NFE Checkin - 02/11/2026

Agenda

• Accounts review
  • Done: Hillary approved the four Green Volta bills on 30 Oct. ERPNext shows NFE owing Green Volta UGX 5,202,515, which becomes 4,952,515 once NFE's 250,000 payment of 27 Oct is booked.
  • Done: the Calin meter labour write-off (page 221), confirmed by Hillary.
  • Done: the rule that nobody approves their own spending, or a transaction they benefit from, agreed by Hillary on 30 Oct. ERPNext enforces it for bills, and it's now in the Spending and approvals policy.
  • Agreed: Dansturn takes over NFE's open balance with Green Volta as his capital contribution (Aaron). See below.
• Phase 3 Nansana
• Customer Pipeline

Minutes

When: Mon 2 Nov 2026, about 100 minutes.
Attendees: Aaron Tushabe, Dansturn Kimbowa, Hillary Arinda (joined about an hour in).
Source: Tactiq transcript, attached to this page.

Summary

Dansturn takes over the UGX 4,952,515 NFE owes Green Volta as his owner's capital, and Green Volta will send NFE receipts. Most of the call went on customers. Conversations go better in person, so Dansturn leads them and aims for one customer visit a week, starting with Worship Harvest's Apostle on Tuesday and Kampala Club on Friday. We're looking for sites that use at least four times what Sezibwa does: about 2.5–2.8 MWh a month, or more than UGX 2M a month on power. At Sezibwa, Phase 3 (solar) is live. It's too early to judge the panels, and the inverter moves to SBU mode for a one-week trial so that solar serves customers before the grid does. October's customer bills went out from NFE's own system.

Decisions

1. Dansturn's capital comes through Green Volta's invoices. He takes over what NFE owes Green Volta (UGX 4,952,515) as owner's capital, and Green Volta issues NFE receipts. Terms below.
2. Customer conversations happen in person, led by Dansturn. They go much better face to face, with time to observe and listen, and they build the kind of long-term relationship we have with the Sezibwa landlord. Goal: one customer visit a week.
3. Target size: at least four times Sezibwa. Sezibwa used 714 kWh in October, so we're looking for sites using about 2.5–2.8 MWh a month, or spending more than UGX 2M a month on power. A hospital or clinic is the kind of site meant.
4. Worship Harvest: lead with data. Ask permission to install NFE's monitoring, share weekly reports until the end of the year, then propose a solution. Aaron: weekly reports are good, but the longer window is what shows the patterns aren't one unusual week.
5. Sezibwa: a one-week trial of SBU mode (solar first, then battery, then grid), watching what it does to reliability. It's the most profitable setup. The risk is that the battery is low when an outage comes.

Discussion

Dansturn's contributions through Green Volta invoices

Dansturn takes over what NFE still owes Green Volta, as his capital contribution, and Green Volta will issue NFE receipts. Aaron and Dansturn agreed the terms below at this check-in, and Aaron recapped them for Hillary when she joined. Background: Owner's capital, grants and related parties.

The balance he takes over

• INV-000116 (18 Mar): UGX 166,000
• INV-000117 (11 Apr): UGX 2,167,800
• INV-000120 (20 Jun): UGX 2,147,940
• INV-000115 (27 Oct): UGX 470,775, the rest after NFE paid 250,000 on 27 Oct
• Total: UGX 4,952,515, matching Green Volta's statement of 27 Oct

Agreed terms (effective 31 Oct 2026)

1. This is Dansturn's owner's capital (account 3130), the same as Aaron's and Hillary's contributions. It is not a loan to NFE.
2. He takes over the balance as at 31 Oct 2026. From then on Green Volta looks to Dansturn, not NFE, for payment of these four invoices.
3. Green Volta issues NFE a receipt for each invoice, showing it settled by Dansturn. The receipts go in NFE Finance › Green Volta Supplier › Payments in Nextcloud.
4. No owner has a stake in Green Volta, as far as we know. We revisit this if that changes. Dansturn doesn't approve Green Volta bills, and Esther doesn't either, because she works at Green Volta.

Also agreed: Green Volta's future invoices are handled like any other supplier's. NFE pays them, after the usual approval.

Next, in ERPNext: NFE's 250,000 payment of 27 Oct is booked from the bank statement. When Green Volta's receipts arrive, one journal entry dated 31 Oct 2026 moves UGX 4,952,515 from what NFE owes Green Volta (2110) into Dansturn's capital (3130), with the receipts attached.

Next, with Green Volta: loop in Esther and Green Volta's accountant so they know the arrangement and issue the receipts.

Customer pipeline

• Pipeline conversations are moving slowly, and we need customers we can keep for the long term. A lesson from Sezibwa: when tenants were difficult, the landlord worked to move the project forward because the relationship was solid. So understand where a customer is before selling to them, and look for reasons the timing might be wrong rather than pushing.
• Kampala Club: Aaron will try to set up a visit for Dansturn on Friday 6 Nov.
• Points of contact: Aaron will put up a list of potential customers to chase and assign points of contact, with Hillary taking some for now. Dansturn is the contact for Worship Harvest, and more will move to him since he's on the ground.
• Hillary's lead: the contact is hard to reach at the moment. Hillary asked for a reminder to follow up.
• Schools (Aaron, at the end of the call): another company Aaron is involved with sells AI to schools. He'd like to approach the schools they already sell to, unless there's a reason schools wouldn't make good customers.

Worship Harvest

Customer file: Worship Harvest (Commercial RPM customer #1). Proposal sent 6 Oct.

• Meeting: Dansturn has booked a meeting with the Apostle. If he agrees, the facilities manager and the chief architect / project manager follow, and Dansturn expects those to be formalities.
• Pain points (Dansturn):
  • Expensive backup. When the grid goes off, the 200 kVA generator runs the whole building, even when the only load is the apartments. They're around 40% occupied, sometimes only four apartments. The Apostle also lives on site. The cost shows up in the budget.
  • Voltage problems. Over-voltage and flickering lights start the generator automatically. The facilities manager then calls Dansturn to find a UEDCL technician to change the transformer tap. Dansturn puts it down to the many roadside food vendors on the same supply, with lights of around 200 W and chip fryers of around 2 kW.
  • Cost. About UGX 6M a month to UEDCL (about 1.5M a week), plus about UGX 900k for the generator on Sunday: roughly UGX 2.5M a week. Aaron: the weekday cost is just what power costs. What stands out is paying about UGX 1M for a single day, at least four times the price, on Sundays.
  • Irregular income. A church that runs on collections won't want to commit upfront capex. Aaron: that isn't a blocker, because no upfront capex is the whole offer.
  • They value data. They already produce performance reports, with ChatGPT's help, so outage and consumption reports should land well.
• Tariff: they're on Code 10.2, and Dansturn thinks they could qualify for Code 20. Aaron: that could be the first step in fixing their power.
• Alternatives they'll compare: a church member at Knight Frank recommended voltage stabilisers. Customers often want to know the options before saying yes, so be ready to show the alternatives (stabilisers, the generator, UEDCL fixes), what they cost, and why ours is better. Stabilisers bring their own losses.
• Timing risks to listen for (Aaron): the building work on the top apartments, and roof leaks they've been raising with the contractor for some time.
• Ownership: a church may value owning the system eventually. NFE sells power for 5–15 years, then the system becomes their asset and NFE helps operate it. The proposal already allows a purchase from year 5.
• Roof: the two towers and the church are joined, so panels could also go on the other tower. Aaron will check whether the roof areas fit the panels we'd need.
• Dansturn knows Worship Harvest from the inside. Aaron asked him to pass on any context that changes the approach, such as reasons they'd delay or wouldn't want to own the system.

Phase 3 Nansana (Sezibwa solar + battery)

Background: Sezibwa Solar + Battery Operating Plan and the 28 Oct call.

• October was a solid month of battery arbitrage alone. Solar came in during the last week, so November's figures mix the two. If we need clean data, we can pause solar and run a month of arbitrage only.
• Usage: 714 kWh for 1 Oct – 1 Nov, about 100 more than the month before. Aaron doesn't think better reliability changes small users' consumption much. Occupancy moves it more, for example holiday makers, or children going back to boarding school.
• Inverter mode (Hillary): the inverter was in SUB (solar, utility, battery), which caused two problems. The battery charged from the grid between midnight and 06:00; that's now cut back to a small top-up, around 20–30%, as outage cover. And once the battery was full, customers were still fed from the grid instead of solar. PR #95 switches the inverter to SBU: solar serves the load first and the surplus charges the battery; battery and solar share the load while the battery is above 15%; the grid comes in only when both fall short. Aaron reviewed the PR and left some feedback, and it's mostly ready.
• Solar output: Hillary says there isn't enough data yet to say the panels underperform. It's the rainy season, the expected range is 12–18 kWh a day, and the best days so far were 13 and 15 kWh. She wants to see the numbers climb as the system adjusts.
• Discharge timing: discharge now starts at 18:00 when the battery is above 30% (the threshold was 75%). On Saturday it started at 97% and reached the floor around 23:00, after which the site runs on the grid. Both agreed that's fine, since little is used at 11 pm. Hillary would like to start discharging earlier, around 17:00, and stay off the grid as much as possible. Aaron would rather spend the battery in the peak window, when power is most expensive, and noted that afternoon outages (around 15:00, up to 1.5 hours) can drain it beforehand. The SBU trial will show which works better.
• Reliability colour: the daily report shows 97% in red. Aaron: residential customers don't notice 97%, so it should be orange at least. Hillary: the index is measured in nines, like a cloud provider's SLA.

Billing and the app

• NFE now invoices from its own system. October's bills went out about an hour before the call. Bill generation failed the first time and was fixed.
• Slow app: the app loads slowly even though it holds very little data. The cause is that the database (Supabase) is in Mumbai and the app is in Washington DC. Aaron is preparing fixes as PRs for Dansturn to review.
• Dashboard redesign: Aaron wants widgets for every microgrid on the dashboard, like the daily report's graphs, and will try Claude Design for it.

Other

• UEDCL article: Dansturn will share the article on why we have blackouts and what UEDCL is doing about them (carried over). UEDCL points to overloaded infrastructure and low investment, and promises substation and line upgrades. Dansturn also sees outages of 5 to 14 minutes every day at Green Volta.
• Dansturn's SCADA work: Dansturn is a local consultant on a substation expansion: two new transformers, and an upgrade of the substation's RTU (gateway), installed around 2010. He wants to understand how NFE's gateway communicates, because the principles are the same.

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