Data Platform Guidelines and Prototype for Microgrids and Energy Access: Matching Demand Profiles and Socio-Economic Data to Foster Project Development

Energy access is a key need for socio-economic growth. Proven to be a key enabler of development and progress, access to electricity has been prioritized by governments using grid extension actions and off-grid solutions, namely microgrids and home systems technologies, fed by renewable sources. How...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Davide Fioriti, Nicolo Stevanato, Pietro Ducange, Francesco Marcelloni, Emanuela Colombo, Davide Poli
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2023-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10179910/
Description
Summary:Energy access is a key need for socio-economic growth. Proven to be a key enabler of development and progress, access to electricity has been prioritized by governments using grid extension actions and off-grid solutions, namely microgrids and home systems technologies, fed by renewable sources. However, achieving universal access to energy remains a huge challenge given the lack of resources and the large population currently unserved. The lack of adequate socio-economic data at granular scale and of a good understanding of demand uptake led by economic growth is a barrier for efficient energy planning. Access to conjoint demand and socio-economic data at local level is crucial, yet hard to obtain: often such data are unavailable or very difficult to collect, and current data platforms often lack the ability to conjointly store variegated socio-economic and time series data. For these reasons, in this paper, we present a comprehensive methodology that, based on an extensive literature review, draws guidelines for developing data-sharing platforms in energy access, develops a proposed architecture to support the data collection of conjoint socio-economic and time-series data, and proposes a prototype of the final application. The methodology leverages on a novel extensive literature review to identify the major determinants of demand uptake and the corresponding consuming entities: villages, households, and appliances. The proposed architecture is able to capture numeric, categorical, and time series information for all consuming entities, based on state-of-the-art NoSQL databases. Finally, a prototype implementation with a web-based interface developed with Angular and Spring is proposed and discussed.
ISSN:2169-3536