Abstract
Energy plays an important role in social and economic development, however close to 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. Improved access and transitions to cleaner and more modern forms of energy are needed to improve the socio-economic conditions of the poor.
The recent reductions in the costs of solar electricity technology have led to an increased use of off-grid solar PV technologies for electricity generation in Sub-Saharan African regions without grid access. However, there has been little research regarding the impact on households unable to transition to high-wattage energy services due to the absence of the grid. This research examines the challenges facing rural energy transitions and whether the households feel they are energy ‘locked-in’. A mixed methods approach, which employed in-depth semi-structured interviews with industry experts and questionnaire-based household energy surveys with rural SHS users were performed. A mixture of descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, along with thematic analysis, were used to analyse the data collected. The results indicated that (i) a significant number of rural households own appliances that could not be powered by their SHS, and (ii) these households were willing to spend large sums to connect to highe capacity electricity providers, if available. This suggested that a significant number of rural SHS-using households felt they were locked into a low energy future. The use of energy efficient, DC-powered plug-and-play appliances, along with swarm electrification technology, was recommended to move these households up to higher tiers of electricity access.
Also, energy access measurement frameworks are important tools for tracking the progress of energy access interventions, and the Multi-Tier Framework (MTF), developed by the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) is widely used for this purpose. However, the MTF uses fixed thresholds to define its attributes, and this rigidity suggested it may lack the flexibility required to capture the contextual nuances of household energy access measurements. The data from the household energy surveys was used to propose refinements to the current metrics used in the MTF to make it more contextually relevant to rural Nigerian households. These refinements can help to improve intervention policies for energy access in rural Nigeria.