nansana, right outside the Ugandan capital of Kampala.

    The goal

    To demonstrate that a grid connected microgrid can provide a sustainable way for a community to provide power at a lower cost through bulk billing and allow the community to monitor their energy usage for solar and battery backup sizing.

    The problem

    We have 10 residential energy consumers connected to the main grid. They consume about 1 to 3 kWh a day each which costs them about 80,000 UGX per month for each household. However they get 6 to 12 hours of unscheduled and indeterminant power outages every week for all the reasons shared here.

    From what they shared, the closest transformer they are connected to may be overloaded causing phase to phase voltage to significantly drop occasionally but we didn’t have the data to verify this before deployment.

    The technical details

    We deployed extended a 3 phase main grid connection and reconnected the homes to the grid via this connection. The connection to the grid is metered with a large commercial 3 phase meter controlled by UEDCL. The connection is sized to deliver 415V, 100A (240V phase to phase) for up to 30 kWh load. That meter is mirrored by another 3 phase meter we control.

    Single phase connections to each household are metered by smart meters connected to an AMI provided by the meter supplier.

    Tech Stack

    Metering: Din rail Calin Smart Meter with inbuilt relays and LoraWAN modules

    Connectivity: Central LoraWAN gatway that is 4G enabled with SIM card.

    AMI: CalinAMI for hourly meter readings and remote on/off.

    Communication: Whatsapp for customer support and a Microgrid Manager who resides in the community.

    Billing: Monthly postpaid payments via Pesapal (Mobile Money, Visa/Mastercard). Invoicing managed via EFRIS.

    Finances: We are tracking our spending and inflows (contributions and income) via Open Collective here.

    Documentation: Most information about this microgrid is available on our public Wiki here.

    Present Challenges

    Metering: We are seeing anomalous behavior with the smart meter connections getting dropped. It maybe coming from clustering LoraWAN enabled meters in a meter box but we don’t know at this point. We do get enough connectivity to collect and view high fidelity data on daily usage patterns on most days.

    Next Release: Phase 2 goals

    Backup: The primary goal is to deploy batteries and or solar capacity to handle at least 6 hours of a power outage during peak demand windows (6pm to 12 midnight).

    Metering 2.0: Secondarily we’d like to move to an Open Source AMI we can modify ourselves instead of the proprietary one we currently use. And since our meters are clustered, we’d like to connect to them directly via RS485/Modbus to a raspberry-pi running OpenEMS edge. We think hard wiring to the meters locally will be a more stable solution than the wireless connectivity via LoraWAN.

    CRM: We would like to switch to MicroPowerManager for our CRM. We need to add invoicing and postpaid capabilities to it and integrate it with EFRIS which we must continue using for easier tax compliance.

    For more on this project, you can connect with the NFE team via our public channel on Matrix or receive our quarterly progress updates via our community mailing list.

    You can also make contributions to the project to support phase 2 via Open Collective here.

  • Our Microgrid Cultivation Blueprint

    Our goal to build community owned microgrids and teach others to do the same.

    This means our initiatives are not considered “Complete” till we exit and empower the community to energy independence. I’d like to talk a little about how we intend to achieve this.

    Why Community Ownership matters

    • Sustainability: when the community owns the energy resources, they have incentive to make the product better because they stand to benefit as customers and owners. This drives down cost of energy for them long term and leads to a sustainable (self-funding) model.
    • Agency: ownership helps guard against perverse incentives that could benefit owners at the risk of hurting customers. The community can take a driving seat in the decisions on future of their microgrid.
    • Efficiency: In our experience, there’s a organic desire to conserve and use energy responsibly that is cultivated when the community can think of the energy resources as “our own power”. So it turns out, ownership is a brilliant way to address energy waste and encourage responsible use.

    Building community owned microgrids

    Our conviction is that people should live in communities and we want to help cultivate that. So our primary target customers are residentials first (and adjuscent businesses like schools, hospitals, saloons, shopping centers, restaurants) that already have a sense of community around them. This can take on different shapes like a rental apartment complex or a set of homes under the same home owners association.

    We build a community owned microgrid for such communities through a 4 phase journey.

    Phase 1: Data Ownership with a Microgrid Operating System

    We deploy a microgrid OS for that community with smart metering capabilities. This microgrid OS is powered by free/open source software to protect the community’s freedom and start them on their energy independence journey by giving them ownership of the data generated by their energy use. The microgrid OS also enables usage data analysis which informs load sizing in the next phase. The smart metering capability enables bulk purchase of power from the grid which can generate income to fund the next phases. The microgrid resells energy as a service to the community.

    Phase 2: Backup

    Our communities deal with frequent macrogrid power outages. For most of them, having a reliable electricity is the main value proposition for setting up a microgrid. In phase 2, we deploy right sized solar and or battery capacity to provide backup power during macrogrid outages and increase energy reliability for the community

    Phase 3: Backbone

    After achieving nearly 100% power reliability, we now invest in reducing the community’s reliance on the macrogrid. We increase battery capacity and add onsite renewable generation capacity like solar to grow our backup into the main source and then rely on the macrogrid as a backup. This further drives down the cost of energy for the community and stimulates growth in new businesses and quality of life for people living there.

    Phase 4: Energy Independence

    NFE exists as co-owner of the microgrid by transfering the operational microgrid to an entity (another co-op) representing the community. This can be started during phases 1 to 3 by baking in lease-to-own economics into the energy as a service contract NFE has with the community.

    Teaching others to do the same

    Along the way, we are sharing everything about how and who we work with. How things work and offer training for those who want to learn so that others (especially the communities we serve) can run with the same vision. All these are documented on our website here or in our Community Library here.

    And that’s all. Community Owned Microgrids in 4 Phases.