Resilient Electricity Networks for a productive Grid Architecture (RENGA)

电力供应被广泛认为是人类发展的关键推动因素之一。向发展中国家的低收入地区提供电力涉及巨大的技术、地缘政治和社会经济挑战。近年来，自主供电系统（AESS）在取代煤油灯和蜡烛作为基本照明来源方面发挥了作用。然而，它们的功率等级太低，甚至不能为小型机械提供动力，这使得它们对人们生产商品的方式影响很小。根据完善的电力系统规划范例，使电力供应适合于更高效的应用的方法是建立新的输电走廊，将电力从大型发电厂输送到偏远地区，在那里通过区域配电网进行分配。虽然这种方法在二十世纪中期证明是成功的，但它往往会产生高昂的费用，使这些项目在发展中国家不可行。旧模式的一个主要问题是，它错过了利用分布式能源（即小规模发电、能源储存等）的机会，从而降低成本，实现更好的能源供应。这个项目的目的是通过研究一种新的方法来解决这个问题，在这种方法中，电网将从小规模AESS的本地互连开始。这一雄心勃勃的目标需要研究一种合适的技术解决方案，将多个AESS连接在一起，开发适合优化相互连接的AESS网络的运营和规划的新工具，并为农村电气化应用量身定制需求和发电模型。这项工作将在卢旺达大学的合作下以卢旺达作为主要研究案例，该大学将为模型的推导提供支持，并将研究和描述最有趣的生产性电力用途，以满足卢旺达农村的具体需要。这项工作还将与BBOXX和Meshpower合作进行，这两家英国公司由伦敦帝国理工学院的校友创办，在包括卢旺达在内的世界几个国家商业化AESS。

Electricity access is widely acknowledged as one of the key enablers of human development. Bringing electricity to low income areas in the developing world involves great technical, geopolitical and socioeconomic challenges. In recent years, autonomous electricity supply systems (AESS) have found a role in replacing kerosene lamps and candles as sources for basic lighting. However, their power rating was too low to power even small machinery, which made them have very little impact on the way people produce goods. According to the well-established power systems planning paradigm, the way to enable electricity access suitable for more productive applications is to build new transmission corridors to ship power from large power plants to isolated areas where it will be distributed using regional distribution networks. While this approach proved successful in the mid twentieth century, it often incurs prohibitive costs that make such projects infeasible in developing countries. One of the main issues of the old paradigm is that it misses the opportunity to use distributed energy resources (ie small scale generation, energy storage, etc) available today to drive the costs down and achieve better energy supply. The aim of this project is to bring some light over this matter by investigating a new approach where the electrical network would start from the local interconnection of small scale AESS. This ambitious goal will require the investigation of a suitable technological solution to link multiple AESS together, the development of new tools that are suitable to optimise the operation and planning of a network of interconnected AESS with models of demand and generation tailored for rural electrification applications. The work will use Rwanda as the main study case with the cooperation of the University of Rwanda, that will provide support for the derivation of models and will study and characterise the most interesting productive uses of electricity to meet the specific needs in rural Rwanda. The work will also be carried in collaboration with BBOXX and Meshpower, two British companies started by alumni of Imperial College London that commercialise AESS in several countries around the world including Rwanda.