Commercial & Industrial Solar
Rooftop and ground-mounted solar for factories, warehouses, malls, offices, schools and institutions, delivered as an EPC contract by Magna Lights Africa Limited.
What we deliver
Engineering, procurement and construction: load and demand analysis, system design and drawings, structural assessment of the roof or ground, procurement of tier-1 equipment, installation by certified crews, commissioning and testing, KPLC interconnection where the system is grid-tied, and ongoing operations and maintenance.
Magna Lights Africa has delivered over 500 solar installation sites and more than 40MW cumulatively, alongside 300+ greenfield telecom towers and 500+ colocation sites. Commercial solar and remote-site power are the same engineering discipline: sizing a system that has to keep running without anyone on site.
Why commercial sizing is different
A domestic system is sized on consumption. A commercial system is sized on the demand profile — when the load occurs, how peaky it is, and what the tariff structure charges for it. A site that runs plant from 8am to 5pm is close to an ideal solar load and may justify very little storage. A site with a large evening or overnight load, or one where an outage stops production, is a different design with a different economic case.
The first deliverable is therefore data, not a quote: consumption history, demand records where available, and an understanding of which loads are critical.
Roof and structure
Large rooftop arrays raise questions a domestic job does not: whether the structure carries the additional dead load and wind uplift, how the array is fixed without compromising the roof's weathering, how it is accessed for cleaning and maintenance, and how the DC runs are routed and protected. On industrial roofs we generally use the 610W bifacial module, because reducing module count per megawatt materially reduces mounting and labour cost.
Operations and maintenance
Solar fails quietly. A shaded or soiled array, a failed string, a degraded connector — none of these announce themselves, and the first sign is usually a bill that stopped falling. O&M covers cleaning, thermal inspection, string-level output checks, protection testing and reporting. We maintain systems we did not install.
Questions
What size commercial solar system do I need?
It is set by your demand profile rather than by roof area. Half-hourly or monthly consumption data, peak demand and the shape of the working day determine the array and whether storage is worth buying at all.
Can solar replace our generator?
Solar with storage can carry critical load through an outage. Whether it replaces a generator entirely depends on the size and duration of the load you must never lose, and that is a design decision with a clear cost attached.
Do you do operations and maintenance?
Yes, including on systems installed by others. Output degrades quietly through soiling, string faults and failed optimisers, and most sites do not notice until the bill moves.
Talk to us about a commercial system
Send twelve months of consumption data and we will come back with a design basis and an indicative cost.