Integrating energy systems and supply chain optimisation for sustainable development: Decentralised, Energy-Leveraging Transformation of African Development (DELTADev)

Project Information

DELTADev

Grant agreement ID: 895890

DOI

10.3030/895890

Project terminated on 31 January 2022

EC signature date 8 April 2020

Start date 1 May 2021

End date 30 April 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 174 806,40

EU contribution

€ 174 806,40

Coordinated by

RHEINISCH-WESTFAELISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE AACHEN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DELTADev (Integrating energy systems and supply chain optimisation for sustainable development: Decentralised, Energy-Leveraging Transformation of African Development (DELTADev))

Reporting period: 2021-05-01 to 2023-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The problem
Access to modern forms of energy for all is one of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG7), and is a critical and well-known enabler of wider socio-economic development across a variety of other SDGs. Yet in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), 580 million people still lack access to electricity, over 80% of them live in rural areas. The key question is how access to modern forms of energy can be scaled up in remote rural areas in various different countries in SSA while simultaneously delivering on its synergetic potential for most other SDGs.

The significance
Despite extensive efforts, current development levels in low-income rural areas in a variety of different countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) pose a fundamental threat to reaching the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). No world region has a lower GDP per capita than SSA, and 90% of all people in extreme poverty are estimated to live in SSA by 2030. The lack of reliable access to electricity is a key barrier for wider rural development in SSA. Efficient water infrastructure, productive commercial activities, health and education facilities, communication systems and domestic appliances all rely on electricity. Rural labour productivity in SSA is growing at less than half the pace of the global average. Over 80% of all rural jobs are vulnerable. The large rural versus urban electricity access inequality in SSA is a symptom of wider rural versus urban divide which drives high urbanisation rates. It is widely accepted that women bear a disproportionate share of the adverse consequences of a lack of electricity access.

The objectives
The overall objective of this research project was to conceptualise and design off-grid energy-enabled solutions capable of fostering broader sustainable development across multiple SDGs in the context of low-income rural areas in SSA. The project defined three sub-objectives to achieve this main objective, namely (1) developing a modelling framework that places energy systems design within sustainable development as defined by the UN’s SDGs, (2) integrate bottom-up off-grid energy systems design and supply chain optimisation, and (3) design an integrated system which enables sustainable development and provides both affordable and scalable off-grid electricity access in rural SSA.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project was originally planned for 24 months. However, early in the project, the Marie Curie fellow was offered a professorship position, and decided to accept this offer. As a consequence, the project was cut short to 9 months, resulting in a reduced amount of work that was completed in the project. The work achieved in the 9 months centred around (1) project management, (2) research and (3) personal development.

Project management
A career plan and a data management plan were developed. It focused on how to balance publications, teaching and writing research proposals, and creating opportunities for students and collaborators where possible. Quality over quantity is a key principle of the career plan. The data management plan inscribed best practices in terms of open data and the associated FAIR principles as well as protecting personal data.

Research
The fellow teamed up with colleagues from Bilkent University and Carnegie Mellon on a literature review on rural electrification optimisation approaches with a multi-criteria angle. 111 research papers were selected for the reivew and coded according to the mathematical problem category, implemented renewable technologies, solution methodology, context, scale and their SDG relevance for all 17 SDGs.
Furthermore, the fellow developed and published a conceptual framework for integrated, energy-enabled development (see attached figure). The paper draws on the recent literature and on numerous short case examples, mainly from East African contexts.
The fellow started to develop a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model which integrates off-grid energy system and supply chain planning. The model identifies the optimal mix of electricity sales to external customers (USD/kWh), as well as electricity-enabled products and services (USD/kg and USD/hour, respectively) across different agricultural and manufacturing supply chains. First solution approaches have been developed and tested.
The next steps include implementing the mathematical formulation I have developed, solving it for a number of instances of the Ugandan fish value chain example, and ultimately expanding it to explicitly include the impact on different SDGs.

Personal development
The fellow took several formal training courses throughout the 9 months of the Marie Curie fellowship. He enrolled in a free online self-taught course of advanced programming in Python, and also did a course in geospatial modelling. In addition, he took several online courses at the University of Oxford on research soft skills, namely on research integrity, open research principles and data management. The learning experience was greatly enhanced through his active participation in the activities my host institution offered.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The following provides an overview of key project results beyond the state of the art achieved in the project’s 9 months duration:
• Dominant rural electrification optimisation approaches are not be flexible enough to capture the multi-objective SDG nature of rural electrification. There is a marked paucity of electrification tools that consider multiple objectives. However, criteria such as reliability, equity, various environmental impacts, food security and gender equality may create trade-offs with financial objectives. Therefore, there is a clear need for more flexible multi-objective optimization models for integrated rural electrification and development planning.
• There are three key requirements for off-grid energy-enabled rural development: First, off-grid energy systems strategies need a paradigm shift from a mere energy access focus to including explicitly planning for appliance investments, and capturing synergies across SDGs in system-wide models. Second, intelligent operations need to deal with and adapt to context-specific socio-economic realities. Third, implementation at scale requires new business models, cross-sectoral governance and tailored finance to create an enabling environment.
• Off-grid renewable energy has large potential to enable wider sustainable development in SSA contexts. In any given agricultural, manufacturing and industrial value chain, there are multiple stages which benefit individually from electricity, implying a critical multiplication effect of value chain-wide productivity gains of introducing energy access.
• Defining a model that simultaneously optimises an off-grid energy system in a given rural setting and its socio-economic impact on adjacent value chains while being subject to an overall budget constrained can be modelled like the well-known knapsack problem in Operations Research where value chain investments are the projects to be fitted into the knapsack with a matrix of SDG impacts that benefits from modern energy access.
• In terms of impact, in addition to working together on energy access issues with the Kenyan, Laotian and Zambian governments, the fellow was invited to work on the African Development Ban’s African Economic Outlook 2022 report which now includes key findings from the fellowship.

Three key elements of off-grid energy-enabled sustainable development in rural sub-Saharan Africa