Abstract
Declining solar and battery costs and increased operational efficiency have helped
expand community-scale mini-grids, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia,
where they now meet the power needs of over 47 million people. However, mini-grid
system economics must continue to improve to be a reliable power solution for a significant
share of the nearly 800 million people still lacking access. For rural, low-income
communities with generally small power loads and significant demand variations, it
can be challenging to align supply and demand while maintaining affordable rates and
recovering investment costs. Time-of-use (ToU) tariffs—a rate structure where the
tariff varies by the time of day that electricity is consumed—could represent one
piece of the solution. This policy brief develops a model to estimate the effects
of a ToU tariff on average costs and revenues using data from Energicity, a solar
mini-grid operator in Sierra Leone.
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