Zambia is vastly endowed with a wide range of energy resources. Yet, to date, Zambia has not fully exploited its potential in solar energy utilisation for electricity generation due to various reasons such as lack of understanding of the distribution of solar energy potential in the country and limitation of access to solar energy resource information. This paper assesses the solar energy distribution and potential in Zambia. Nine provinces with different geographical and climatic regions that makes up Zambia were assesed. The distribution of solar radiation within the country were assessed using spatial analysis in ArcGIS Software. The 22year period solar datasets were considered for assessment. These datasets were obtained from NASA Atmospheric Science Data Center using Surface Meteorology and Solar Energy. The analyzed results indicate that Zambia has approximately 20,442TWh/year technical solar energy potential and receives 2109.97kWh/m2 of solar energy per year with 4403.12hours of sunshine. The country has 186,121km2 available and suitable land area for RETs implementations. This study is important as it present an overview of the technical solar energy potential for Zambia which is vital for decision making, energy mix and sustainable deployment of solar energy technologies in the country.

Generation adequacy assessment of electrical power systems is vital in ensuring proper decision making in generation expansion planning and system operations in the face of stochastic system performance such as equipment failures and variations of generation and load. This paper presents the results of generation adequacy assessment of the Zesco generation system using the probabilistic approach. The system is analyzed under several scenarios in order to investigate the effect of each of these scenarios on the reliability of the system. The analytical method is applied to evaluate the stochastic system performance and reliability indices. In this study, the generation adequacy of the Zesco generation system was assessed considering the existing and the future generation capacity. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to assess the adequacy of Zesco generation system to meet the load requirements taking into consideration the existing and forecasted electricity demand. The results show that Zesco system was not very adequate in 2009 to meet the load requirements. On the other hand, the system is will be adequate in 2020 after addition of new generation capacity of 1280MW.

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To achieve a national energy access target of 90% urban and 51% rural by 2035, combat climate change, and diversify the energy sector in the country, the Zambian government is planning to integrate other renewable energy resources (RESs) such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal into the existing hydro generation-based power system. However, to achieve such targets, it is essential for the government to identify suitable combination of the RESs (electricity generation fuel mix) that can provide the greatest sustainability benefit to the country. In this paper, a multicriteria decision-making framework based on analytic hierarchy process and system dynamics techniques is proposed to evaluate and identify the best electricity generation fuel mix for Zambia. The renewable energy generation technologies considered include wind, solar photovoltaic, biomass, and hydropower. The criteria used are categorized as technical, economic, environmental, social, and political. The proposed approach was applied to rank the electricity generation fuel mix based on nine sustainability aspects: land use, CO 2 emissions, job creation, policy promotion affordability, subsidy cost, air pollution reduction, RES electricity production, RES cumulative capacity, and RES initial capital cost. The results indicate that based on availability of RESs and sustainability aspects, in overall, the best future electricity generation mix option for Zambia is scenario with higher hydropower (40%) penetration, wind (30%), solar (20%), and lower biomass (10%) penetration in the overall electricity generation fuel mix, which is mainly due to environmental issues and availability of primary energy resources. The results further indicate that solar ranks first in most of the scenarios even after the penetration weights of RES are adjusted in the sensitivity analysis. The wind was ranked second in most of the scenarios followed by hydropower and last was biomass. These developed electricity generation fuel mix pathways would enable the country meeting the future electricity generation needs target at minimized environmental and social impacts by 2035. Therefore, this study

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