M-LED: a Multi-sectoral Latent Electricity Demand Assessment Platform for Energy Access Planning and Nexus Implications Evaluation

Abstract:

Globally about 800 million people live without electricity at home. Ending energy poverty is a key development priority because energy plays an enabling role for human wellbeing and economic activities. Planning electricity access infrastructure and allocating resources efficiently requires a careful assessment of the diverse energy needs across space, time, and sectors. However, because of data scarcity, most country or regional-scale electrification planning studies have been based on top-down electricity demand targets. Yet, poorly representing the heterogeneity in the electricity demand can lead to inappropriate energy planning, inaccurate energy system sizing, and misleading cost assessments. Here we introduce M-LED, Multi-sectoral Latent Electricity Demand, a geospatial data processing platform to estimate electricity demand in communities that live in energy poverty. The key novelties of the platform are the multi-sectoral, bottom-up, time-explicit demand evaluation and the assessment of water-energy-agriculture-development interlinkages. The platform allows estimating irrigation requirements and the related pumping energy and crop processing energy requirements, and linking these to electrification planning. M-LED also enables estimating the local potential revenues to the farmers from increased agricultural productivity, net of pumping and transport costs. We apply the methodology to the country-study of Kenya. Our findings suggest that a bottom-up approach to evaluating energy needs across space, time, and sectors is likely to improve the reliability and accuracy of geospatial electrification models and therefore of electrification planning, shedding light on the crucial role of nexus dynamics in integrated water-energy-land planning to eliminate energy poverty.