The Asian Development Bank's (ADB) Energy for All Partnership has published a study exploring minigrid effectiveness and barriers to their deployment, which finds that planning clusters, rather than islands, of minigrids greatly improves their collective positive impacts.
July 2013: The Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Energy for All Partnership has published a study exploring the effectiveness of and barriers to mini-grid deployment. The study suggests that planning clusters of mini-grids, rather than islands, would improve their collective, positive impacts.
The study is the result of ongoing ADB work to increase the deployment of mini-grids, partially by investigating the interrelated governance, finance and supply chain barriers that have prevented mini-grid scalability thus far.
The report finds that current assessment tools used to determine energy supply options are incomplete and do not adequately consider cost and service quality in an integrated manner, and tend to aim at scaling down mini-grids to meet low existing demand rather than consider the surplus value an energy surplus would bring with it. Additionally, it finds that “viability of mini-grids is still largely modeled around individual systems in isolation and that this is both unnecessary and distracting” and that “this approach fails to align with the financial imperatives of the very private investors the sector is trying to attract, that is: scale.”
The report further concludes that both public and private finance are needed for replicable, scalable mini-grid strategies; strategies should be tailored to local conditions; and strategies should successfully aggregate customers to take advantage of economies of scale for supply, operation and maintenance and long-term sustainability of the systems. [ADB Press Release] [Publication: The Future of Mini-grids: From Low Cost to High Value: Using Demand Driven Design to Maximise Revenue and Impact]