Abstract
There are over 650 million people in Africa who have no access to electricity; this is in sharp contrast to the continent’s vast untapped renewable energy potential and reflected by the lack of investments in energy infrastructure. New investments in decentralised power generation within Sub-Saharan African play a progressively important role in increasing energy access and addressing the continent’s electricity supply shortages. Tracking the performance of Sub-Saharan African countries along various socio-political and economic axes can spur the mobilisation of private, public and international sectors in decentralised energy technologies. An increasing amount of high-resolution global spatial data are available, and used for various assessments. However, key multidimensional indicators are mainly still independently provided only at national level. To this end, we present a comprehensive and consistent analysis of the attractiveness for decentralised photovoltaic technologies at an unprecedented level detail. We develop and build a new composite indicator that considers the interplay between social, political, environmental and financial factors at a granular regional level for Sub-Saharan Africa and embeds within it the importance of the local production costs at high-spatial resolution.
Highlights
Increasing energy provision is of paramount importance in SubSaharan Africa (SSA) where currently less than 45% of the population has access to electricity [1]
The PV Decentralised Energy Investments (PV-DEI) index and accompanying levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) data were designed as a flexible tool to support the mobilisation of sustainable investment from either the private, public, non-for profit, and international sectors
In the case of the 3-top countries, the market size ranges from 64 million people for Ethiopia to 4 million people for South Africa
Summary
Increasing energy provision is of paramount importance in SubSaharan Africa (SSA) where currently less than 45% of the population has access to electricity [1]. The requirement for increasing electrification within SSA, is situated within the challenging local context of rising fossil fuel costs and poor grid infrastructure, and the global context of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) [5]. Against this backdrop, renewable energy technologies (RETs) represent a sustainable option for the stra tegic deployment of energy technologies in SSA that can improve both energy access and mitigate climate change, whilst balancing these am bitions with important development goals [6,7,8]. The case for focusing on decentralised PV is made by the poor transmission, distribution [14] and road
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