How solar home systems temporally stimulate increasing power demands in rural households of Sub-Saharan Africa

Opiyo, NN ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9666-8712, 2020. How solar home systems temporally stimulate increasing power demands in rural households of Sub-Saharan Africa. Energy Transitions. ISSN 2520-1166

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Abstract

Small solar home systems (SHS) have emerged as potential alternatives to grid electrifications, enabling households to make modest investments into their power systems, and to modify those systems according to their changing economic circumstances and power demands. Study shows that introduction to basic electricity access temporally stimulates increasing power demands in rural households, leading to eventual installations of larger systems that can power more electric appliances. Specifically, study shows that once households get access to basic electricity, they get to realise the socio-economic benefits of it and start to desire more appliances, with TV being the most desired appliance, followed by stereo systems, small fridges, and small cooling fans. These desires are realised temporally with increasing household incomes, leading to increasing loads, and thus to the modifications of the originally installed small SHS, to meet those increasing load demands; the desire for luxurious appliances leads to activities that contribute to increased household incomes, and thus to the modifications of the initial SHS. Acquisitions of luxury appliances lead to improvements in quality of life and to improved esteem visibility and social status within the local communities. Potentially, increasing load demands within a given community could lead to extensions of the national utility grid to those areas, as total loads justify such investments. SHS therefore potentially act as grid electrification stimulators, leading to eventual grid electrification of a given community.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Energy Transitions
Creators:	Opiyo, N.N.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	22 June 2020
ISSN:	2520-1166
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s41825-020-00028-9 DOI 1350827 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	07 Aug 2020 08:13
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:13
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/40376

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