Abstract
In many developing countries, electricity outages occur frequently with consequences for sustainable development. Moreover, within a country, region or city, the distribution of outages and their resultant impacts often vary from one locality to another. However, due to data constraints, local-scale variations in outage experiences have seldom been examined in African countries. In this study, a spatial approach is used to estimate and compare exposure to electricity load shedding outages across communities in the city of Accra, Ghana. Geographic Information System and statistics from the 2015 rolling blackouts are used to quantify neighborhood-level load shedding experiences and examine for spatial patterns. The results show that annual load shedding exposure varied greatly, ranging from 1117 to 3244 h. The exposure values exhibit statistically significant spatial clustering (Moran’s I = 0.3329, p < 0.01). Several neighborhoods classified as load shedding hot or cold spots, clusters and outliers are also identified. Using a spatial approach to quantify load shedding exposure was helpful for overcoming the limitations of lack of fine-grained, micro-level outage data that is often necessary for such an analysis. This approach can therefore be used in other data-constrained cities and regions. The significant global spatial autocorrelation of load-shedding exposure values also suggests influence by underlying spatial processes in shaping the distribution of load shedding experiences. The resultant exposure maps provide vital information on spatial disparities in load shedding implementation, which can be used to influence decisions and policies towards all-inclusive and sustainable electrification.
Highlights
Power outages in electricity supply systems occur both in developed and developing countries.The threat of electricity blackouts and brownouts has increased in recent times, with components of the electricity system—generation, transmission and distribution—being increasingly vulnerable to both natural and manmade phenomena
Ghana is one of the countries in Africa that has been through several acute, multi-year electricity supply shortages over the past four decades, which have resulted into nation-wide load shedding
Over 10,000 load shedding segments were recorded in that year at the peak of an acute statistics collected by the utility in the study area
Summary
Power outages in electricity supply systems occur both in developed and developing countries. Spatial visualization using maps has found application in improving the communication of load shedding schedules in South Africa, enabling users to visualize and better plan for load shedding [42] These and other related studies demonstrate the usefulness of spatial analytical techniques in examining and communicating spatial characteristics of energy parameters on both local and national scales. Efforts to collect such data by any researcher can be difficult because of restrictive bureaucratic and financial requirements This potentially explains why very few spatial analyses on energy (electricity) parameters have been carried out in Africa, especially on a local level. The study is motivated by the need to provide community-scale spatial information to utility-level decision makers for better planning of electricity distribution during times of supply shortages.
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