Electricity Planning and Implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review
Philipp A. Trottera,[1], Marcelle C. McManusa, Roy Maconachieb
a Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Bath, Claverton Down Road, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
bDepartment of Social and Policy Studies, University of Bath, Claverton Down Road, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
AbstractUniversal electricity accessis an important development objective, and the focus of a number of key global UN initiatives. While the methodical planning of electricity infrastructure is widely believed to be a prerequisite for effective electrification, to date, no comprehensive overview of electricity planning research has been undertaken on sub-Saharan Africa, the world region with the lowest access rates. This paper reviews quantitative and qualitative electricity planning and related implementation research, considering each of the 49 sub-Saharan African countries, the four regional power pools and the sub-continent as a whole. Applying a broad understanding of electricity planning and a practical limit of 20 reviewed articles per country and region revealed 306 relevant peer-reviewed journal articles included in this review. A general classification schemeis introduced that classifies the planning literature along the addressed value chain depth, number of different analysed criteria and number of evaluated decision alternatives. The literature is found to be strongly clustered in a few countries, with less than 5 identified relevant articles in 36 of the 49 countries,although the total amount of articles per year is clearly increasing over time. It addresses a wide selection of generation technologies with foci on solar PV, hydropower and non-renewables as part oftechnology choice, operation, distribution and implementation analyses. Including different high-level criteria in analysing electricity systems is common, however the literature is only starting to use formalised multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) tools. The review indicates that 63 % of relevant articles favour renewable energy technologies for their given problems. Frequently mentioned success factors for electrification in sub-Saharan Africa include: adequate policy design, sufficient finance and favourable political conditions. While considerable regional and methodological literature gaps are apparent, the literature in this review identifies a rich and fruitful ground for future research to fill these gaps.Keywords: Sub-Saharan Africa, energy planning, electrification, energy policy, multi-criteria decision making, renewable energy
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Review methodology and energy planning classification
2.1 Definition of electricity planning
2.2 Geographic extent and review methodology
2.3 Classification of electricity planning approaches
3. Approaches to electricity planning and implementation in sub-Saharan Africa
3.1 Regional distribution
3.2 Temporal development
3.3 Technological scope
3.4 Value chain depth
3.5 Analysis/decision criteria
3.5.1 Type of criteria used
3.5.2 Number of criteria
3.5.3 Time trend in number of criteria used in quantitative research
3.6 Alternatives
3.7 Application of the DCA-classification
3.8 Methodologies and approaches
4. Recommendations for electricity planning and implementation in sub-Saharan Africa
4.1 Recommended technology mix
4.2 Electrification delivery success factors
5. Conclusion - The myriad opportunities for electricity planning research in Africa
1.Introduction
Access to electricity has frequently been argued to be a crucial prerequisite for socio-economic development [1-4]. In the context of developing countries, it has been shown to be associated with higher literacy rates [2], improved health care [5], enhanced employment opportunities [6] and productivity advancements [7]. Acknowledging electricity’s crucial role for combating global poverty more generally, the UN aims at achieving universal energy access by 2030 via its “Sustainable Energy for All” initiative.
While several regions in the world are yet to achieve universal electricity access, the gap to reach this goal remains most significant in sub-Saharan Africa. According to 2012 World Bank figures, only 15% of its rural and 35% of its total population have access to electricity. Consequently, more than 630 million people in the region are currently unelectrified. In comparison, South Asia, the world region with the second lowest electricity access figures, has rural and total electrification rates of four and three times as much as sub-Saharan Africa, respectively. Furthermore, the urban bias in electrification measured as a ratio between rural and urban electrification is 3.5 times greater in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world.
Mandelli et al. (2014), in their well-written comprehensive data and policy review paper on energy in Africa, provide a variety of key insights for successful energy-driven sustainable development in Africa. They conduct in-depth analyses of African energy systems, present primary energy potential data and discuss a variety of different policy options in great detail [8]. Scholars have furthermore agreed that a systematic approach to electricity planning is a sine qua non for successful large-scale electrification (see for instance [9-14]).Despite its salient rural electrification shortage, Rojas-Zerpa and Yusta (2014) suggest that sub-Saharan Africa has received considerably less scholarly attention than South Asia with regards to using modern electricity planning techniques [9].To date, no academic paper has systematically structured and reviewed the wider African electricity planning literature.
This paper intents to fill this gap by reviewing a wide range of quantitative and qualitative literature on electricity planning and related implementation analysis in sub-Saharan Africa. It pursues two principal goals. First, the paper aims to support and encourage future research on the topic by offering a broad and transparent review of the status of the electricity planning literature in sub-Saharan Africa. It explores relevant electricity planning and/or implementation literature, or the lack thereof, for each of sub-Saharan Africa’s 49 countries. In addition, it also reviews the comparative literature featuring more than one country, as well as literature on regional power pools and sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. This exercise involves a systematic approach to literature searching to ensure that articles with few previous citations are not overlooked. The paper characterises each article reviewed with using a range of criteria, including: regional scope, temporal development, kind of electricity producing technologies addressed, value chain depth, decision criteria employed,alternatives studied and methodological approaches utilised. In doing so, the paper identifieswider trends in the sub-Saharan electricityinfrastructure literature, as well as revealing a number of existing gaps. A brief overview of the substantial findings in the literature presents crucial success factors for electrification mentioned in the reviewed articles, as well as the extent to which researchers tend to find renewable energy systems (RES) or non-renewable energy systems (non-RES) more promising to address sub-Saharan Africa’s electricity needs. As a rich and informative literature on the different methodologies used in energy planning already exists[9-13, 15-19], this paper will not review the characteristics of such methodologiesper se.
Second, the paper presents a novel classification scheme for energy planning literature in general, in order to improve the structure of discussing energy planning approaches. Review papers on energy or electricity planning have not produced an explicit, widely used framework for characterising energy or electricity planning approaches. Instead, they have tended to focus on identifying the methodological concept used in a given paper rather than actually characterising the method, the latter should be independent of how the researchers named their employed method. This has led to different, and at times contradictory, ways of classifying the literature [9-13, 15, 16, 18, 20]. For example, the concept of mathematical optimisation has been classified as separate from multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches [9, 12], compatible with but distinct from MCDM [13], as one of many possible instances of MCDM [10, 15, 20], and as one of two types of MCDM [18]. Such conflicting results can be alleviated by classifying energy planning approaches based on mutually exclusive and cumulatively exhaustive characteristics that can be applied universally beyond single methodological concepts. This paper presents such a classification scheme and demonstrates its applicability for the wider African electricity planning literature.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the review methodology. It first presents a comparably broad definition of electricity planning used throughout this paper. Furthermore, section 2 details the review approached used in this paper and presents a literature classification scheme which allows a characterisation of energy planning research. Section 3 provides the literature review results. The literature is discussed in terms of regional distribution, temporal development, technological scope, value chain depth, decision criteria, decision alternatives and methods in turn. Recommendations for successful electricity planning in Africa apparent from the reviewed literature are presented in section 4, while section 5 offers a conclusion which summarises the key achievements and gaps of the African electricity planning literature.
2.Review methodology and energy planning classification
2.1Definition of electricity planning
Electricity planning, or more generally, energy planning a have been defined in greatly varying degrees of comprehensiveness. Some scholars have chosen relatively narrow definitions. Hiremath et al. (2007) state that “[t]he energy-planning endeavor involves finding a set of sources and conversion devices so as to meet the energy requirements/demands of all the tasks in an optimal manner. This could occur at centralized or decentralized level” ([14] p. 730). Hence, energy planning is seen to solely finding an optimal, usually cost-minimal, supply mix for a given centralised or decentralised demand. Subsequently, however, the extent of energy planning has been considerably widened. Both Loken (2007) and Rojas-Zerpa and Yusta (2014) have argued that energy planning problems involve multiple decision criteria so that a simple global optimum often does not exist [9, 10]. However, both works mirror [14] in mostly focusing energy planning on finding suitable energy supply options. Other scholars have produced yet more encompassing energy planning definitions. In some cases, these have been summarised under the term integrated energy planning. Bhattacharyya (2012) in his review paper on off-grid electricity planning writes that “a successful implementation … requires a careful planning of all related stages, which goes beyond just the technology choice or component selection decision” ([12] p.690). Other stages along the value chain he deems important for energy planning are obtaining good demand estimates, appropriate energy delivery and adequate implementation mechanisms. Bhattacharyya saliently highlights the importance of ex-post analysis in energy planning to derive valuable lessons learned for future projects. Mirakyan and De Guio (2013) offer a similarly broad definition in their review of integrated energy planning. It again features the multi-criteria nature of energy planning, its applicability at different units of analysis, its spread across different value chain stages including energy generation, transmission, distribution and use, as well as the relevance of ex-post analyses ([13] p. 290). Further work on integrated energy planning corroborate such comparably broad definitions[21].
In order to review African electricity planning as comprehensively as possible, this paper follows a broad definition of electricity planning, in a similar way to the integrated energy planning literature. Electricity planning is seen as an integrated approach of analysing an economically, technologically, environmentally, socially and/or politically suitable equilibrium between electricity demand of a given unit of analysis and different available supply options across the electrification value chain (see [13]). This definition has comparably broad implications for scale, depth and approach of electricity planning articles included in this review. First, it is applicable on different scales, ranging from local remote to national and international applications [9, 12, 14]. Therefore, articles dealing with the electrification of a remote rural village are included in the review, as are analyses of the national electricity infrastructure or the Africa-wide transmission network. Second, following [11-13, 21], this paper considers the electricity planning exercise to span different value chain elements. Specifically, it includes studies in the review which address at least one of the 5 value chain stages of obtaining demand estimates, selecting electricity producing technologies, planning operations, designing transmission and distribution of electricity, or ensuring an enabling environment for successful implementation of electrification in an African context. Third, the above definition explicitly includes both ex-ante design exercises of new electricity systems and ex-post analysis of existing systems which derive lessons for electricity planning [12]. Hence, articles which qualitatively assess a past electrification of an African town are included in the review, much like those which use a quantitative approach to design a suitable future supply mix for a given demand. Relevant quantitative methods are single-objective optimisation [9, 18, 19], MCDM [10-12, 15, 17, 20], life-cycle assessments (LCA) [14] or model simulations [12]. Qualitative research includes evaluations of project implementations [22], non-technical analyses of generation technologies or specific energy policy analyses [8, 18, 20].
Despite this encompassing definition, specific content limits apply. Articles that solely address energy potentials are not included (see [8] for a review) as they are commonly exogenous to electricity planning. The same applies for strict engineering technology design work such as developing a new type of solar PV modules, and papers that do not primarily address electricity but are concerned with other energy usage such as biofuels for transport or biomass for cooking and heating.
2.2Geographic extent and review methodology
Using the concept of electricity planning described in section 2.1 as a basis, this paper reviews academic articles which address one of the 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, two or more of these countries at once, one of the four regional power pools (Western African Power Pool (WAPP), Eastern African Power Pool (EAPP), Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) and Central African Power Pool (CAPP)), or sub-Saharan Africa as a whole region. A list of the respective 49 countries is available in Table 1. For practical reasons, the maximum number of articles included in this review per country is 20. Where there are more than 20 relevant papers addressing a specific country, the 20 reviewed papers were chosen based on the authors’ judgement of both timeliness and relevance. Furthermore, the review only includes English-speaking peer-reviewed journal articles. It does not, therefore, include conference presentations, government documents or peer reviewed papers in languages other than English.
In terms of methodology, this review paper employs a systematic approach to literature searching in order to achieve the goals set out in section 1. Articles have been identified using Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. All 49 sub-Saharan African countries, the four regional power pools and sub-Saharan Africa as a whole have been each combined as search items with all possible declinations and composite word forms stemming from “energy”, “electricity”, “power”, “multi-criteria”, “multi-objective” and “technology selection.” Where otherwise impractical, the search was limited to possibly relevant scientific fields such as “Energy”, “Engineering”, “Social Science”, “Environmental Science”, “Economics” and “Agricultural Science”, applying intentionally broad filters and conducting all searches twice with Scopus and Web of Science to limit overlooking relevant papers. Several Google Scholar searches and checking reference lists in relevant papers complemented the systematic literature search approach. Applying this approach led to the identification of 306 papers ranging from 1977 to 2016 that are reviewed in detail in section 3 and section 4.
2.3Classification of electricity planning approaches
While there is a considerable literature on reviews of energy planning that already exists [9-13, 15-20, 22], no objective classification method for energy (or electricity) planning approaches has been used consistently. Some reviewers partition the literature based on methodological concepts rather than tangible approach characteristics, thus leading to ambiguous classifications [9-13, 15, 16, 18, 20]. The process-oriented framework by Mirakyan and De Guio (2013) is useful as it shows the depth of energy planning, yet it suffers from feedback loops which render mutually exclusive classifications difficult [13]. Others focus solely on a specific method or part of energy planning [10, 11, 15, 20], being unable to categorise the wider relevant literature arising from the comparably broad definition used in this paper (see section 2.1).
This paper classifies the reviewed literature by expanding the energy planning approach classification scheme presented by Zhou et al. (2006) [18] to encompass broader integrated energy planning approaches. It uses aspects of the planning process framework presented by Polatidis and Haralambopoulos (2008) [21]. Zhou et al. (2006) present a tree-based classification system with number of decision criteria as its first node, dividing between single and multiple objective decisions, before it trickles down into different methodological approaches. Avoiding the pitfall of relying on methods for literature classification described above, this paper instead uses three objective categories to classify electricity planning approach. As a first category, it introduces the value chain depth a given article has addressed. For the purpose of this paper, the planning exercise spans the 5 stages of the electricity value chain mentioned in section 2.1 [11-13, 21]. A depth of 1 implies a given paper has addressed one of the value chain elements, for instance only generation planning, while an analyses of several value chain stages results in a higher depth. The second classification category denotes the amount of decision criteria used in the analysis, taken from Zhou et al. (2006). As mentioned in section 2.1 this paper distinguishes 5 high-level criteria, namely economic, technological, environmental, social and political criteria (see also [12, 23]). A given paper is defined to feature a given criterion if it includes a relevant respective qualitative or quantitative analysis, which could potentially affect a later decision for an alternative. The third literature classification category is the number of different decision alternatives considered in a given paper (see [21]). Some researchers choose to evaluate a set amount of alternatives, while optimisation techniques allow to find a solution without predefining specific alternatives, possibly the most important merit of such an approach. The number of algorithmically analysed alternatives thus approaches infinity for purely continuous optimisation, or is a very large finite number for discrete optimisation. This is true even if only one kind of electricity producing technology is addressed, for example where to install how many solar PV cells in a given country.