Repurposing Electricity Access Research for the Global South: A Tale of Many Disconnects

Abstract

is currently a research fellow on energy policy and sustainable decarbonization at the University of the West of England, where he works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to sustainable energy systems modeling. Specifically, his research spans core electrical engineering, the social sciences, and computer science and focuses on sustainable development, integration of renewable energy systems, smart grid, applied artificial intelligence, energy efficiency, and the design of public policy to help facilitate easy access to electricity and improvement in the resilience of energization systems.Kingsley O. Akpeji received his BSc(Eng) degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 2014 and the MSc(Eng) degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2019. He is currently a teaching and research assistant at the Department of Electrical Engineering, UCT. His passion for a just energy transition and the alleviation of energy poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa reflects in his research on decentralized electricity supply systems, cost of interruptions of electricity supply to commercial and industrial end-users, and sustainable electrification frameworks and policies.

A review of renewable off-grid mini-grids in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Some of this stems from skills and knowledge gaps at the top echelon of government. The weak political will of the government (Monyei and Akpeji, 2020) stems largely from the poor quality of energy advisers in the government. For instance, due to bureaucratic inefficiencies, it takes an average of 17 months to secure regulatory license approvals to operate mini-grids in SSA (Nygaard et al, 2015).…”

Affordable clean energy transition in developing countries: Pathways and technologies

“…Based on the foregoing, we suggest that the Global South should have an agenda for “clean energy transition for development”, i.e., development that encompasses both sustainable human development and economic growth pari-passu . For instance, the prevalent philosophy that drives the majority of off-grid energy access investments in underserved communities is that rural electrification has huge impacts on household labor supply, income, and summary measures of well being ( Babayomi and Dahoro, 2021 ; Monyei and Akpeji, 2020 ). However, randomized controlled tests in India ( Aklin et al., 2017 ) and Kenya ( Lee et al., 2016 , 2020 ) indicate that rural electrification efforts yield insignificant impacts on savings, spending, business creation, time spent working or studying, health outcomes, asset ownership, or student test scores.…”

A comparative analysis of the application of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies in the energy sector: A case study of South Africa, Germany and China

“…By searching for 'renewable+energy+technology', a total of 220 publications, from the past three years, were displayed. At a quick glance, these publications are centred on developments in particular types of renewable energy such as tidal (Sewnarain et al, 2020), solar (Obiora et al, 2020) and wind (Neshat et al, 2021); the creation of hybrid energy systems; access to energy (Monyei and Akpeji, 2020); decentralisation of the energy system in the country and using individual technologies such as solarvoltaics in specific sectors such as agriculture (Obiora et al, 2020). This Scopus search, then, suggests that there is little research on using a range of 4IR technologies across the energy sector in South Africa.…”