The socio-technical barriers and strategies for overcoming the barriers to deploying solar mini-grids in rural islands: Evidence from Ghana

Technological appropriateness of biomass production in rural settings: Addressing water hyacinths (E. crassipes) problem in Lake Tondano, Indonesia

“…Regarding the third tier (social), it is even more difficult to quantitatively probe all intangible social aspects [46,60]. Thus, workarounds are needed to ensure social benefits to rural stakeholders without having to pursue quantifications for all social indicators.…”

“…When the biomass production process occurs in rural settings, the areas, communities living around a water hyacinth site, and the agriculture sector could expect benefits from the conversion process. However, a technically minded energy generation as such requires extensive investments and technological skills [32,[53][54][55][56], making further burdens to rural people due to lacking economic resources [57,58,141] and limited technical knowledge available [59,60,141]. Furthermore, applying the AD technique to address the water hyacinths problem implies crucial considerations of how the whole conversion process and the products (organic fertiliser and bioenergy) are flown and distributed from their source(s) to their designated end-users.…”

“…Transportation and handling [96,103,104] are required in-field after harvesting, and between other discrete processes to the downstream direction. Considering the focus of this research on rural context lacking resources and knowledge [45,58,60] to conduct a sustainable and scalable energy conversion (bioenergy production) process, which could require intensive investments and advanced technical knowledge, this research chooses to target the pre-treatment stage. Typically, the biomass pre-treatment stage consists of discrete and reciprocal sub-activities: processing and conditioning.…”

A review of renewable off-grid mini-grids in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Equity investors include Angel investors and venture capitalists (who provide initial capital for the development and implementation of mini-grid projects), private equity (for expansion of capital investments), impact investors (who decide to provide initial or final capital investment depending on the investor, and the social and financial return of the project), and development financing institutions (DFIs) that provide equity investments directly or through third-party funding streams. DFIs look for potentials in the form of development impact and project viability before making financial commitments (Jonker Klunne, 1020; Nuru et al, 2021;Bukari et al, 2021;Antonanzas-Torres et al, 2021c).…”

Techno-economic comparison of standalone solar PV and hybrid power systems for remote outdoor telecommunication sites in northern Ghana

“…In Ghana, studies on the feasibility of renewable energy systems solutions have considered electrification of remote or island off-grid communities, with results suggesting the promising utilization potential. However, challenges ranging from techno-economics to socio-technical need to be addressed to reap the benefits of renewable energy solutions (Bukari et al, 2021;Gyamfi et al, 2015;Kemausuor & Ackom, 2017;Nuru et al, 2021). A feasibility study on a hybrid mini-grid renewable energy system ( consisting of solar PV and biodiesel generators) in Wa East district by Adaramola et al in 2017 using HOMER computer application software showed a COE of US$ 0.76/kWh from the system at full cost (Adaramola et al, 2017).…”