The Value of Grid-Scale Variable Renewable Energy Generation in Sub-Saharan Africa

This report was produced for the Green Growth Diagnostics for Africa project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.Securing a sufficient supply of reliable and affordable electricity is a huge challenge for countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries in the region are experiencing rapid increases in the size of their populations, and even more rapid growth in their economies. As a result, the region experienced a 45 per cent increase in annual energy consumption between the years 2000-2014, with the growth in some countries much higher. This article surveys the most relevant research, policies and sources of data relevant to generation adequacy assessment in two example SSA countries: Kenya and Ghana. It also includes an exploratory analysis of the temporal relationships between the hydro resource, wind resource and power demand in Kenya, with an emphasis on assessing the impact of limited data availability

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Assessing the Potential Impact of Grid-Scale Variable Renewable Energy on the Reliability of Electricity Supply in Kenya

Securing a sufficient supply of reliable and affordable electricity is a major challenge for countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), due to low current access levels, and rapid population and economic growth. This article will review application and technical modelling issues associated with generation adequacy assessment (i.e. assessing the risk of available generation being less than demand) in the context of SSA countries with significant capacities of renewable energy, with Kenya as the main case study. One major challenge in performing such studies in SSA is often availability of the necessary data on renewable resource and demand – the article will further demonstrate how useful information may be gained on the extent to which wind and hydro energy resources complement each other in Kenya, in the context of limited data availability

Assessing the Contribution of Nightly Rechargeable Grid-Scale Storage to Generation Capacity Adequacy

This paper is concerned with assessing the contribution of grid-scale storage to generation capacity adequacy. Results are obtained for a utility-scale exemplar involving the Great Britain power system. All stores are assumed, for the purpose of capacity adequacy assessment, to be centrally controlled by the system operator, with the objective of minimising the Expected Energy Not Served over the peak demand season. The investigation is limited to stores that are sufficiently small such that discharge on one day does not restrict their ability to support adequacy on subsequent days. We argue that for such stores, the central control assumption does not imply loss of generality for the results. Since it may be the case that stores must take power export decisions without the benefit of complete information about the state of the system, a methodology is presented for calculating bounds on the value of such information for supporting generation adequacy. A greedy strategy is proven to be optimal for the case where decisions can be made immediately after a generation shortfall event has occurred, regardless of the decision maker’s risk aversion. The adequacy contribution of multiple stores is examined, and algorithms for coordinating their responses are presented