Chad Township Microgrid — 8 MW / 16 MWh BESS with 4 MW PV and Diesel Reserve

The community sits in a region of Chad where extending grid infrastructure isn’t commercially viable nor near-term planned. Chad’s national grid reaches around 12% of the population (World Bank, 2023) — among the lowest electrification rates anywhere in the world — and the unserved 88% lives across Sahel and sub-Sahelian zones where transmission line economics break long before they reach demand centers. Off-grid PV+BESS hybrid systems are the established technology pathway for communities more than 5 km from any planned grid extension across sub-Saharan Africa — a threshold widely applied in electrification geospatial planning frameworks. Diesel-only electrification is the default fallback, and it carries a known cost stack: industry-typical $0.40–0.80/kWh delivered cost when fuel logistics, maintenance windows, and operator overhead are accounted for, plus particulate emissions and noise constraints that limit where generators can sit relative to occupied buildings. For townships planning around a 20-year asset life, the diesel cost trajectory is the load-bearing problem. Fuel logistics in Sahel-climate zones run on rough roads through long supply chains. A capital structure that hinges on diesel runtime is a capital structure exposed to fuel price volatility and route security across that entire two-decade horizon.

For the Chadian rural electrification authority — the public-sector counterparty financing and contracting this project directly — the brief was different. Deliver first-time electrification with capital structure that survives a 20-year asset lifespan, not just five-year diesel logistics horizons. PV generation alone wouldn’t solve evening and overnight demand. PV doesn’t shift midday surplus into evening peak or overnight load. Storage wasn’t an upgrade. It was the gating component that made the rest of the project economics work across a full diurnal cycle. The system specification landed at 8 MW BESS rated power, 16 MWh of energy capacity at 2-hour discharge, with grid-forming PCS architecture so the microgrid can cold-start without an upstream droop reference. The diesel set stays as a 4 MW reserve for contingency events — fuel-to-load coverage, not primary generation. PV at 4 MW handles daytime load and BESS charging through the day. The BESS handles evening peak through overnight discharge until PV picks up again at sunrise. The 4 × 4 MWh containerized blocks run in parallel PCS array clusters at the microgrid MV bus, with per-block fault isolation — a single-block fault doesn’t collapse the entire microgrid bus.

Henley Power deployed 4 × HLY-BESS-Utility-4MWh containerized blocks (4 × 4 MWh = 16 MWh; 4 × 2 MW = 8 MW), the PCS, the energy management system, and balance-of-plant integration. The contracting structure is direct manufacturer-to-buyer: one signatory, one warranty chain, one accountability path. Cell sourcing is Tier-1 LFP cells from publicly listed manufacturers, multi-supplier homologated — specific suppliers documented under NDA in the project bankability dossier, never on public pages. The project opted into the insurance-backed warranty pathway via a licensed European insurer as part of its public-sector financing structure. Honest answer on outcomes: the system has been operating since 2025 commissioning but hasn’t completed a full warranty-cycle year of off-grid performance data. Grid-forming PCS dispatch performance is subject to site qualification data becoming publicly disclosable in the Q3 2026 performance window. The dataset reaches 24-month maturity in Q3 2026 and that’s when Henley Power releases the disclosable performance summary. Until then, published deployment experience from comparable hybrid configurations frames the 50–70% diesel-displacement expectation. Full operating data is shared on request, subject to NDA, via Henley Power’s bankability desk.