Exploring implication of renewable energy transition on the cost of electricity and green house gases emisssion in East African coutries

Abstract

The increasing demand of energy coupled with continuous reliance on non-renewable energy resources as least-cost power generation option contributes highly on climate change. The decision making to having access to a cost-effective and environmentally friendly source of energy relies increasingly on an economic and environmental assessment to inform evidence-based policy set-up for renewable energy (RE). The previous studies fail to capture the decrease in RE capital cost due to learning curves; country specific load profile and capacity build out of potential of renewable energy sources. The aim of this research is to explore the implication of RE transition on cost of electricity generation and greenhouse gas emission in East African Countries. The study applied a scenario capacity expansion model (System Planning Test) to investigate implication of changing penetration level of RE from the reference least cost solution in existing national and regional policy documents on the overall costs of building and operating an electricity system and the derived carbon dioxide emission level. The results showed that the relationship between RE and the electricity system cost is non-linear. Thus implying that small changes in the level of renewable penetration relative to least cost solution result to small changes in the system costs (changing level by ± 10% leads to less than 2% changes in the system costs). Contrary, large deviation leads to large changes in the system costs (± 25% leads to over 15% changes in the system costs).The higher levels of RE lead to 90% reduction of carbon dioxide levels relative to least cost solution but with higher overall system costs. While lower levels of RE leads to higher carbon dioxide emission levels at lower system costs. Thus evaluating the tradeoff between emission saving and system cost, shows that cost of avoiding emissions is incremental to RE deployment and declines as RE is curtailed. Based on the findings, initiatives to promote RE growth in order to meet the Sustainable Development Goals have been proposed. The study also proposed the future study to incorporate the aspect of electricity trade and storage implication