Renewable energy: a win-win option for off-grid electrification?

摘要

Do renewable energy technologies (RETs) offer particular opportunities for rural electrification in developing countries? Where are their limits? What about the environmental and climate protection benefits? Can the introduction of RETs trigger positive development processes? Can we expect users to be willing to pay for the introduction of RETs? To answer all these questions, it must first be ascertained whether RETs are cost-effective - both in terms of their direct benefits and in comparison to the costs of other technologies. The fundamental point on which the whole discussion presented in this article is based that the costs of gridconnected electricity supply rise steeply with declining density of supply. Figure 1 illustrates this in curve 1.For sparsely populated areas beyond public grids, this means that alternative solutions based upon RETs can be cost-effective options: at first for isolated local grids not linked to the main grid and then, with further declining density, also for stand-alone installations for individual consumers.