For decades, solar home systems and minigrids have made great progress providing small quantities of electricity for lighting, communications, and other small electric loads. Meanwhile, the most pressing energy poverty issue has been the health and deforestation impact of cooking with biomass, particularly indoors. Over 2 billion people still cook with biomass even if they have access to electricity that may not be reliable or otherwise sufficient for cooking. With the recent cost reductions for PV and technical improvements for batteries, we are now able to design solar + storage systems that are affordable to use for cooking.
This presentation will describe how the higher power requirement of cooking appliances changes the design of solar + storage systems. This has significant implications for the selection of battery and control technologies. Examples of several diverse designs will be provided with economic results for minigrids, both with and without backup generation and for individual systems, sometime called pico-grids or solar home systems.
Pilot projects have been conducted in Haiti, Malawi, and India using different innovative design and control approaches. Encouraging initial results from these pilot projects will be presented along with plans for replication and scale-up.