Tomy Goulding: The roll-out of solar photovoltaics in cities across sub-Saharan Africa: towards a framework for urban hybrid energy systems?

In cities across sub-Saharan Africa, where the average rate of access to electricity stands at 60% to 70%, ensuring universal access to electricity remains a challenge. In this context, the development of the ‘large centralised grid’ – a priority for public authorities – and the proliferation of decentralised solutions, such as solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, are leading to hybrid urban electricity configurations. The thesis takes this observation as its starting point—the implications of which for electrification policies and the urban energy transition are still poorly understood—and aims to test the hypothesis of a forced adaptation of national electricity systems in cities experiencing rapid demographic and economic growth.
At the intersection of research from Transition Studies, urban political ecology and energy justice, it develops three lines of research. The first analyses how electrical hybridisation is concretely embodied in urban systems (technologies, actors, scales, territories, market mechanisms, regulatory and policy frameworks, etc.).

The second explores whether and how forms of governance emerge from this hybridisation, and examines the socio-technical representations and imaginaries that inspire them. The third examines how the rise of solar PV is shaped by urban socio-environmental inequalities and, in turn, impacts them, whilst simultaneously leading de facto to a redefinition of an essential service.

By focusing on the socio-technical interfaces between decentralised solutions and the wider grid as ‘sites’ for observing the transformations taking place, the methodology draws on a detailed inventory and mapping of the diverse modes of solar PV urbanisation, an analysis of the evolution of legislative and regulatory frameworks, and a study of actual practices regarding the installation and use of hybrid electricity access systems. Mindful of the power relations that shape these interfaces and the inequalities they engender, it also draws on tools for analysing the discourses and representations that accompany and influence the transformations underway. The primary field of investigation is the Dakar region in Senegal. This case study will then be placed in perspective alongside other urban contexts across the continent.