On Sustainable Rural Electrification in Africa: Design of a Self-Sufficient Micro Off-Grid System

Abstract

Less than 50% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has electricity access. Considering rural areas in SSA, electricity is available only to 16% of the local people. In addition, there are over three and half billion people without access to the Internet globally. The overall percentage of Internet connectivity in SSA is approximately 22%. Therefore, rural electrification and digitalization in developing countries have become a hot topic. To tackle both of them, there is a need to design a smart off-grid concept, which provides electricity, and information and communication technologies (ICT) to provide Internet access and digital services that are run on the system. The application of ICT in the energy sector brings new opportunities and applications to power system control, protection, and energy management. Further, it expands the realm of opportunities for data processing, collection, and exchange. The availability of Big Data concepts enables the integration of machine learning (ML) to the energy sector. There is a wide variety of use cases of ML algorithms applied for different tasks in the field of energy systems, such as prediction, classification, and feature extraction. ML algorithms can also be applied to protection, control, and energy management tasks. For the sake of interoperability and compatibility, ICT within the power sector has to be standardized. IEC-61850 is a communication standard developed for electricity substation automation and expanded to smart grid applications. In the proposed concept, it is used as a feasible alternative to the existing standards used for smart grids. Introduction of ICT to an off-grid system raises cybersecurity challenges that have to be taken into account in the design.

The novelty of the doctoral dissertation is in the concept that provides customers with sustainable electricity, connectivity, and digital services in an affordable manner. The scalability of the system brings flexibility to electrification. The cost optimization of the system is achieved with the introduction of advanced energy management and fault detection control systems. The communication network and cybersecurity tests with real hardware bring a practical dimension to the work.