Conservancy Solar Off Grid Systems
Three off-grid mini-grids, 440 kWh of storage, and zero compromise on conservation operations.
The conservancy sits in one of East Africa's most demanding off-grid environments. Research stations, ranger camps, and monitoring infrastructure are spread across thousands of hectares of Laikipia, where every diesel litre is trucked in and downtime affects active conservation work. Kinawa Energy designed and oversaw three off-grid solar mini-grids, each sized to its site's load profile rather than a one-size-fits-all template.
Diesel logistics, conservation uptime, and three different load profiles.
Conservation infrastructure runs to a different reliability standard than commercial sites. Cameras, telemetry, comms relays, refrigeration for veterinary supplies, and ranger-station lighting all need power 24/7, and any loss of supply is also a loss of monitoring coverage. Until the project, the conservancy had been running on diesel generators, with the cost of fuel logistics climbing in step with the security premium of moving fuel through wildlife terrain.
The three sites were not interchangeable: a research base, a workshop/operations hub, and a smaller monitoring outpost each had distinct daytime loads, night reserves, and seasonal duty cycles. A single template solution would have over-built two sites and under-built the third.
Three systems, sized independently and managed as one programme.
Kinawa profiled each site over a representative duty cycle, then designed three discrete off-grid systems with shared standards (inverter platform, BMS, monitoring layer) so the conservancy team would only ever need to learn one operating model. The work spanned design, EPC oversight, weather-station integration, and ongoing scheduled and unscheduled O&M support.
- Site A: 39.83 kWp PV + 120 kWh BESS for the operations base.
- Site B: 64.74 kWp PV + 260 kWh BESS for the high-demand research station.
- Site C: 23.24 kWp PV + 60 kWh BESS for the smaller monitoring outpost.
- Common platform. Same inverter family and monitoring stack across all three sites, so a single technician can service the whole network.
- Weather-station integration. Irradiance and temperature feeds pulled into the monitoring layer to validate yield against design.
Diesel displaced, monitoring uptime preserved.
Across the three sites, the off-grid mini-grids now carry the bulk of daytime and overnight load on solar plus storage, with diesel demoted from primary supply to last-resort backup. The conservancy's operations and research teams have continuous power for monitoring, refrigeration, and comms, with a single-pane-of-glass view across all three sites for performance and alerting.
"Kinawa understood that conservation infrastructure needs a different reliability standard than commercial work. Their independent oversight is the reason we trusted the design."
