Sizing solar-based mini-grids for growing electricity demand: Insights from rural India

Abstract

Mini-grids are a critical way to meet electricity access goals according to current and projected electricity demand of communities and so appropriately sizing them is essential to ensure their financial viability. However, estimation of demand for communities awaiting electricity access is uncertain and growth in demand along with the associated cost implications is rarely considered during estimation of mini-grid sizing. Using a case study of two rural communities in India, we assess the implications of demand growth on financial costs and performance of a mini-grid system consisting of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and battery storage using two different system sizing approaches. We show a cost-saving potential of up to 12% when mini-grids are sized using a multi-stage approach where mini-grids gradually expand in several stages, rather than a single-stage optimisation approach. We perform a sensitivity analysis of the cost of the two sizing approaches by varying six key parameters: demand growth rate, logistics cost, system re-sizing frequency, likelihood of blackouts, solar PV and battery cost, and degradation rate. Of these, we find that system costs are most sensitive to variations in demand growth rates and cost decreases in solar PV and batteries. Our study shows that demand growth scenarios and choice of mini-grid sizing approaches have important financial and operational implications for the design of systems for rural electrification.

CLOVER: A modelling framework for sustainable community-scale energy systems

“…CLOVER has been used to evaluate the design and techno-economic impacts of sustainable electricity systems across a wide range of development contexts. These include the costs and greenhouse gas emissions of solar minigrids in India (Sandwell, 2017;Sandwell, Ekins-Daukes, et al, 2017), including for healthcare applications (Beath et al, 2021) and as electricity demand grows over time (Sayani et al, 2022). CLOVER has been applied to community-scale electricity access in displacement settings, such as refugee camps in Rwanda (Baranda Alonso et al, 2021;Baranda Alonso & Sandwell, 2020) and Djibouti (Matthey-Junod et al, 2022), and for comparisons of the impacts of rurality and climate (Few et al, 2022) and existing energy infrastructure (Sandwell, Wheeler, et al, 2017) on minigrid design in different countries.…”

Lifetime optimisation of integrated thermally- and electrically-driven solar desalination plants

“…Lifetime optimisation of solar-driven MED plants Further, the lower operating temperature of MED plants, compared to MSF installations, results in a lower risk of scaling [42]. MED plants also have the potential for smaller-capacity installations, supplying as little as 1.14 tonnes of clean water per day [43], which lends MED-driven desalination well to offgrid, community-scale contexts where access to clean drinking water [44] and electricity are likely to be lower [45].…”