Solar monitoring in Africa: what to look for in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa

Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa are three very different markets for commercial and industrial (C&I) solar. Grid reliability, the role of diesel, connectivity and tariffs all vary, and so do the questions a monitoring platform has to answer. This guide doesn't make claims about each market. It lists what to check, so you can judge a platform against your own sites.

Grid reliability and load-shedding

• Does the platform show when the grid was down, so grid downtime isn't counted against the plant?
• Can it show whether batteries and backup systems carried each site through an outage as designed?
• Can savings and PPA performance still be checked when the grid is down part of the day?

For South Africa specifically, see the load-shedding monitoring guide.

Diesel hybrids

• Can you see solar, battery and diesel genset on the same site in one view?
• Does it read gensets and controllers that have no cloud API, through a datalogger on site?
• Can it show how much diesel the solar and battery replaced?

Daystar Power manages 200+ hybrid solar systems across West Africa on AMMP; read the case studies. More on hybrid site monitoring.

Connectivity

• What happens to data when a site loses its connection, and does the platform show which values are missing or estimated?
• Does it combine cloud APIs with an on-site datalogger, so each site uses whatever connection works there?
• Are communication failures raised as alerts, so a silent site isn't mistaken for a healthy one?

Tariffs and savings

• Does the platform hold the grid and PPA tariffs for every country you work in, including time-of-use and demand charges?
• Can it check battery charging and discharging against a time-of-use tariff?
• Can savings and PPA invoices come from the same data as monitoring?

In South Africa, the AMMP tariff database covers 1,000+ tariffs; see AMMP in South Africa.

What to look for in a platform

• Every brand in one portal: inverters, batteries, meters and gensets, through cloud APIs or a datalogger.
• KPIs calculated the same way in every country, so sites can be compared.
• Alerts that reach the team in Microsoft Teams, Slack, email or webhooks.
• Reports for investors and clients from the same data.
• Data access through an API, an MCP server and exports, so you aren't locked in.

AMMP runs on 10,000+ sites in 30+ countries, with 30+ integrations, and is one option to compare against this list.

Frequently asked questions