End of Week three in Nigeria

Three weeks in and nothing has happened

After three weeks we have not started installation of any client systems. We planned for all the contingencies possible, but could not plan for what we refer to as the Nigerian factor. We purchased our Inverters and Panels more than a month in advance. The Inverters arrived one week late. Like we told you earlier, we selected a new manufacturer for our panels. Renesola a New York Stock Exchange traded company, agreed to be our supplier. They hired all new people with very little experience with logistics and delivery. The delivery left more than 10 days after it was supposed to. It arrived in Nigeria on November 14th and it is either at the NAHCO shed or with the agent they assigned. We have called the agent she asked for a payment of N360,000. She refuses to give a break down and will not release our documents so that we can clear our panels. So here we are and everything we tried to avoid by paying extra to ship our panels by air is holding us back. Jide Josef must have infected the people who clear stuff.

Today is Thanksgiving Day in America. It will be my first thanksgiving away from the family in over 15 years. I want to wish my friends and family in America a happy thanksgiving day. Save some Turkey and pie for me. We have so much to be thankful for.

Suzette and I did not get our wish of spending our 26th anniversary on top of a roof doing installations. We had a more adventurous trip. The vehicle we rented broke down once we came into Rivers State. A saint and a glorious man Mr. Michael Ukpeh sent his horse / A/K/A SUV navigated by Mr. Simon to the rescue. He treated us to lunch at the Meridien and housed us at Juanita Hotel. It is a beautiful place with the perfect romantic set up. We had dinner out doors and spent some time by the pool. Suzette proclaimed it the best anniversary ever. Thank you Michael, we are forever in your debt.

We have our Inverters, our cables, charge controllers, our accessories and batteries. As we told you in our last post we have adopted the Trojan batteries for our power applications. They tolerate the kind of abuse that renewable energy systems will subject them to. They perform better in hot weather, have very good discharge characteristics and don’t require the daily recharging that the sealed batteries need. The failure rate is negligible. The Trojan master dealer in Nigeria will also provide us with our panels. These panels are made in Germany. We have eliminated one more possible bottleneck in our system by going to him. Thank you Solar Shop.

We have been hard at work improving our product offering. Air conditioner lovers and small businesses rejoice. We now offer solutions up to 30 Kva in single and three phases. This for us represents a huge leap forward. We will be installing one such system in Port Harcourt in the immediate future.

Did you spot the errors in the last newsletter? We will have a contest to see who spots the first error. It was a tie the last time. So be the first to spot the errors and get mentioned in the next newsletter.

Results are awesome;

The silence is deafening

This is my 7th day in (9/13/2014) Lagos. I arrived last Saturday. As they say the more things change the more they stay the same. Our clearing agent is still as bad as ever. Greedy, lacks a concept of customer service and believes that people who come from America must be extorted. Please avoid Jide Josef at all costs.

The good news is that our HP series are performing beyond our expectation. The weakness of our installations so far has been batteries. To get the best results we have switched to the Trojan batteries. They require a lot more care but are designed for the deep discharge and recharge that a solar powered home experiences.

We have replaced two of the systems we installed on our last visit and will be replacing another 3 starting on Monday. We are very excited at the possibilities and capabilities the HP series affords our clients.
It comes with a very powerful charger. This charger equalizes the batteries so that the voltage in all the batteries are the same. It has the ability to regulate input voltage. PHCN provided wildly fluctuating voltage. From as low as 65 V to as high as 295 volts. A lot of people in the area suffered damage to their appliances as a result. Our system refused to connect the house to PHCN and ran on Solar during that period. For us that is a huge plus. For the last 2 days there has been no grid power. I suspect a bad transformer. The folks on Solar, have power.
We will continue to update you as to our progress.

Enjoy the video of the 2 kw system running on 2 Trojan 12 V 205 AH batteries.It pumped water (2 hp

A lot of you reading this note, have Inverters installed in your homes. These inverters store energy from the grid in the batteries and when the power from the grid goes out they power your appliances and lights.

They are a worthy solution

We arrived with the expectation that our systems will be delivered within a week of our arrival. It is one month later and we don’t have them. We have stopped believing in the promises are waiting for the good to be delivered. Our Chief Technical Office Astrea Essandoh came in on Wednesday morning from Ghana. We had hoped to start installations on Wednesday evening.

We have been visiting prospective customers and the demand is there. What people need are reliable systems that will work. The reason a lot of the systems are not performing up to expectation is because of substandard installations. Panels installed in an area with shade. Panels not getting direct access to the sun. We have seen so many bad installations but we want to bring you a success story.

We went to visit a home in shogunle, we saw with Solar panels on the roof. The homeowner self installed the system, Everything cost him a little over $13,000 (1.8 million naira).

He has 16 240 W panels 24 2 Volt batteries, 1 6KW Inverter and an outback 50amp MPPT charge controller. He has had the system for 9 months and can be completely off the grid if he chooses to. He can run every thing in his home, washing machine, AC, big refrigerator, Water chiller, his fans and lights. He barely runs the batteries down during the night. One day last week his 3.8KW system produced 3.5 KW. That is impressive when you consider that a system can suffer up to 20% in efficiency losses.

He produces more power than he will ever use.

I have enclosed pictures of his system for you to see.

Update: Yesterday 6/23/2014 We took delivery of our systems and started installing. We completed our first at 26 Alasia Village Compound. Tonight we are running on Solar.

The buzz around our products has been very high. The demand has been very strong and with that in mind we are making some improvements to our offering.

Starting on May 1 the systems will come with installed solar panels equivalent to the system label. Our current 1KW systems comes with 800 Watts in panels. The new upgrade will come will the full 1KW. The 1KW system will be priced at $3499.00 before installation compared to $2999.00

We created a new flash animation ad that we are excited about. Please share your thoughts.

I saw a slogan today and it said

Q. We see street lights that don’t work. Why would my solar installation work?
A. Street lights are exposed to many conditions your home installation are not exposed to. 1. Vandalism: People destroy them by accident (cars run into them), people steal the batteries. 2. The installation was not done properly. 3. The street lights were of sub standard quality. 4. The lights purchased were not designed for the environment they were installed in.

Q. Solar is very expensive. For the money I can buy generators or an inverter.
A. Relative to either, Solar power is more expensive when you consider the initial outlay of money. When you have to operate them then the Solar system comes into it’s own. A generator has moving parts and requires fuel to run. A 3 Kva generator consumes 2.2 to 3 liters of fuel an hour. If you run it for an average of 8 hours a day, you are consuming 16 liters of fuel a day. At N100 per liter that is N1600 per day for fuel. You do that everyday for 1 year your cost is [b]N584,000[/b]. Add the cost of repairs and service and your generator costs closer to N650,000 per year not including the purchase price. Your inverter is a great system as long as you get power from the grid for a few hours a day. If your experience is similar to what is currently in Nigeria, then you need a generator to charge your Inverter. Lets say you charge the inverter by running the generator for four hours day, that Inverter now costs you N292,000 per year in addition to the purchase cost. A solar installation that will power the same equivalent as your generator will cost you about N550,000. Your cost to run it is N0. It will run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All it needs as fuel is sunshine. In Nigeria we have sunshine in abundance. It has no moving parts and requires no maintenance.

Q. Is solar reliable:
A. Yes it is very reliable. The first solar panels were installed in the US in the 1950’s and some of them are still generating electricity today. The US space program has satellites and orbiters that were launched in the 70’s that are still aloft today. They are powered with solar. Because Solar powered systems have very few moving parts they can last a very long time. Solar panels can last 25 years or more. The inverters and other systems can last longer than 10 years if properly taken care of

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Join us: We are off to a good start

As we begin the second quarter it is hard to believe the progress we have made.

On the staffing side, we hired Astrea Essandoh from Ghana to be our Chief Technical officer. He will oversea and have the responsibilities of managing our installations in Nigeria. He has NABCEP training and he has installed a few Wind and Solar systems in the United States and in Ghana. We are currently interviewing sales people to staff our office in Ladipo, Lagos.

Atlantic Waste & Power is the official factory representative of Senwei Energy Technologies in Africa and North America. They manufacture one of the best selling small wind turbine in Europe. They have UL, CE, TUV, IEC and other top certifications. This makes them one of the few manufacturers that can sell systems on every continent. We are receiving calls from Nigeria and Europe from people interested in purchasing their systems. We are listed on their website as official representative.

A.W.P.S visited to the North American Factory for SIEL. They are a manufacturer of residential and Industrial grade Inverters. They are headquartered in Italy and opened the factory in Parsipanny NJ last year. Luca Arcioni the sales manager was happy to welcome us and looks forward to building a small utility scale project with us in Nigeria.

The story of how we got started was featured in an online publication called Africa Business Jump Start. We got very good press, a few phone calls and a lot of emails. People were inspired by our story. The magazine gets over 500,000 visitors a month. It is a good resource for people who want to start a business in Africa. You can read the article here.