Planning the Future Electricity Mix for Countries in the Global South: Renewable Energy Potentials and Designing the Use of Artificial Neural Networks to Investigate Their Use Cases

Michael Allison,Gobind Pillai

doi:10.3390/designs4030020

Abstract

Due to a symbiotic relationship, economic growth leads to greater energy consumption in transportation, manufacturing, and domestic sectors. Electricity consumption in the global south is rising as nations in the region strive for economic development. Due to the high costs of fossil fuels and environmental issues, these countries are planning exploitation of their renewable energy potential for meeting their energy needs. In this paper, we take Myanmar as a case study for which photovoltaic (PV) is seen as the preferred technology owing to its modular nature and Myanmar’s tremendous PV potential. To create sustainable systems, the impact of diurnal PV profiles on electricity demand profiles needs investigating. Accurate load forecasts lead to significant savings in operation and planning and maintenance. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) can easily be used for load profile forecasting. This work proposes a three-stage systematic approach which could be employed by global south countries for designing ANN load forecasting models with the aim of simplifying the design process. While the results of this work demonstrate that PV is a suitable energy source for countries like Myanmar, they also point to the importance of including annual load increase rate and PV output degradation rate in system planning.

Highlights

Ample and reliable electricity supply is vital to modern life [1]
Analysis of the results obtained through the PVsyst simulation showed that in the first year of operation the PV installation described in Table 4 would inject a total of 16,345,600 kWh into the local grid at an average of 4490 kWh/Day
It is a widely held belief that electricity consumption is the engine of modern economic growth, especially in developing countries

Summary

Introduction

Ample and reliable electricity supply is vital to modern life [1]. Demand for electricity has been rising sharply globally for decades [2], both as a tool for economic growth [2,3,4,5] and as nations increase access levels to the resource through national electrification programs [6]. At the same time governments and the public alike have realized that current electricity networks are environmentally, economically and socially unsustainable due to their heavy reliance on fossil fuels such as coal [10,11] This has led to an increase in the interest in exploiting rich local renewable energy resources (RERs). Myanmar (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar) was the 9th country to join ASEAN and is the second largest country in Southeast Asia [12] It is currently one of the lowest consumers of electricity in the world.

Methods

Results

Conclusion