Many communities across Africa depend on decentralized solar for critical services like hospital lighting and cold storage. These systems regularly underperform due to dust and air pollution, but ground-based measurements of these effects are scarce in the region, limiting our ability to build accurate predictive models.

We partner with local institutions to build sensing infrastructure that fills this gap. Our flagship effort is the Ashesi Solar Monitoring Network (ASMONET), a network of IoT-enabled ground stations that directly measure dust soiling impacts on PV panels and local environmental conditions across sites in Ghana. We are expanding ASMONET to new locations and upgrading the system to support multi-site operation and real-time diagnostics.

Realizing the potential of decentralized energy systems requires design tools that can model not just technical performance, but also how system architectures distribute costs and benefits across society, such as revenues, energy services, and environmental harms like air pollution. We develop computational tools that assess these complex tradeoffs to support the design of energy systems that are technically effective while addressing community needs across all segments of society.

Our current focus is on dust effects on photovoltaics, a pervasive and undercharacterized driver of solar underperformance in arid regions around the world. Our published work shows that accuracy limitations in existing environmental datasets can lead to PV systems being undersized by more than 10% in West Africa (Isaacs et al., Applied Energy 2025). To address this, we are developing both physics-based and ML/AI models to enable rapid design optimization and deployment of reliable solar systems across the African continent.

Rather than importing one-size-fits-all solutions, we design energy technologies that are driven by environmental conditions and community needs and values to enhance locally-specifc performance. Our key project is Shape-Enhanced Aerodynamic Dust Removal (SEADR), which modifies solar panel geometry to harness wind for passive dust removal. This is relevant in West Africa's Sahel region, where Harmattan-season dust can degrade solar performance by more than 50%. Our recent CFD modeling and wind tunnel testing show that simple geometric changes can more than double wind-driven dust removal to mitigate these dust losses.

SEADR serves as a testbed for our community-engaged design approach and lays the groundwork for energy technologies shaped by the places and people they serve.