Abstract

The outstanding solar potential in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) enables significantly cheaper levelized costs of electricity for decentral solar systems compared to the commonly used diesel generators. Yet, the limited purchase power in SSA impedes rural electrification by solar systems due to their high investment costs. Decentralized Energy-Water-Food systems (EWFS) have the potential to solve this problem. Using solar-powered water pumps, rural communities can supply water for drinking and irrigation. Thereby, agriculture does not depend on rainfall solely and can be done all over the year, which leads to increasing productivity. The increased crop production reduces the community’s expenses for nutrition and enables profit by sales, which in turn enables a payback of the initial investment costs of the solar system. The increased amount of biomass waste enables economically feasible small-scale biogas production. The biogas can be used for electricity production by biogas motors. These can supply private, social or small commercial loads, which enhance the local productivity even more. To identify the least-cost system design regarding the supply of electricity, water and food for the rural village of St. Rupert Mayer, Zimbabwe, the linear optimization model urbs was adapted. urbs was developed for energy system modelling, yet its sector coupling feature allows to add processes like water pumps and commodities such as biogas. The modelling results show that a holistic system including photovoltaics (PV), water pumps, enhanced agriculture and biogas production reduces the levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) from 0.45 USD/kWh by power supply from diesel generators to 0.16 USD/kWh. The modelling results shall support local governments and entrepreneurs in their decision-making.

Highlights

  • The outstanding solar potential in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) enables significantly cheaper levelized costs of electricity for decentral solar systems compared to the commonly used diesel generators

  • While the extraordinary potential for solar energy in SSA allows for a low levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) by means of photovoltaics (PV), which is lower than electricity generated by conventional fossil fuels, the share of solar and wind energy in primary energy consumption in SSA is currently smaller than 0.1% [3]

  • The results show the techno-economic benefits of decentralized Energy-Water-Food systems (EWFS)

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Summary

Introduction

The outstanding solar potential in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) enables significantly cheaper levelized costs of electricity for decentral solar systems compared to the commonly used diesel generators. A major reason for this is the high interest rates typically found in SSA in combination with low purchasing power of the masses These have an especially negative impact on investments in volatile renewable energy (RE) technologies since these have typically higher specific investment costs than conventional fossil fuel powered energy production units. Solar water pumps are a good example of such loads as they can be used flexibly and add to agricultural productivity by the pumped water Another advantage of these decentralized Energy-Water-Food systems (EWFS) is that the resulting biomass residue can produce cost-effective biogas. This can be used to compensate the volatile PV electricity production using cheap generators

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