A team of researchers was recently awarded a seed grant from the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) to host an energy work shop in Ghana.
January 4, 2019 by Destenie Nock
In Fall of 2019 the SEN-Africa (Sustainable Electricity-access Network for Africa) team (http://sen-africa.org/) will head to Ghana to host a stakeholder energy workshop, funded under a seed grant from the WUN. The focus of this workshop will be to gather stakeholders from various parts of the energy sector (i.e. energy ministers, utilities companies, local leaders, etc), to discuss opportunities and challenges towards reaching universal energy access.
Currently the SEN-Africa team is working on an approach based on maximizing benefits from energy access subject to realistic resource constraints, such as limited gas supply, and solar energy constraints. This approach will bring equity to the forefront, incorporating it, and other criteria, into a stakeholder utility model in a way that reflects community preferences. By grounding the research in the community, the team assures that the criteria used in models and decision frameworks is relevant to those affected by decisions. This inclusive approach will increase the likelihood of widespread implementation of renewable energy. The team is also developing a mathematical model which incorporates the full range of technological alternatives that make sense in the Ghanaian business and ecological environments.
By incorporating equity in to the power system planning model the work of the SEN-Africa team will directly address the "accounting for equity" issue, which I mentioned in previous posts (https://tinyurl.com/yaso39sr and https://tinyurl.com/ybtx8jff). By incorporating the equity issue in the electricity planning framework we can have a better idea about how to create a socially sustainable power system. Looking forward to sharing more of the work from the SEA-Africa Team in the coming months.
Note: The SEN-Africa Team is made up of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Ghana, University of Nairobi, University of Cape Town, and Argonne National Lab. For more information about the team please visit http://sen-africa.org/