Gender Considerations in Load Estimation for Rural Electrification

More than 1.5 billion people in the world today do not have access to electricity. In developing countries, most of these people live in rural and remote areas far from the main grid necessitating establishment of off-grid electrical systems such as solar PV microgrids. Establishment of these off-grid systems requires accurate prediction of the load so as to have a sustainable system that can meet the electrical needs of the community fully. An evaluation of the efficacy of the current methods for load estimation has been carried out in this research. Informed by this evaluation, an improved approach is proposed that yields more accurate estimates of the electrical demand for off-grid systems in rural areas. Load characteristics that take account of the influence of gender as well as changes in customer habits on estimated load are investigated using the Markov Chain process. MATLAB software is used to generate the load profiles. The results show that average electricity consumption in a similar village that is already electrified can be used as a sound basis to estimate the consumption in a village without electricity. Moreover it has found that the effect of gender on estimated demand is critical in microgrid design.