Sustainable Microgrid Development for Productive Use
Date
2020-04-24
Advisors
Phillips, Jonathan
Fetter, T. Rob
Repository Usage Stats
197
views
views
142
downloads
downloads
Abstract
Productive use of electricity - the use of electricity for income generating purposes
- is a key driver of long-term electrification and economic growth in the developing
world, and, in particular, Sub-Saharan Africa where hundreds of millions of individuals
are predicted to lack electricity for years to come. Productive use also promises
to bolster the financial viability of microgrid developers who seek to provide electricity
to those who would otherwise lack electricity over the coming years.
The client of this project, Zambia-based microgrid developer Standard Microgrid, is
seeking to understand if productive use of electricity may offer a viable option for
increasing their revenue. This project aims to provide a baseline understanding of
the current state of productive use on its microgrids by comparing productive use
customers to consumptive use customers - customers who do not use the electricity
for productive uses. In particular, the project answers two key questions:
1. Do productive use customers pay more per unit of electricity consumed?
2. Do productive use customers pay more frequently?
Answering these questions provides the client with helpful information regarding
whether productive use customers perform better than other customers and also informs
areas where they can improve their strategy to better maximize the revenue from these
customers.
This project leverages datasets provided by the client to answer the key research
questions. These datasets include information regarding their customers and their
appliance subscriptions, sales made to these customers, and the customers’ electricity
use. In order to answer the research question, the customers were categorized as productive
use or consumptive use customers based on assumptions driven by the types of appliances
each customer was subscribed to. An additional category, productive potential, was
added to account for errors in this methodology. Several confounding factors like
the location and age of the microgrid were also included in the analysis. Several
multiple linear regression models were created and analyzed to answer the central
research questions.
The models found that productive use customers do not pay a significantly different
amount for every unit of electricity they consume but they do appear to pay more regularly.
Productive use customers pay more for a day of energy, however, since they consume
much more energy per day than consumptive customers, the rate they pay per unit of
electricity is not significantly different. Notably, though, productive use customers
purchase more days of electricity with every transaction. This finding in addition
to the fact that productive use customers consume much more electricity shows that
productive use customers offer more reliability as customers.
Based on the promising findings showing some indication that productive use customers
may perform better than other customers, the following recommendations were made to
the client:
1. Consider raising rates for productive use customers as they could potentially be
able to pay more as they also derive value from the electricity use.
2. Pilot a survey to further analyze current productive use customers and also identify
new productive use customers as well as new productive use applications.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20511Citation
Kara, Njeri; Lins, Edward; & Valaik, Connor (2020). Sustainable Microgrid Development for Productive Use. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20511.Collections
More Info
Show full item record
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Rights for Collection: Nicholas School of the Environment
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info