Somalia: Metering for reliable power delivery

Successful implementation of a smart metering pilot project in Somalia is showing the country a way to address cost and reliability of power delivery while transitioning to a clean-energy grid.

According to Power Africa, Somalians pay amongst the world's highest prices for electricity because 90% of the country's electricity is supplied through isolated diesel-based mini-grids through an ageing power grid.

While Somalia exhibits significant potential for cheap renewable energy because of vast resource potential in wind, solar, hydro and geothermal energy, very little information is available on energy asset health, power quality or customer demand.

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Now the National Energy Corporation of Somalia (NECSOM) has announced it will deploy SparkMeter's software on the country's distribution network to enable better management of the grid. Once implemented it should contribute to cutting overall cost of power delivery and give end-users better control over their bill and energy consumption.

"NECSOM is committed to investing in technologies that help us deliver affordable, clean and reliable power in our service area," said Abdirisak Mohamed, NECSOM CEO. "Working with SparkMeter will help us meet these goals while ensuring that our customers are equal partners in our efforts to build the grid of the future."

NECSOM will now start to expand the use of SparkMeter's advanced metering and grid management software solution on its distribution network.

SparkMeter CEO Dan Schnitzer said the current installed base of 529 meters is a subset of the entire distribution network transformer. "The assets are installed under a 100kVA Distribution Transformer (DT) that serves the ring-fenced area for the pilot project.

The number of connections under this DT as indicated, fully instruments the last mile connections under this DT," Schnitzer explained.

SparkMeter and NECSOM have signed an agreement for a commercial deployment for 20,000 connections. "SparkMeter is in the process of getting these meters and associated assets produced and subsequently delivered to NECSOM for installations.

"This is a contract to be deployed in batches through a span of 24-36 months," said Schnitzer.

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Last year's metering pilot project was set up to evaluate the use of data to support NECSOM's long term vision of improving the cost and flow of power. It started in July 2022 and ran until January this year. NECSOM's key challenges lay in:

Asset optimisation – the lack of information about their distribution assets meant the utility was unable to accurately determine the amount of energy it was distributing. They are also thus unable to optimise potentially cheaper renewable energy generation sources.

Profitability – the utility is unable to accurately and quickly detect where energy is lost to theft, incorrect billing and technical losses. Inefficient billing; incorrect meter reading; late-paying customers and accounts receivables of more than 45 days all create a drag on the company's bottom line.

Custom satisfaction – manually reported outages take time to resolve and a high number of complaints because of billing issues results in customer mistrust.

Business optimisation – meter-to-cash activities are manual, inefficient and costly and a substantial number of customer payments are manually reconciled and thus resource-heavy.

The NECSOM team were trained by SparkMeter to install devices in the field and setup the software.

They setup complete instrumentation of customers and distribution transformer lines on one distribution transformer of: 1 grid management unit, 9 grid monitors and 529 customer meters.

Now, at least for the customers on the pilot project, they:

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