What full daytime cover actually looks like at a food processor

Sumz Food Industries in Nkoowe was scaling up for local and regional markets when we started work. That matters, because a growing processor has a load profile that is about to change, and a system sized against last year alone would have been wrong within a year.

Sized against the process load

The system is 250 kWp, grid-tied, sized to cover the full daytime process load. Food processing is a good fit for that approach because the heavy loads run during the day, in daylight, which is exactly when a solar system is producing. There is no need to move energy across time, so there is no need to buy storage.

Where a client asks us to add batteries to a profile like this, we usually ask what problem the battery is solving first. On this site the honest answer was none, and leaving storage out kept the money in generation.

Zero feed-in, by necessity

The system is set to zero export. Uganda does not offer net metering for commercial and industrial users, so any surplus the array produces has nowhere to go. That constraint drives the sizing directly. Oversize the array against the daytime load and the extra capacity is simply curtailed, which means it was money spent on nothing.

Delivered under a PPA

The system was financed by a finance partner under a power purchase agreement, so Sumz pays for energy rather than for hardware. We do not provide the funding ourselves. What we do is design and build to a standard that a financier is prepared to underwrite for the length of the contract, which is a useful discipline in itself.