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The impact of development priorities on power system expansion planning in sub-Saharan Africa

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Abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa faces unique barriers to electricity development due to the large proportion of the population that is un-electrified and the prevalence of rural populations. Typically, power system expansion planning models assume all potential consumers can be immediately electrified. This assumption is unrealistic in sub-Saharan Africa, where electrification will likely be a gradual process over a number of years. Furthermore, since a large proportion of the population in sub-Saharan Africa is located in rural regions, the prioritization of these regions may impact how the grid develops. In this research, we develop a multi-period optimization model for power generation and transmission system expansion planning in sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast to existing models, which assume full electrification, we consider a variety of electrification policies and analyze the impact of varying the electrification rate and policy on the cost and resources selected for power system expansion. We test our model on a case study of Rwanda. We find that varying the year in which full electrification is reached has a larger impact on cost and generation capacity than varying the electrification policy does, although, when urban and rural regions are considered equitably, more rooftop solar is built. Varying the electrification policies has a larger impact on transmission expansion than on generation expansion and this impact is amplified when starting from zero initial system capacity rather than the original Rwanda system. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis shows that tightening the bounds on CO2eq emissions has a large impact on the generation portfolio and cost.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by ExxonMobil through the Georgia Institute of Technology. This work was performed in part under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers whose feedback helped to improve the quality of this paper. We would like to thank Paul Rugambwa who provided us with some relevant resources and helped us form our initial understanding of the electrification environment in Rwanda. We would also like to thank Todd Levin for answering questions on his previous modeling efforts, which provided a starting point for our model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA

    Amelia Musselman

  2. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Amelia Musselman, Valerie M. Thomas & Dima Nazzal

  3. ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, Annandale, NJ, USA

    Dimitri J. Papageorgiou

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Aranya Venkatesh

  5. MIT Energy Initiative, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Dharik S. Mallapragada

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  1. Amelia Musselman
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Musselman, A., Thomas, V.M., Nazzal, D. et al. The impact of development priorities on power system expansion planning in sub-Saharan Africa. Energy Syst 13, 461–492 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12667-021-00433-z

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