Buckle Up for EVs in Rural Africa
Powerhive is partnering with the FCDO on a pilot programme bringing electric vehicles (EVs) to rural Western Kenya. This project is aimed at proving the technical and commercial viability of the EV business model, as well as their integration with the mini-grid.
At Powerhive, we supply solar electricity to the public providing clean energy to thousands of families in rural Kenya. Access to Energy is crucial to improve the lives of almost 1 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa and it can help to support sustainable economic growth, improve human health and well-being and enable women and children to lead more productive lives.
In our previous blogs, you can read why we believe that EVs play a crucial role as anchor loads in the economic viability of mini-grids. After Powerhive procured 33 EVs, navigating the challenges of importing and registration, it was time to take the vehicles for a spin…
The tests immediately faced challenges on several fronts.
Light Commercial Vehicles need to reliably (and cheaply) cover very long-distance journeys combined with rather impressive payloads — the standard measurement for good load capacity in Kenya is “two sacks of maize”, which amounts to 120 kg (or 2 adult passengers). As you can imagine, most commercially available EVs have not been constructed with long rides and heavy loads in mind.
And there was one more challenge.
Powerhive has all of its micro-grids operating in Kisii, a city in the Kenyan highlands about 360km by road from Nairobi. We selected a micro-grid site where we have a great relationship with the local villagers. The site has a small 30kW micro-grid in place, plus enough stationary battery to support the charging of the EVs.
Kisii also has a very high density of Boda riders (motorcycle taxis). The Boda rider association report a staggering 138,000 Bodas in Kisii area, on a population of just 1,4 million. Most Boda rider drivers use Honda or Bajaj. There are also a few hundred small three-wheelers operational in Kisii.
The relatively high gasoline prices in East Africa, combined with a very short lifetime of only 48 months lead to a high TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of petrol Bodas. Boda drivers make an average turnover of around 9 USD per day, but often take home in between 1 to 3 USD. Powerhive’s new technology could save the driver 1 to 2 USD per day. Needless to say, that is a huge deal.
So far, so good — but Kisii also offers considerable challenges.
Firstly, there are frequent floods, it is very dusty, and the average drive cycle consists of long stretches of dirt roads.
Secondly, in the words of one Kenyan travel blog, Kisii is “conspicuously hilly, with few level patches”.
What does that mean in practice?
If you’ve ever watched the Tour de France you’ll have seen cyclists trying to beat ridiculously long, gruelling hill climbs. Imagine what your legs feel like when (or if!) you make it to the top. Imagine doing this every day, all day long. You’d probably need a physiotherapist before long.
That’s just what we were facing: Drivetrains that would simply burn themselves out, give up, pack their bags and go home. And we were like an under-resourced team of physiotherapists trying to massage just one more climb out of them.
Or to put it in technical terms: the terrain leads to sustained high amperages in the drive train.
The three-wheelers failed almost instantly, because they were massively underpowered. To improve the performance of the three-wheelers, we decided to order retrofit kits producing more than three times the nominal power. We expected that more power would mean fewer problems with underpowered drive trains which had not had any protection from overheating, coupled with controllers and motors which were failing continuously.
The two-wheelers were off to a better start. We initially selected the Super Soco as our test vehicle, which we knew to be a well-engineered bike that had proven its worth in China. Unfortunately, it also proved unequal to the combined challenge of terrain and commercial use requirements.
After about a month, we received a call from a Boda rider. He claimed he was smelling smoke coming from the battery compartment of his Super Soco. After inspection, indeed it appeared that the battery connector had melted, due to constant high currents in combination with heavy vibrations from less than ideal road conditions.
At this point, we recruited an EV expert to join the team, to make sure that three-wheelers’ retrofit kits would be up for the considerable task ahead of them, and to improve the Super Socos. We spent a considerable amount of timein the workshop adapting and optimising, and one of the fixes we are most proud of is the re-engineering of the battery connectors with custom-designed, 3D-printed parts.
With the new `Bodafications` in place, we were finally able to start testing with the Super Socos commercially. Drivers were very enthusiastic and Powerhive quickly onboarded more than 20 customers, in a village of just 200 people. The turnover from rental showed a classic hockey stick profile and the project was right on track, until…
The rear forks started to fail. Due to the high payload, and potentially the longer saddle we used, the forces on the rear fork assembly were simply too high. Though a simple mechanical failure, we concluded that this would not be the last part that would fail and that the Super Soco was fighting an unfair battle. Encouraged by the strong commercial results, we gathered the technical learnings to define our functional specifications and source good quality Bodas and trikes.
We are now proceeding with more powerful e-Bodas (yes, 3 times more power) and retrofit kits for the three wheelers in place, and will share more learnings about these in our next blog.
Finally, we’d like to leave you with some words of advice in case you have been thinking about getting involved in the EV space:
- First of all, don’t reinvent the wheel. Make sure that you have at least 1 person in your team with EV experience and connect to regional companies in the EV space. Feel free to reach out to us!
- It is absolutely essential to fully understand the functional requirements for your specific purpose. You can not rely on your supplier to do this for you. In our opinion, the best way of achieving this deep understanding is by thoroughly baselining the current mobility segment you aim to replace.
- For the test batch, it is better to over-spec your EV than to go in conservative — after all, it’s always possible to optimize cost later on in the project, but if your first batch is below spec you won’t even get to test your hypotheses.
- Make sure you have full access to the EV controller & BMS parameters, so you can optimise the performance and range, while protecting the drivetrain against overheating.
