Rural electrification through mini-grids: Challenges ahead

By Jörg Peters, Maximiliane Sievert, Michael A. Toman. Energy Policy, 2019

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent debates on how to provide electricity to the roughly one billion still unconnected people in developing countries have identified mini-grids as a promising way forward. High upfront costs of transmission lines are avoided, and unlike home-scale solar, mini-grids can provide sufficient electricity for productive uses. This note outlines the challenges the mini-grid sector faces to achieve that potential. To date, few examples of sustainably working mini-grid programs exist. We identify regulatory issues, low electricity demand in rural areas, high payment default rates and over-optimistic demand projections as among the key challenges. Business models that account for high transaction costs in rural areas and are based on realistic demand forecasts could considerably increase the commercial viability of village grids.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/270a3a7b59ad37be4a20310918cc4e63e45a32e1

Citations in the corpus

• Demand for Off-Grid Solar Electricity: Experimental Evidence from Rwanda (2020, unknown): “See Fowlie et al. (2018) and Peters et al. (2019) for a discussion of the viability and challenges of mini-grid electrification. et al. 2019).”