Prioritization of isolated communities for the development of renewable-energy projects in wide geographical areas

Abstract

This work aims at proposing a user-oriented tool for the ranked selection of isolated communities when implementing rural electrification projects based on renewable energies. The tool takes openly-available data to evaluate a large amount of communities and focuses at maximizing the local population benefits. The tool considers two steps. First, we evaluate the energy potential of different resources and establish a metric to compare them. Second, we compare several factors, such as demographic, socioeconomic, social (native origin), productivity and energy potential, perform a correlation analysis to keep only those that are significant for defining a priority, and propose a weighted index. We test the method in the Los Rios Region in Chile, where 98 communities were considered. The method can be extendable to other geographical areas following both steps and helps decision makers, such as local governments or entrepreneurs, to decide where to implement electrification projects based on renewable energy.