Okra tools to get your DARES projects developed effectively & at lighting pace ⚡️
Following on from my last post, I’ll share some insights on how 3 of our partners have gotten approximately 40,000 connections ready for project financing in less than 6 weeks.
So you want to build a mesh-grid portfolio? How?
We’re here to help! Our software team has been working tirelessly over the last couple of months putting together new tools to help accelerate the process of building a financeable mesh-grid pipeline!
Firstly, I want to shoutout the Vida geospatial tool - it’s an awesome tool layering a bunch of useful data and should be the first point of exploration when trying to figure out what your DARES pipeline Nigeria should look like. The tool has a bunch of useful information, from grant eligible sites, grant amounts, distance from main roads etc.
The Site Finder
We have however found that a number of the sites that we know are off-grid, have exclusivity signed, are in our customers (energy developers) pipelines were not found on the VIDA geospatial tool.
This got us thinking - based on the way filters have been applied or perhaps some other reason, a bunch of sites that should be eligible for the grant are not showing on the VIDA tool.
After speaking with the REA we have confirmed eligibility of all additional sites that were not found on the VIDA platform but are indeed off-grid. Looking deeper, using Google Open Buildings dataset, we estimate we've found more than another 500,000 additional connections that will be eligible for the DARES grant. We've actually adapted the tool for you and called it the "Site Finder". Reach out to us if you want to use it, and we'll run you through it - no cost!
Proximity Analysis
Once you’ve got a rough idea of which sites you want to hit, you want to double down on them to make sure they indeed a good target site. We’ve built partnerships with Thrive Agric, One Acre Fund and others to know where they’re operating because they’re doing some great work in engaging with rural communities to boost productivity.
It’s useful to understand if the sites in your pipeline are crossing over or near to where these organisations are working because those communities are likely to have more use cases for electrification and potential income generation from electrification (ie for agriculture). We’ve overlaid the data on the Site Finder tool to make it easy to cross check!
Site Surveys and Scoring
Finding good sites doesn't end with a geospatial tool (at least not yet, in 2025) ; on the ground survey data & speaking to end-users provides key data that goes into accurately planning sizing which is key to making sure you have efficient utilisation of your assets!
We recommend using an offline survey tool like Fulcrum to survey. To keep things streamlined our recommendation at Okra is to use the pareto 80-20 rule, survey the 20% of the community that will have the biggest impact on sizing! So we suggest surveying 100% of the businesses, diesel genset owners and those with productive appliances in the community (which in a good site makes up around 15% of the community) along with a sample survey of 20% of the other users.
Once the survey data is collected, it's easy to use a rules based scoring algorithm to determine whether or not the end-user is a candidate for a productive use kit (1.2kW up to 3.6kW AC) or whether they would only have basic residential needs (150W AC) in which case they would only be drawing excess energy from other users.
The survey is also used to identify if indeed the end user would be best served by a mini-grid (>3.6kW AC productive load).
Network Simulations and Load Modelling
Once the survey and demand scoring is complete, we can input the scores to the Network Planner.
The network planner applies an energy demand forecast for all end users, takes into consideration location of users, time of use, and matches that up to size the kit variants with an objective to reduce capex while maintaining the target up-time (95%+ or 98%+ based on what's set in the network planner).
The expectation is that you should be able to serve about 15kWh/mo (around 500Wh/day) average demand at 95%+ up-time at less than $400 USD delivered to Nigeria. If the economics end up being worse than this (ie. higher costs or similar costs serving much lower demand, you might want to reconsider that site being in your pipeline!)
Project Builder - aggregated BOMs (fast)
The last tool I want to share about today is the Project Builder - shoutout to Lucas Ferreira de Souza for the foresight to get this tool out there! When there's a lot of sites, there's a lot of simulations, a lot of excel files and before you know it, a lot of mistakes.
In order to submit sites for DARES, technical specs and BOMs are required for each site, but procurement and financing is done on the portfolio level. For example if you have a single pipeline of 87 sites encompassing 21,247 connections - you would need 87 separate BOMs to be submitted for the DARES program. So we’ve put all of the requirements together in one place - the Project Builder.
Our Project Builder aggregates all the individual network simulations together, eliminating manual errors and repetitive work. You can have a portfolio view of all the sites and be ready for financing the portfolio AND submitting them site by site for DARES site specific application.
By this stage you have done a lot of the legwork required to get your projects financed, your grants approved by DARES, and ensure you have a good shot of developing a commercially viable portfolio! You probably just need to have a sound implementation plan, an achievable financial model, a load stimulation strategy and you’re good to go - which is what I'll share about in my next post!
Hope that was helpful!
Massive shoutout to our partners SOSAI Renewable Energies Company First Electric and Renewvia Energy for providing feedback to us as we build these tools and of-course a huge shoutout to our software witches 🧙 and wizards 🧙 for putting all of this together!
Brownie points for anyone who hits me up with any ideas, or feedback you have! 🍪🍪 Send me an email at afnan@okrasolar.com
