Rural electrification with PV mini-grids – case study Nigeria (Cader et al. 2016)

Worldwide, more than 1.3 billion people do not have access to secure electricity, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. This shortage has a negative impact on health care, education and economic development. For this reason, large-scale electrification programmes are undertaken in these countries – often with the support of international donors and institutions – to achieve a better supply of electricity to the local population.

The electrification of millions of people in rural and remote areas is a major technical and financial challenge. The path favoured for a long time was the expansion of the central power supply system through gradual grid expansion. However, grid connection is not always associated with electrification, as generation capacities are often lacking in the central supply system. Due to the falling costs in the field of renewable energy technologies, especially photovoltaic systems, decentralized mini-grids are becoming a competitive alternative. This means that distributed PV mini-grids can reduce the investment costs for the electrification of remote areas and deliver environmentally friendly electricity more reliably than is possible via the conventional route of grid expansion. However, the responsible states and institutions only take advantage of this possibility of decentralised electrification to a limited extent, which is also due to a lack of planning capacities.

At the Reiner Lemoine Institute (RLI), a rural electrification planning tool has been developed that can simulate a cost-optimal expansion of the power supply through the options of grid expansion, mini-grids and solar home systems and thus supports effective planning. For this publication, the planning tool for a state in Nigeria is used to determine the potential of PV mini-grids for the electrification of rural areas. To this end, individual demand clusters are first defined with the help of geographical analyses, which must be electrified. For these non-electrified clusters, an estimate of future electricity demand will be carried out. Subsequently, energy system simulations will be carried out for this need to determine the costs of different electrification options (grid expansion, mini-grids, solar home systems), with a special focus on PV mini-grids. The entire modeling process is described in Figure 1 of the presentation. The result of the tool application is a spatially resolved representation of the optimal electrification options, which enables a potential assessment at first glance (see Figure 2). The aim of this study is to convey two main aspects:

1. First, it underlines the importance of using comprehensive planning tools that enable the technically and economically optimal electrification strategy of remote regions.
2. Secondly, this study shows that photovoltaics can also make a decisive contribution to the electrification of rural regions outside of solar home systems. To this end, it is important to recognize the potential of PV mini-grids and to use them in a variety of projects.

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