Sanana Hotel
A 77% cut in monthly electricity spend, with independent technical oversight from design to commissioning.
Kinawa Energy was engaged as the independent advisor on Sanana Hotel's hybrid solar deployment in Mombasa. We selected and supervised the EPC contractor, validated the system design against actual hotel load profiles, and signed off on commissioning. The result was a measurable monthly cost reduction without compromising guest experience during grid outages.
KSh 200,000 a month, climbing, with outage-driven guest complaints on top.
A 24-room boutique hotel on the Mombasa coast was paying around KSh 200,000 per month for grid electricity, with the bill trending upward each quarter as KPLC tariffs adjusted. Margins on hospitality are tight; energy was eroding profitability faster than rate-card rises could be passed on to guests.
Worse, planned and unplanned grid outages, common during the long rains, were affecting AC, lighting, and pumping at exactly the times when occupancy was highest. The hotel needed both a cost lever and a resilience lever, in one solution, without making operational compromises.
Sized to actual loads, not nameplate optimism.
Most failed hospitality solar projects oversize the array or undersize the storage. Kinawa took the contrary route: pull the hotel's 12 months of bills, profile load against guest occupancy, and design the system against measured peaks rather than supplier-suggested rules of thumb.
- Independent EPC selection. Three contractors solicited, scored on warranty depth, real installation portfolio, and post-commissioning support, not headline price.
- BESS sized for resilience. 20 kWh chosen to carry critical loads (refrigeration, pumping, half of guest rooms) through the longest historical grid outage on record, not just the average.
- Commissioning oversight. Kinawa was on-site for performance testing, witnessed the load-bank test, and approved final handover only after seeing two consecutive days of expected yield.
From KSh 200,000 to KSh 45,000 a month.
The first full month after commissioning, Sanana Hotel's grid bill landed at KSh 45,000, a 77.5% reduction. Three months in, the operator confirmed the trend was holding and that the system had carried the hotel through two unplanned outages without a single guest complaint logged.
"Kinawa's oversight cut our monthly electricity spend by 77%. Their independence as advisors is the reason we trusted the design and the EPC contractor selection."