Peak-Shaving Powerhouses

In Nairobi, a 24-hour supermarket chain paired a 120 kW rooftop array with 180 kWh of batteries. The battery kicks in during the 6–9 pm rush to avoid 100 kVA spikes, trimming demand charges by more than KES 350k per month. When Kenya Power has a voltage dip, the same battery keeps tills, scanners, and fridges steady so the store manager is not rebooting POS or writing receipts by hand. Start with seven days of interval data to find your real peaks. Size the battery for one to two hours of discharge at that peak, then add a 15–20% reserve purely for outages. A compact hybrid inverter can do both peak shaving and backup without a second changeover. If you run multiple branches, test at one flagship, prove the payback (often under three years with today’s tariffs), then replicate. Finance gets predictable bills, operations get calmer cold-chain, and customers see a store that keeps humming when the neighbourhood flickers.