A Geospatial Assessment of Small-Scale Hydropower Potential in Sub-Saharan Africa

Alexandros Korkovelos,Dimitrios Mentis,Holger Rogner,Christopher Arderne,Morgan Bazilian,Shahid Siyal,Ad De Roo,Hylke Beck,Mark Howells

doi:10.3390/en11113100

Abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa has been at the epicenter of an ongoing global dialogue around the issue of energy poverty. More than half of the world’s population without access to modern energy services lives there. It also happens to be a sub-continent with plentiful renewable energy resource potential. Hydropower is one of them, and to a large extent it remains untapped. This study focuses on the technical assessment of small-scale hydropower (0.01–10 MW) in Sub-Saharan Africa. The underlying methodology was based on open source geospatial datasets, whose combination allowed a consistent evaluation of 712,615 km of river network spanning over 44 countries. Environmental, topological, and social constraints were included in the form of constraints in the optimization algorithm. The results are presented on a country and power pool basis.

Highlights

Electricity holds a privileged place in modern societies as it literally powers opportunities for socioeconomic development and well-being [1]
This study focuses on comprehensive geospatial at regional and high spatial small-scale hydropower in particular, big hydropower plants Africa
The results of the hydropower assessment achieved for the defined capacity range (0.1–10 MW)

Summary

Introduction

Electricity holds a privileged place in modern societies as it literally powers opportunities for socioeconomic development and well-being [1]. It is estimated globally that about 1 billion people lack access to electricity [2,3]. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), it is estimated that more than 620 million people do not have access to electricity services, while nearly 730 million people rely on traditional fuels (firewood and charcoal) in order to cover their daily energy needs (cooking, lighting, etc.) [2,5]. A majority of this population is located in rural areas, far away from the existing, usually poorly developed grid network. Electrifying these areas is a challenging process and usually requires significant investments and technological and structural changes in energy systems [6,7]. In order to maximize impact, do public and private investments towards providing access need to dramatically increase, but they need to be deployed in a cost-effective way [2,8]

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion