The Global Electrification Platform 3.0: More data for more accurate, least-cost electricity access plans

It is a well-known fact: with access to electricity comes better health, education, and connectivity, as well as higher productivity and incomes.  Unfortunately, in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, as many as 571 million people still lack access to electricity. To help close this gap, the World Bank Group committed to providing electricity access to 250 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 and announced a new partnership at the 2024 Annual Meetings with the African Development Bank, bringing this commitment to 300 million people.

Achieving these ambitious electrification goals requires reliable data and robust planning tools to understand:

• The amount of electricity needed

• The pathways to bring that electricity

• The technology options and their costs, and

• The timeline and geographic location of the rollout 

This information is often difficult to access for countries with limited resources who are struggling to bring universal access to electricity to their people. World Bank projects like Accelerating Sustainable and Clean Energy Access Transformation (ASCENT) and Nigeria Distributed Access Through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES), which aim to make a sizable dent in reducing the electricity access gap, also require accurate data to identify where people still need electricity and the best options to bring it.  

The Global Electrification Platform (GEP), an initiative by the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), aims to standardize and simplify the use of geospatial tools to create least-cost electrification plans. Originally launched in November 2019, it provides a high-level overview of the technology mix - grid, mini-grid and standalone solar - and investment required to achieve universal access by 2030 for each country. 

The GEP is one of the few energy optimization modelling tools that is open source, publicly available, and freely replicable. Using the costs associated with generation, transmission and distribution, it calculates the cost to serve every unelectrified settlement with various technology options - e.g. grid extension, mini grid, or standalone solar - and then identifies the least-cost solution. A set of standardized scenarios is developed for each country, visualized in a user-friendly way on a web-based platform freely available on energydata.info.

Initially, the GEP focused on access at the household level. Version 2.0 of the GEP, launched in September 2021, was upgraded to add estimates for public buildings like schools and clinics as well as businesses, among others, allowing for a more accurate estimation of access needs. In Madagascar, for example, the access requirements estimated for 2030 moved from 1.6 GW to 2.6 GW and the estimated investment requirement from $4.7 billion to $6.5 billion with the inclusion of public buildings.  

Version 2.0 proved useful to energy access and transition practitioners who drew on the various electrification scenarios to inform policy recommendations. Alvin Jose, Program Manager at Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll), for example, commented: “Utilizing the GEP was pivotal in our support to the development of Sierra Leone’s Energy Transition and Investment Plan. The tool's scenario planning capabilities enabled us to evaluate various electrification strategies effectively, providing critical insights for policymakers.”

The latest version of the tool, GEP 3.0, has just been released. It introduces greenhouse gas emissions in the estimation of least-cost pathways to universal electricity access by including a shadow price of carbon in the calculation of each technology solution. GEP 3.0 accounts for emissions associated with additional grid electricity generation and diesel consumption in solar-hybrid mini grids. This updated version can thus help governments who have prepared Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement devise lower-carbon as well as least-cost electrification plans. 

For Sub-Saharan Africa, GEP 3.0 finds that annual emissions by 2030 can be reduced, depending on targeted electricity demand levels, from 69 - 193 million metric tons CO2-equivalent to 16-36 million metric tons CO2-equivalent with an increase in investment of only 9-12%. This shows that significant reductions in the expected additional emissions from expanding electricity access can be achieved at a relatively low cost.

Try the GEP 3.0 at electrifynow.energydata.info. 

RELATED

• Global Electrification Platform

• Energy Data Platform

• ESMAP 
   

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