A Geospatial Assessment of Small-Scale Hydropower Potential in Sub-Saharan Africa!
The results are presented on a country and power pool basis
Sub-Saharan Africa has been at the epicenter of an ongoing global dialogue around the issue of energy poverty. More than half of the world’s population without access to modern energy services lives there. It also happens to be a sub-continent with plentiful renewable energy resource potential. Hydropower is one of them, and to a large extent it remains untapped.
A recent study, led by KTH-dESA researcher
Alexandros Korkovelos
, focused on the technical assessment of small-scale hydropower (0.01–10 MW) in Sub-Saharan Africa. The underlying methodology was based on open source geospatial datasets, whose combination allowed a consistent evaluation of 712,615 km of river network spanning over 44 countries. Environmental, topological, and social constraints were included in the form of constraints in the optimization algorithm. The results are presented on a country and power pool basis.
Find the full report
here
and explore datasets based on the methodology
here
!