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Abstract
Energy production systems for isolated communities lacking national energy grids are, in many countries, associated with first energy access of rural or developing regions. Those communities require innovative design methods to select relevant solutions for sustainable developments in a context of continuously strengthening climate change conditions. The design of an innovative solution goes through multiple stages. After identifying opportunities, analyzing a context and identifying a problem, we are interested here in the process of imagining solutions and guiding reflections so that the resulting solutions are sustainable. Sustainability is analyzed from technical, economic, environmental and social angles. The two main visions for imagining solutions, the value proposition and the technical solution, are discussed. We are then developing a multi-criteria method of sustainable design to imagine the technical solution of an electricity production system in a context of first access to energy for isolated communities. This method serves as decision and discussion support between all stakeholders (community, decision makers, project managers) so that they collectively build a sustainable solution. As the exchanges progress, criteria from different fields meet and complement each other to allow the development of the specifications for the energy production solution which will be ultimately developed.
Highlights
Isolated communities experience an increase in their quality of life as soon as they gain access to electricity, through significant social and economic local developments
Prior to the selection of the solution, defining correctly the various aspects of the four criteria of sustainable development to correctly integrate them in a design method is the first step of proposing the optimal answer to the identified need of an isolated community
Thanks to a global vision, due to its multi-criteria nature, our method fosters the imagination of stakeholders who can outline a sustainable solution for the electricity production system
Summary
Isolated communities experience an increase in their quality of life as soon as they gain access to electricity, through significant social and economic local developments. Not just to list existing technical solutions, but to propose a dedicated answer to a dedicated need, a method should be developed to select a sustainable solution that allows an isolated community to harness local energy (for instance from hydro-power) in a context of first access to energy. The sustainability of the solution is determined by its capacity to propose acceptable performance indicators on four major criteria that rely on technical, economic, social and environmental aspects The relevance of such adequately weighted (optimal) solution is significant for a community in the sense that favoring only one of those criteria will lead to unbalanced developements and possibly “make things worse”. That constitute the subject discussed in this paper, focusing on possibilities of electricity production from hydraulic energy using low-power hydroelectric plants or tidal turbines for the illustration, targeting isolated areas near seas and rivers
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