01 — THE OFF-GRID CASE
Diesel still powers most of the world’s off-grid load — about 565 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lack reliable grid access (Tracking SDG 7 — Energy Progress Report 2025), and the industrial off-grid case in mining, telecom, and remote agro-processing runs on diesel because grid extension is uneconomic. The fuel logistics, the running cost, and the carbon liability are all moving the wrong way at once.
Fuel cost dominates the operating budget. Diesel delivered to a Sahel village or a mining camp routinely lands at €1.30–€1.80 per litre once haulage, security, and storage are priced in. A 100 kW genset running 12 hours a day burns roughly 90,000 litres a year. PV-plus-storage doesn’t replace the diesel entirely on most projects. It cuts genset runtime in half and shifts dispatch away from peak fuel-burn windows. Payback that took 8–10 years five years ago now lands at 3–5 on most sites.
Reliability is the second pressure point. Diesel-only sites have a single point of failure. Fuel runs out, the genset breaks down, the local technician is unreachable. A microgrid with PV plus storage adds redundancy: the battery covers genset start delay, runs the load through a cool night, and lets the diesel cycle on a maintenance schedule rather than a demand-response one. Telecom sites and rural clinics with uptime obligations get there without running the genset 24/7.
Financing pressure has now shifted to the renewable share. DFI lending facilities and institutional energy programmes increasingly require a renewable fraction in the energy mix as a condition of debt drawdown. A 30–60% solar share with a battery to firm the dispatch profile is what gets the financing through committee. The technology is mature; the question on most desks is which supplier the lender will sign off.
02 — WHAT THE BATTERY DOES
03 — INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE
Mode A
Mode B
Mode C
04 — SIZING LOGIC
Lever 01 — Energy
Lever 02 — Power
Lever 03 — Duration
Rule of thumb
Village microgrid 50–500 kW: typically a 200 kWh–2 MWh BESS, often built from C&I 261 kWh or 418 kWh blocks in parallel. Industrial microgrid 1–5 MW: typically 2–10 MWh, built from utility 3 MWh containers. Mining or telecom hub microgrid 5–20 MW: 10–40 MWh, multi-container utility deployment with redundant PCS. Starting points for feasibility, not engineering numbers — load profile, irradiance, and genset duty-cycle analysis sit upstream of detailed sizing.
05 — RECOMMENDED HENLEY PLATFORM
06 — REFERENCE PROJECTS
Note from engineering
Henley Power’s most direct microgrid reference is a Sahel-region rural electrification project in Chad — PV-plus-storage co-located with a small diesel genset, displacing 50–70% of the diesel runtime. The project services a township with mixed residential, clinic, and small-commercial load. It’s the active sectoral case for everything we publish on this page.
The rest of our deployed portfolio sits on the China-utility side: Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Hebei, Henan, and Shandong provinces, predominantly grid-connected solar-plus-storage rather than islanded microgrids. The engineering pattern transfers directly: same Tier-1 LFP cells, same grid-forming PCS architecture, same modular containerization. What changes between a grid-tied utility BESS and an islanded microgrid is the control logic and balance-of-plant integration with the genset and PV inverters.
If your project needs a deployed microgrid reference at the same scale and climate envelope before you specify, we’ll say so openly rather than over-promise. The Chad project data is shared after NDA on request, and adjacent C&I deployments are accessible via the project portfolio.
07 — FAQ
08 — RELATED SOLUTIONS
