Fitting Renewable Energy Systems to Community Development Needs: The Case of Sioma High School's (Zambia) Microgrid

This research initially focused on the following research question: how well does a Technological Fit approach increase the social acceptance of an electrification system? While an electrification system’s lifetime serves as the best measure of a system’s socio-technical sustainability, social acceptance in the immediate post-commission phase serves both as a foundation and early indication of an electrification system’s success or failure (Jones & Thompson, 1996). Thus, this work focused on two aspects of social acceptance: identifying the ways in which stakeholders were likely to maintain the system (based on energy usage trends and maintenance experience) and identifying the way stakeholders would keep utilization within the guidelines and capacity of the system. As both the installation of and research on the Sioma High School Microgrid project developed, the gaps between the information obtained during efforts to achieve the technological fit of the system to the school community and actual behavior of users and system operators became obvious. In response to the weaknesses of an exclusive technology fit approach, a second phase of socially-oriented design work that I call “Community Feedback” was undertaken by system designers and school leaders. Unable to perfectly predict how well a community will interact with a system, community feedback requires system promoters to work with a community to understand, maintain, and manage a system in preparation for transitioning the system to the community for ongoing maintenance. Thus a second question emerged: how can a renewable energy systems management and technical controls be designed to take into account new information about emerging demands on the power grid and changes in local interests in the system? During and after the installation, a feedback process in which the installers make technical alternations and work with the community to develop proper management programs to optimize system performance will augment the initial Technology Fit approach and improve chances for both short and long term success.