Morocco’s global rural electrification programme, launched in 1996, took the rural electrification rate from under twenty per cent to nearly every household in two decades. Most of it was done by extending the grid. For localities too scattered or too remote, the programme chose solar home systems, installed and operated by private operators under contract with the national utility, in a fee-for-service model: the household does not own a piece of equipment, it subscribes to a service, with a monthly fee that covers maintenance and the replacement of components.
I ran operations for one of those operators for twelve years. What follows is not a history of the programme. It is what that trade teaches, and it holds for a three-hundred-megawatt plant as much as for a panel on an adobe roof.
Inauguration does not count
On installation day everything works. The panel is new, the battery is new, the household has light for the first time. The question that decides the programme’s value comes four to six years later, when the battery reaches the end of its life. Who replaces it, with what money, how quickly. A programme with no answer to that question has distributed equipment, not electricity.
The fee-for-service model answered it by construction: the monthly fee financed replacement, and the operator had a contractual interest in the system working, because a broken system is a household that stops paying. Transposed to large projects, this is the question of the operation and maintenance contract, its length, its incentives, and the renewal reserve the financial model must provide for. An energy project is assessed on what it delivers in year eight.
Repairing and collecting are the same visit
On a territory where households are hours of track apart, two rounds, one for maintenance and one for collection, are not affordable. It is the same person, the same vehicle, the same visit. The technician checks the system, replaces what needs replacing, and collects. That is not a logistical constraint. It is what holds the model together. The household pays because it sees what it is paying for.
The lesson goes beyond solar home systems. In any project, the relationship that produces revenue and the one that produces service must be held by the same people, or at least pass through the same point of contact. Where they are separated, each ends up ignoring the other, and arrears rise together with breakdowns.
Design for the one who maintains
- Equipment is standardised. One type of controller, two battery sizes, one lamp. A technician must be able to diagnose and repair without consulting anyone, with what is in the vehicle.
- Spares are stocked near the field, at provincial level, not in a central warehouse. A battery that takes three weeks to arrive is a lost customer.
- Technicians come from the territory. They know the tracks, the families, the farming seasons when nobody is home. They are trained by the operator, and they stay after the head-office engineers have left.
This rule, design for the person who will maintain it, translates directly to large projects: local content and territorial anchoring are not boxes to tick in a tender specification. They are the conditions for the installation still being maintained in ten years, by people with an interest in it working.
The grid eventually arrives
The national programme advanced on two fronts at once: the grid kept extending, and solar systems covered what the grid did not reach. Year after year, the grid reached villages equipped with solar. That was planned, and welcome. But a service contract that does not say what happens the day the grid arrives, for the operator, the equipment and the household, produces situations nobody knows how to settle.
Every project has an end, or a transformation: the arrival of a competing infrastructure, the expiry of an offtake contract, the transfer of an asset to the public authority. The time to write it down is the beginning, when all parties still agree. An exit clause negotiated at signing is worth more than an arbitration fifteen years later.
What changes with scale, and what does not
I then spent nine years at the other end of the chain, in the agency in charge of large renewable projects, on partnerships and territorial anchoring. Scale changes everything: the amounts, the counterparties, the sophistication of the contracts. But the underlying question is the same as in a village of the Atlas: who benefits from the installation after inauguration day, and who has an interest in it working. A project where the answer is clear gets financed and operated. A project where it is not degrades, whatever its budget.