The abundance of solar energy in Africa provides the ideal opportunity to mitigate the concerns on price, reliability and voltage quality of electricity supply to end-users. Rooftop PV and local energy storage solutions in a microgrid where energy is well managed, could unlock significant savings in energy costs and improve voltage quality and reliability. Each microgrid is a unique use-case due to the variation in type, size and costing of energy resources, and the loading and billing structure. This paper presents a methodology to identify and select microgrid energy management objectives using levelized cost of energy as the reference metric. The theoretical framework is validated by implementation in a real microgrid and concludes that Li-Ion energy storage is still too expensive for grid-tied applications in South Africa