Assessing the Techno-economic Feasibility of eCook Deployment on a Hybrid Solar-Diesel Mini-grid in Rural Malawi

Globally, three billion people still use biomass to accommodate their cooking needs, causing negative health and adverse environmental impacts. Recent research promoting the use of electric cooking devices (eCook) to reduce biomass usage includes data capture, market assessments and eCook device prototyping to give a clearer vision on how people cook and associated costs. However, when dealing with analysis of electrification in rural and remote areas, a lack of information remains for the optimum size and costs of off-grid systems to accommodate eCook loads. The techno-economic modelling software HOMER-Pro is used in this paper to simulate four different mini-grid models to evaluate optimal configurations for the Dedza mini-grid in Malawi with increased household (HH) eCook use, targeting economic and environmental objectives. The simulation results reveal that model 4 which represents the optimized photovoltaic (PV)/battery/diesel hybrid mini-grid model, provides the lowest Cost of Electricity (COE), less greenhouse emissions, a higher Renewable Fraction (RF) when accommodating eCooks, and as the eCook penetrations increase the COE reduces due to the relative increase in the total annual electric load served (E-served).