Introduction
Globally there are around 800 million people without access to electricity with around 600 million living in Sub Saharan Africa.
The Energy for Development (e4D) programme at the University of Southampton was created in 2010 to address this challenge and initiated seminal studies in electricity access for hard-to-reach poor areas in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond [1]. This included the design and construction of five solar PV based mini-grids with partners in Kenya and Uganda.
The supervisory team continues to actively monitor and support the operation of these mini-grids. One key observation over the greater than ten years’ operation has been very different rates of growth in energy demand in different locations, despite broadly similar characteristics [2]. This clearly has implications for cost benefit analysis and system component lifetimes.
Within this programme, this project aims to further the understanding of electricity demand, its growth and optimisation within mini-grids in Kenya and Uganda. Specific challenges include:
Estimation of electricity consumption profiles for households and businesses of different types based on measured datasets: these can be used to train models and construct synthetic datasets.
Prediction of electricity demand growth over mini-grid lifetime: this is a key aspect of the cost-benefit analysis for mini-grid projects.
Risk analysis of combined loads exceeding design thresholds: given the contained nature of mini-grids, this is critical for ensuring systems do not fail earlier than predicted.
Optimal demand management in mini-grids under conditions of constrained generation and storage capacity: how to manage and control heavier loads to maximize availability and overall benefit to mini-grid users.