This work falls under the “Congo Epela Project” in which researchers are working with partner
organisations to support electricity access planning in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Alongside
this building energy system modelling, they are also improving the Congo Epela online visualisation
platform, updating data and producing case studies on decentralised power supply options at local
level. The project is the third phase of an ongoing project in which the RLI has already been involved
since November 2020. The RLI is part of a project consortium that works with numerous local actors
including national and local government, civil society representatives and the private sector. The project
is funded by a grant from the American Jewish World Service "11th Hour Project" fund. The aim of this
program is to raise awareness about climate change, fair resource management and use, and the
promotion of modern, sustainable renewable energy sources.
In this report, case studies on electrification with mini-grids and detailed site mapping have been
conducted. The RLI team has prepared four case studies on electrification with mini-grids for several
locations in the DRC that reside in ETDs with mining royalties that could be directed to electrification
projects. The study results help to make information from the visualisation platform and its
connections with real electrification measures more understandable. As part of the studies, we have,
for example, identified and prioritised locations, prepared detailed GIS site maps of buildings and
economic activities, and techno-economic optimisation of mini-grid configurations based on
renewable energy potentials and estimated demand profiles, and incorporated on-site data collection
activities for several villages that were possible to be visited by project partners. They take into account
combinations of energy supply options such as solar PV, battery storage, diesel backup systems, and
hybrid systems combining several of these options together.
In parallel, we made improvements to the previous cluster-based national population and demand
models used in the Congo Epela platform electrification planning platform. This included current and
future population data updates with custom calibration possible for each of the 26 DRC provinces with
customizable population totals. Demand updates were also made to the heavy industry sector
including more detailed mining demand estimations in the Katanga region using new projections from
related research, and heavy industrial demands now also allocated to several additional locations.
This report summarizes and explains the used methodology and the results of our work. It starts with
an introduction, then the second section describes the study’s approach and methodology, then results
are presented in the third section, and finally, the report ends with discussions and conclusions.
Model input and output files including techno-economic assumptions, GIS mapping data, hourly solar
generation profiles, as well as full model output breakdowns and hourly time series files, scripts and
code, and spreadsheet customization tools are provided separately to the report.
