Background
Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) is responsible for managing and maintaining public infrastructure across Uganda's capital, including markets, parks, roads, and municipal facilities. USAFI Market is one of Kampala's central trading markets, serving thousands of vendors and customers daily.
KCCA engaged Orijtech Energy to deploy energy monitoring at USAFI Market as part of broader efforts to understand and manage electricity costs across its portfolio of facilities. Large markets with diverse, informal electrical connections present particular challenges — varied loads, ageing infrastructure, and limited visibility into what is actually drawing from the supply.
Without measurement, a market like USAFI runs on assumption — that the supply is stable, that every connection is accounted for, that nothing is wrong until something visibly fails. For a space thousands of people move through daily, assumption is a poor safeguard.
What We Did
Orijtech Energy installed smart energy meters at the main incomers and key distribution points throughout USAFI Market. In addition to consumption monitoring, the system captured power quality parameters: voltage levels, phase balance, harmonic content, and demand profiles over time. Data was transmitted to the Orijtech Energy cloud platform for continuous monitoring and analysis.
What the Data Showed
Voltage instability: The monitoring data revealed recurring voltage excursions — fluctuations outside safe operating ranges — occurring at specific times of day. Sustained operation outside the declared voltage range shortens the life of connected equipment and, under certain conditions, creates an electrical hazard including fire risk.
Phase imbalance: The three-phase supply serving sections of the market was found to be significantly imbalanced, with load distributed unevenly across phases. Phase imbalance drives neutral current, accelerates wear on motors and transformers, causes overheating, and in severe cases leads to equipment failure and fire. The imbalance measured at USAFI was at a level that warranted urgent attention.
Unaccounted consumption: Comparing metered consumption at the incomers against the sum of the load measured at the distribution points left a persistent discrepancy that the registered connections did not explain. The pattern was consistent with load being drawn from the market supply outside the metered distribution — unmetered connections, in engineering terms. The metering gave KCCA a quantified, time-stamped record of the discrepancy to investigate against its own connection records.
Outcomes
The monitoring deployment gave KCCA actionable, evidence-based findings across three distinct risk areas:
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Voltage instability was quantified and reported to KCCA — a time-stamped record of every excursion outside the declared range, and of the equipment and safety exposure it creates for the market's thousands of daily users.
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Phase imbalance was measured and reported to KCCA — the uneven loading across the three phases put on record, with the equipment-damage and fire risk it carries in a high-density, high-footfall public space, and the load redistribution the measurements point to.
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Unaccounted consumption was quantified — giving KCCA a measured basis on which to reconcile the market's supply against its registered connections.
This case illustrates how energy monitoring serves not just cost objectives, but safety and governance objectives — particularly important for public sector clients managing infrastructure used by the public.
For a public institution, visibility is more than a cost tool — it is a duty of care. Risks that cannot be seen cannot be managed, and USAFI's could not be seen until they were measured.
"The monitoring revealed risks we were not aware of. For a public market with thousands of visitors every day, identifying those risks before an incident was exactly the outcome we needed."