Balancing Cost and Demand in Electricity Access Projects: Case Studies in Ecuador, Mexico and Peru

Rural areas in developing countries have the highest concentrations of unelectrified communities. There is a clear link between electricity consumption and the Human Development Index, as highlighted by the 7th Development Goal of the United Nations. Estimating the energy needs of the previously nonelectrified population is imprecise when designing rural electrification projects. Indeed, daily energy demand and peak power assessments are complex, since these values must be valid over the project’s lifetime, while tight budgets do not allow for the systems to be oversized. In order to assist project promoters, this study proposes a fuzzy mixed integer linear programming model (FMILP) for the design of wind–PV rural electrification systems including uncertainty in the demand requirements. Two different FMILP approaches were developed that maximized the minimum or the average satisfaction of the users. Next, the FMILP approaches were applied to six Latin American communities from three countries. Compared with the deterministic MILP (where the energy and peak power needs are considered as specific values), the FMILP results achieved a better balance between the project cost and the users’ satisfaction regarding the energy and peak power supplied. Regarding the two approaches, maximizing the users’ minimum satisfaction obtained globally better solutions.