How basic access to electricity stimulates temporally increasing load demands by households in rural developing communities

Abstract

Small solar home systems (SHS) have emerged as potential alternatives to grid electrification in rural sub-Saharan Africa, enabling households to make modest investments into their power systems, and to modify those systems according to their changing incomes and power demands. In this work investigate how introduction of rural unelectrified households to basic electricity temporally stimulates increasing power demands. We use survey-gathered data to show that once households get access to basic electricity, they begin to realise its socio-economic benefits and start to desire more luxurious appliances, especially through social pressure and neighbourhood influence. These desires are realised temporally with activities that lead to increasing households' incomes, leading to increasing loads, and thus to the modifications of the originally installed small SHS, to meet those increasing load demands. Eventually, cumulative increasing loads within a given community could lead to extensions of the grid to that area, as total power demands now justify such investments. Basic SHS therefore potentially act as grid-electrification stimulators, leading to eventual grid electrification of a given community; as an electrification policy, developing communities should consider seeding unelectrified areas with SHS to stimulate power demands for eventual grid electrification.