Energy Management in Botswana and Sub Saharan Africa (EMBOSSA)

Completed

Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electricity transmission and distribution)
Other Power and Storage Technologies(Energy storage)
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Environmental, social and economic impacts)

Basic and strategic applied research

SOCIAL SCIENCES (Development Studies)
AREA STUDIES (Middle Eastern and African Studies)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting
Systems Analysis related to energy R&D (Energy modelling)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Other sociological economical and environmental impact of energy)

Dr R Li
Electronic and Electrical Engineering
University of Bath

Standard

EPSRC

01 May 2017

31 March 2018

11 months

£101,207

Energy

South West

Energy : Energy

Dr R Li, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath

Dr S Le Blond, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath
Dr F Li, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath

The nature of current Botswana electricity market can be summarized as: low security and high cost.Low security: the country sees an annual consumption around 3650 GWh, where at least 70% electricity is imported fromSouth Africa. Such high dependency is a cause of great concern to the country's energy security, which is severely affectedafter the South Africa energy crisis in 2008. Coupled with its sole generation plant (Morupule) under refurbishment, thecountry is grappling with load shedding which occurs on a daily basis. Even with a well-documented load-sheddingschedule in place, unexpected load shedding occurs when a locality's energy demand exceeds 50 MW. The industryproductivity and household life quality are thus severely affected.High cost: Botswana has a population just over 2 million, 13.4% of which are living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 perday), 30.6% in poverty and only 2.7% in urban areas. With a national average income less than 500 per household permonth, household has to pay 30-100 electricity bills per month depending on the season, which accounts forapproximately 13% of the total income.Swanbarton, a UK SME, will lead a consortium of University of Bath, University of Botswana Clean Energy ResearchCentre (CERC) and Yuasa Batteries UK in testing the technical and commercial feasibility of a system to support people inSub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia through the project of EMBOSSA. EMBOSSA will address this problem by enablingthem to have a low-cost energy store sufficient to ensure constant lighting and mobile communications. The energy storewill be capable of construction locally, mostly from recycled materials (including second-life car batteries and smartphones)and following designs which we will provide as open source, at prices affordable even for poor households. The energystore will be controlled by battery management software with an optimisation system embedded. It makes charge/dischargedecisions based onhe electricity tariff, demand estimation and load shedding schedule. The idea is to charge the batteryduring off-peak times and discharge during peak-time or load shedding periods to: i) saving energy bills and ii) improvingelectricity security.The key innovations are:i) As the battery system is recycled, it delivers energy security at a price point that's an order of magnitude lower thancomparable European and North American solutions.ii) It uses mobile communications technology to integrate the home system to the electricity supplier's systems so that theenergy management system could optimize multiple objectives including energy cost, energy security and networkcongestion.iii) It improves the optimisation performance by integrating real-time load profile estimation from cloud data, which provides an accurate and dynamic understanding of household demand.This project will test the technical and commercial feasibility of such a system to support people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thesystem will help householders by ensuring that essential services are not interrupted by power cuts, and help them toreduce energy bills. It also helps electricity companies to make fewer power cuts at times of peak load and defer networkinvestment.The recycled hardware will not only stimulate local recycling economy but also give redundant hardware containing toxicmaterials a second life and saved from landfill. A single kerosene lamp will generate a tonne of carbon over five years. EMBOSSA will also reduce air pollution by enabling local poor households by reducing the use of kerosene

15/02/18