Electrification in Remote Communities: Assessing the Value of Electricity Using a Community Action Research Approach in Kabakaburi, Guyana

Abstract

PROBLEM—Provision of electric services in remote communities operating a subsistence economy has been challenging both for policy-makers and engineers. The value of electricity services and the choice structures in remote economies are not well understood. NEED—There are several technical, economic, and environmental challenges to the top-down approach of electrification. There is a need for methods that can integrate multiple dimensions of social development that can fit the environmental, economic, and technical aspects of community development. APPROACH—To create a system that best fits with the rural community, a bottom-up approach is recommended; this depends on community participation to provide a coherent from-the-ground-up decision-making framework for rural residents, engineers, and policy-makers. OUTCOMES—We have developed a from-the-ground-up community participation approach to power system design, where the community activity system is studied before investigating energy development options and assessing the risks and benefits from the perspective of the people in the community. We present the approach called Community Access Resource for Electricity Sustainability (CARES), with its foundation in action research methodology to explore the values in the community, the valued electricity services (VES) that the community feel they need, and the way the community adopts the different value types through problem-solving. We conclude that the CARES approach provides rural residents, engineers, and policy-makers with a new bottom-up approach to rural electrification in remote economies. IMPLICATIONS—The implications of this design calls for designers to extend their workspace beyond the design office and to facilitate with remote communities in devising solutions that best fit their needs. ORIGINALITY—Original contributions are the identification of the different value types and VES from-the-ground-up, and the integration of these into a gamified, interactive, and virtual-reality setting for participants to play through and discuss major consequences from which prudent decisions for development can be made. Additionally, we have proposed a new cost index for the feasibility assessment of rural electrification projects.

Interdisciplinary Transition Innovation, Management, and Engineering (InTIME) Design: an intersection analysis of design approaches for whole-system sustainability

“…InTIME Design has been demonstrated over the last decade with use cases in agriculture, building heat, personal transport and urban form, remote energy, demand participation, and freight transport, and has resulted in path breaking shift project concepts (Ahrens et al, 2022;Andrade et al, 2022;Bai and Krumdieck, 2020;Blair et al, 2019;Fulhu et al, 2019;Gallardo et al, 2021;Gyamfi and Krumdieck, 2011;Krumdieck, 2019Krumdieck, , 2015Krumdieck and Hamm, 2009). New types of data infrastructure that expands understanding of current systems and sources of unsustainability are often more advantageous shift projects than new energy technologies.…”

Energy transition in a developing economy: Challenges, prospects and policy considerations

“…The literature on the economic considerations of energy efficiency was synthesized by Fowlie and Meeks [20] , whereby they identified a bulk of research focusing on the private returns on energy-efficient investments, market failure and under investments, and cost-effective analysis on varying energy-efficient policy options [7,[21][22][23][24] . The key principle observed in all the literature on the economics of energy efficiency is the concept of feasibility in the transition process.…”

Towards people-private-public partnerships: An integrated community engagement model for capturing energy access needs

“…There have been several recent examples of deeper engagement. In Guyana, for example, representatives from remote communities collaborated in the design process for the electrification plans through a combination of individual meetings and workshops [40]. In Ecuador, one of the most successful projects for off-grid PV systems was developed in collaboration with an electrification committee composed of representatives from different parts of the community.…”