The CREDiT Project

More Than a Solar Mini-Grid

Across Africa, solar mini-grids are already demonstrating their potential to transform energy access. CREDiT goes further. Its innovation lies not simply in installing renewable energy infrastructure, but in creating a living digital model around the energy system, the services it enables and the community it serves.

At the heart of this approach are CREDiT's Digital Twins. Real-time monitoring of the solar PV, battery storage and energy system provides the foundation, but the Digital Twin extends far beyond technical performance. CREDiT will explore how Digital Twins can support and strengthen the project's co-design, business models, capacity building and long-term decision-making, bringing traditionally separate areas of rural energy development together within an evolving digital environment.

During co-design, Digital Twins can help communities and project partners explore options before decisions are made — testing different energy demands, system configurations, productive uses and future requirements and demonstrating whether proposed solutions are likely to work.

For business model development, Digital Twins can connect technical performance with demand, utilisation, operating costs and future scenarios. This creates the potential to test different service models, understand financial sustainability, assess investment decisions and explore how a mini-grid could expand as the community and its energy needs develop.

For capacity building, the Digital Twin can become much more than a project research tool. It can provide a practical platform for training local operators and stakeholders, understanding system behaviour, investigating problems, planning maintenance, testing "what-if" scenarios and evaluating future investment without putting the real energy system at risk.

Most importantly, CREDiT is designed around local capability and long-term ownership. The project will explain, demonstrate and provide training in the Digital Twin tools and approaches, progressively transferring the knowledge required to use them to CREDiT's in-country partners, communities, operators, end users and other local stakeholders.

The ambition is that the Digital Twin does not disappear when the research project ends. Instead, it remains alongside the physical energy system as a long-term digital asset — helping local partners monitor, maintain, optimise, adapt and potentially expand their energy infrastructure for 10, 20 years and beyond.

A Different Approach to Long-Term Sustainability

CREDiT therefore brings together five closely connected elements:

Community Co-Design → Physical Energy System → Digital Twin → Sustainable Business Model → Local Capability

Rather than treating these as separate activities, CREDiT seeks to connect them through a continuously evolving digital representation of the real system and its operating environment.

This creates the potential for a new model of rural energy development: one where communities do not simply inherit renewable energy infrastructure, but also inherit the knowledge, digital tools and decision-making capability needed.