Case Study

Nabico (Kenya)

Overview

Nabico Enterprises Limited in Kenya is a specialised direct importer and wholesale distributor of globally renowned electrical and houseware brands. The company was founded in 1989, and is a family run business, whose mission is to provide the Kenyan market with quality products and the best solutions available.
The company offers turn-key solutions for electrical panel building, building automation, solar panels and fire and alarm systems. With over 30 years of experience in the Kenyan market, the company operates from a modern, state of the art warehouse and office facility in Nairobi.

Objective

Nabico Enterprises has always aimed to stay at the forefront of the global trends. The company approached New Southern Energy with their goal to become more sustainable and less reliant on the national utility grid, which has been known to be unstable.
The system would be installed at their Nairobi facility, which serves as their head office, warehouse and assembly factory. With lower and more predictable expenses on energy, the company could be more competitive in its pricing to consumers.
Nabico is also a solar panel distributer. Therefore, an objective was also to showcase the advantages of using Solar Edge inverters and optimisers, and the superior advantage that these have over the string inverters that are used in most Kenyan installations.

Solar Solution

New Southern Energy designed and a built a 42.84kWp solar system made up of 128 solar panels and 2 Solar Edge 27.6k Inverters and 64 optimizers. The panels are mounted on the roof of the Nabico building. This solar system is also grid-tied, meaning that it is connected to the national electricity grid.
The system’s performance is monitored and controlled through a master controller, which can also communicate with the inverters. All of the data is logged and saved in cloud-based storage. Furthermore, the performance can be monitored in real time via a smart phone app.

 

Team

Business Development Manager: Peter Njoroge
Project Manager:  Eduardt Rühling
Asset Manager: Brian Ssebabi

Results

The site was commissioned early in July 2019.
The system currently generates 47% of the sites total consumption, which is 15.81MWh.
This solar plant has an estimated lifespan of 25 years