Can Time-of-Use Tariffs Increase the Financial Viability of Mini-Grids?
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2022-10-26
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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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McNamara, Marie, Victoria Plutshack, Jonathan Phillips and Nicole Poindexter (2022). Can Time-of-Use Tariffs Increase the Financial Viability of Mini-Grids?. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26572.
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Jonathan Phillips
Jonathan Phillips is the Director of the James E. Rogers Energy Access Project at Duke University, with an appointment at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. His work focuses on policy, regulatory, and economic issues related to rural electrification, grid de-carbonization, off-grid energy systems, and energy for productivity.
Phillips was the senior advisor to the president and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation during the Obama Administration, helping scale-up the agency’s climate finance capabilities and lead the implementation of strategic initiatives, including the agency’s $2.1 billion Power Africa portfolio.
Before that, Phillips led private sector engagement and programming with Power Africa at USAID, helping ramp-up the $300 million presidential initiative into one of the largest public-private development partnerships in the world.
From 2007-2014, he held a variety of roles in the U.S. Congress, most recently serving as the senior policy advisor to Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. He supported many notable legislative efforts, including serving as one of the lead authors of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009. He also served on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming as well as the House Natural Resources Committee.
Phillips was a business and economic development volunteer with the Peace Corps in Mongolia. He received a bachelor’s degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.
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