Pre-feasibility techno-economic comparison of rural electrification options: exploitation of PV and wind

About 630 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to electricity and 75% of them dwells in rural areas. Providing them with reliable access to electricity means to support rural development and represents an opportunity to reach a huge amount of potential new consumers. To this purpose, technical solutions consist of grid extension, micro-grids or stand-alone systems. Accordingly, a procedure to compare these different configurations is necessary. This paper describes an easy tool to address the early stage of rural electrification planning. The tool provides a quick pre-feasibility comparison between grid extension and targeted off-grid system configurations based on levelized cost of energy and loss of load probability. An application of the tool to a case study in Uganda is also shown.