Development Goal 7 and the UN Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) initiative to provide universal access to electricity by 2030. According to the IEA, the number of people without access to electricity stands at 770 million, a figure which has declined steadily since 2013 (IEA 2019). Of this, approximately 580 million people live in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the continent’s inhabitants.
However, the realisation of universal access is unlikely to be met if current trends are followed and has been further undermined by the Covid-19 pandemic (IEA 2020). Moreover, many households that are counted as having an electricity connection suffer from an unreliable and poorly functioning supply. While the World Bank’s multi-tier framework has gone some way to account for this (World Bank 2015), conventional measurements still dominate global statistics on electricity access (Ulsrud 2020). It is well-acknowledged that tackling the energy access gap requires nothing short of a socio-technological transformation in which decentralised and off-grid renewable electricity generation, including mini grids, will play a key role (Peters et al 2019, Odarno et al 2017).
According to the IEA, the construction of 100,000–200,000 mini grids could serve an estimated 140 million rural Africans by 2040, while an additional 80 million people could be served by off-grid systems (IEA 2019). These new systems are anticipated to displace or at least compete with the centralised electricity system of generation, transmission and distribution, which is dependent for the most part on conventional thermal and large hydro-electric sources (Ockwell and Byrne 2016).
