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2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Research Design

Author : Hisham Zerriffi

Published in: Rural Electrification

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

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Abstract

The history of distributed rural electrification efforts makes it possible to develop a structured study in order to understand the factors important for both success and failure. In order to do so, it is necessary to be specific regarding the characteristics of the distributed electrification model believed to be important in determining outcomes, the outcomes to be measured and the other factors that can be influential. This chapter outlines the methods used in this study, the hypotheses developed to explain outcomes, and how the particular case studies were chosen.

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previous chapter Rethinking Rural Electrification

next chapter Distributed Rural Electrification in Brazil

For an excellent review of methods for social science research and the power of case study approaches see King et al. (1994).

The relationship between energy and welfare is the subject of other ongoing projects. For a review of the welfare impacts of electrification see Ramani and Heijndermans (2003), Pachauri and Spreng (2004), Cabraal et al. (2005), and Elias and Victor (2005).

It should be noted that in some cases, supply may actually exceed community demand, at least in the short term. This could happen if a generating unit is sized too large due to a miscalculation of the populations’ willingness or ability to pay or if the unit is sized to meet some productive application during certain hours of the day and then is oversized for the load of the local population when used for community and residential purposes.

Five years is chosen because this is slightly longer than the replacement time for a number of components on some of the key technologies (e.g. batteries for solar home systems) and it is reasonably expected that most technologies would have to undergo some sort of repair or parts replacement. The Very Low score is included with a 2 year cutoff to account for the fact that historically, some projects have had very fast failure rates (failing even before the expected lifetime of the shortest-lived replaceable component).

Through preferential policies and a different business model, the coops were able to supply electricity in areas that traditional utilities considered unprofitable. In general, coops in the United States own little generation themselves and are wholesale customers of the larger investor-owned utilities.

This will be true as long as the tariffs can exceed the operating costs of the unit, which will depend upon the customers’ willingness and ability to pay.

High costs could also act to limit consumption by some customers rather than completely eliminate access. This is reflected in the cash PV markets where PV cell sizes are often very small and users buy additional modules as their incomes allow.

It is possible to have a population that is remote from major urban centers and centralized power grids but is, at the same time, relatively closely spaced.

This study looks at both “regulatory governance” and “regulatory substance” in determining whether the regulatory system is favorable, neutral or unfavorable towards distributed electrification models (Reiche et al. 2006).

It is important to recall that this study is of the performance of business models for distributed rural electrification. Therefore, limiting the universe of cases to those countries that have experience with distributed rural electrification does not raise concerns regarding case selection bias or of selecting cases based on values of the dependent variable. If, instead, this was a study of the presence of distributed rural electrification, then this would obviously be a concern.

This is the reason that there are no African countries included among the final list of countries. While there have been some successes (e.g. PV in Kenya), generally speaking the experience has been much more limited and does not provide the basis for making conclusions. However, some of the conclusions of this study could be applied to future efforts in Africa.

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Title: Research Design
Author: Hisham Zerriffi
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Book: Rural Electrification
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9593-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-90-481-9594-7

Copyright Year: 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9594-7_2