Fleet Electrification — South Africa Pilot

A national bus operator in East Africa was transitioning 40 vehicles to electric as part of a climate-linked DFI programme. The vehicle procurement had been specified and the depot infrastructure contracts had been awarded — but no operational design work had been done. The charging strategy, vehicle schedule, and depot configuration had all been planned on the assumption of stable overnight grid supply, which was inconsistent with local load shedding patterns of four to six hours per day.

E2Gx Mobility was engaged to design the operational layer of the transition. We began by modelling the energy demand of every route in the network, establishing which routes were viable for the available vehicle range without en-route charging. We then designed a charge-aware vehicle schedule that matched charging windows to the grid's stable periods and built in backup capacity for the most common outage scenarios.

The depot electrification specification was revised to include battery storage at each depot sufficient to maintain charging capacity through a six-hour outage without service disruption. The transition was completed on schedule and the full fleet was operational within the planned timeline — without the service gaps that had affected comparable transitions in the region.