scope:

Scope and overview

Rural electrification is one of the predominant policy actions designed to increase the well being of rural populations together with improved healthcare, education, personal advancement and economical development. Rural electrification can be completed through connection to a national or regional electrification grid. This document applies to cases where the grid is too far away (too costly) or the individual demand centres are too small to make grid access economic, where autonomous power systems may be used to supply these services.

This series of documents intends to provide to different players involved in rural electrification projects (such as project developers, project implementers, installers, etc.) documents for the setting up of renewable energy and hybrid systems with AC voltage below 500 V, DC voltage below 50 V and power below 50 kVA.

These documents are recommendations:

a) to choose the right system for the right place,

b) to design the system,

c) to operate and maintain the system.

These documents are focused only on rural electrification concentrating on but not specific to developing countries. They must not be considered as all inclusive to rural electrification. The documents try to promote the use of renewable energies in rural electrification; they do not deal with clean mechanisms development at this time (CO² emission, carbon credit, etc.) Further developments in this field could be introduced in future steps.

This consistent set of documents is best considered as a whole with different parts corresponding to items for safety, sustainability of systems and at the lowest life cycle cost as possible. One of the main objectives is to provide the minimum sufficient requirements, relevant to the field of application that is: small renewable energy and hybrid off-grid systems.