Alternative energy supply system to a rural village in Ethiopia

Background: Most households in rural developing countries do not have access to modern energy supply. Household level biogas energy was considered as an option but failed due to lack of sufficient resources for its installation and operation. A community energy system can be an option, but most studies focused on off-grid electricity. This energy system cannot be a realistic option particularly for cooking demand. An efficient and suitable system matching local resources and demand expectation needs to be developed which this study focuses on assessing. Biogas and solar energy technologies are viable to establish such kind of a system since they can be converted to different forms of energy. Therefore, this study aims to determine efficient biogas and solar energy production and utilization options for small scale village energy application in rural Ethiopia. Methods: The efficiencies of the production and utilization options are determined based on the system configurations involving resource, conversion, and utilization combination models. We used local resources, data, and relevant literature information for the system analysis. Results: The analysis shows that most energy is needed in the form of heat for cooking and a smaller part in the form of electricity (about 10%). The community waste stream converted to biogas will be enough for cooking, but not enough biogas is left to produce enough electricity. Co-digesting altogether provides biogas that can meet only about 75% of the electricity demand. Concentrated solar cookers can be an alternative for cooking in areas where installation of biogas is not possible. About 2-m size solar concentrator is sufficient to meet each household’s cooking energy demand. The lighting and appliance energy demand can be met with photovoltaic (PV) energy produced with reasonably sized panels. However, the use of electrical energy for cooking produced with PV cannot be an economic option with the available technologies. Conclusions: The community energy system involving anaerobic co-digestion (biogas) and/or solar energy technologies is viable to meet the demand when efficient production and conversion is made based on specific local resource supply and demand. Background Modern energy is vital to any economic development and societal well-being. Societies in rural developing countries are deprived of modern energy access at least for basic cooking, lighting, and powering of low voltage appliances. Presently, these services are met with the traditional use of biomass energy, kerosene, and dry cell batteries [1, 2]. The traditional use of biomass energy is inefficient and unclean and involves huge negative socioeconomic and environmental consequences. In principle, biomass (converted to biogas) and solar energy sources are viable to meet the demand since they can be converted into different energy forms. Biogas can be directly combusted to provide heat for cooking and can be converted into electricity for different services. Similarly, solar energy can be converted into electricity within a photovoltaic cell (PVC) and concentrated to provide heat for cooking (concentrated solar cooker (CSC)) and electricity with a concentrated solar power (CSP) system. Since recent decades, family size biogas digesters and PV as solar home systems (SHSs) have been considered in most energy policies and promoted to solve rural energy problems. China and India are among developing * Correspondence: [email protected] Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Technology, Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Energy, Sustainability and Society © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Tucho and Nonhebel Energy, Sustainability and Society (2017) 7:33 DOI 10.1186/s13705-017-0136-x