Wed, 19 June, 2024
Key to achieving The Breakthrough Agenda is creating power systems that can handle very high levels of renewable energy (up to 100%) in different regions and climates while staying cost-efficient, secure, and resilient (Gov.uk, January 2022). This involves overcoming challenges in (i) providing low-carbon energy to meet supply-demand needs in low-carbon societies, and (ii) developing smart and flexible power infrastructures for energy delivery and storage that support sustainable economic and social development (Ayrton Fund, 2020).
Electrification solutions currently used in rural Africa address only one of these challenges, often neglecting the other:
- Conventional grid solutions (AC microgrids) are expensive but have a significant impact on local economic development. However, over the past 50 years, they have failed to solve the energy access problem. In many African countries, like Madagascar, connection rates have been slower than population growth. Economically, their large-scale development potential is limited to larger villages with stable financial support, which is not typical for most off-grid African communities.
- Solar Home Systems address the short-term energy access issue and quickly improve living conditions for millions of households in Africa. However, they fall short on long-term sustainability and development. These systems are unsustainable technically (lasting only 2-3 years), economically (not suitable for revenue-generating activities), socially (not helping users advance to higher energy levels and posing risks not covered by energy providers), and environmentally (producing large amounts of hazardous battery waste that cannot be collected).
PowerPath aims to tackle this challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, starting with Madagascar, where only 23% of the population has access to electricity (World Bank, 2020). Madagascar's remote and dispersed communities present significant infrastructural and financial challenges for traditional centralized grid expansion.