By Vvon Engineering Team | Published | Updated
How campus metering, the long summer break and UGC development funding change a rooftop solar project, and what to fix in the specification before the tender goes out.
Solar EPC & street lighting RFQ checklist (TXT)
The first question on a campus solar project is not how much roof there is. It is how many electricity meters the campus has, and whose name each one is in. A university that looks like a single customer to its own vice chancellor can look like nine customers to the distribution utility, and net metering in Bangladesh is settled per connection. Get that wrong at survey stage and the plant that was approved on paper cannot be built the way it was drawn.
Campuses grow building by building, and the electrical supply grows with them. It is normal to find an older academic block on one low tension connection, a newer block on its own, halls of residence on a third, a workshop or auditorium on a fourth, and a pump house connection nobody in the estate office remembers sanctioning. Some campuses instead take a single high tension supply at 11 kV into their own substation and distribute internally. That is the easier case by a distance.
It matters because the net metering guidelines cap the plant at a share of the consumer's sanctioned load, and that ceiling attaches to the connection, not to the institution. Six small connections do not add up to one large allowance. Each also needs its own application, its own agreement and its own bi-directional meter, which multiplies the paperwork and multiplies the number of desks at which the file can stop moving.
Do not assume that generation behind one campus meter can offset bills on other connections. Obtain the utility's written approval for the metering and allocation arrangement before combining the financial case.
An office building draws roughly the same load every working day of the year. A campus does not. Teaching weeks, examination weeks, the long summer break, Ramadan and Eid closures and the gap between sessions all produce different curves, and the distance between a full teaching week and a vacation week is wide enough to change the sizing decision.
Three things usually keep running through a break, and they are what stops export from becoming the whole story: halls of residence, where a proportion of students stay on, research laboratories with incubators, freezers and animal houses that cannot be switched off, and the campus network room. Everything else, lecture theatre air conditioning above all, goes quiet.
Size against the vacation baseline first and the teaching load second. A plant sized to a full teaching week spends the longest holiday of the year exporting, and exported units are settled on the terms written into the net metering agreement rather than at the retail rate you avoid paying when you consume your own generation. That is not an argument for building small. It is an argument for knowing which months are paying for the plant, so that nobody is surprised by the September bill.
The instinct is to start with the tallest building. The better starting point is the building whose meter carries the largest daytime load, because a unit consumed behind that meter is worth more than a unit exported from it.
Compare the structural condition, shading, roof interfaces, cable routes and maintenance access of each candidate building. An unclassified or apparently simple roof is not automatically structurally suitable.
Compare DC and AC route options using electrical limits, losses, fire access and maintainability rather than prescribing inverter location from distance alone.
The university's procurement and finance teams should identify the approval and funding route before tendering. BPPA lists the Public Procurement Rules 2025; use the current rules, amendments, circulars and applicable funding conditions. Development-project approvals depend on the funding route and are not a universal prerequisite for every campus purchase.
Private universities have a shorter route, usually a board approval and a negotiated award, but they meet the same trap in another form: a quotation that looks cheap because the structure, the earthing or the maintenance has been left out of it. Ask any bidder to price the same scope, in the same order, on one page.
If teaching is an objective, specify the learning facilities and responsible department explicitly instead of assuming that a production array automatically becomes a teaching laboratory.
Consult the relevant edition and the documents for the exact equipment and site: BPPA: current Public Procurement Rules; SREDA: Net Metering Guidelines and current application documents; IEC 62548-1: PV array design requirements.
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