A Toolkit Featuring Case Studies for the Design of Subsidies in Off-Grid Solar and Clean Cooking

This toolkit provides a framework to design responsible subsidies, building on lessons learned, considering different contexts and objectives, and balancing tradeoffs. The way a subsidy is designed will have an impact on the cost to the government, the speed of rollout, the number of people reached and its scalability, as well as the market-distortion and political risks discussed above. The toolkit provides recommendations on how to inform the subsidy design, options to set specific parameters (targeting, subsidy level, delivery, verification, exit or adjustment), as well as guidelines for communication about subsidies. It also provides recommendations on monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation mechanisms. This toolkit is primarily focused on subsidies for the purchase of off-grid solar products and clean cookstoves; it is limited in its application to fuel or electricity subsidies. Off-grid solar electrification is making the most progress through the selling of devices to end users (on cash or credit through mechanisms such as Pay-As-You Go). This toolkit draws primarily from the experience of subsidizing such sales and is therefore most applicable for the design of subsidies for product purchase. The report however acknowledges the importance of emerging Fee-for Service or Electricity-as-a-Service models, and most of the recommendations in this toolkit are also suitable for these models. However, they are not cited as prominently. Similarly, this toolkit is most applicable to subsidies for the purchase of improved and clean cooking devices. Less so for subsidies for fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), or the electricity consumed by electric cooking devices

Solar electric cooking in Africa: Where will the transition happen first?

Whilst the rapid spread of solar photovoltaics (PV) across Africa has already transformed millions of lives, it has yet to have an impact on the main energy need of poor households: cooking. In the context of falling global PV prices, recent advancements in battery technology and rising charcoal/fuelwood prices in severely deforested regions, the door is opening for a potentially transformative alternative - solar electric cooking (PV-eCook). While initial investigations focused on solar home systems sized for cooking (cooking device, battery storage, charge controller and PV array), it has since been shown that battery-supported electric cooking (eCook) can also strengthen national, mini, micro and nano grids. This paper presents a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) based methodology, accounting for a wide variety of socio-cultural, political, technical and economic factors which are expected to affect the uptake and potential impact of eCook across a variety of African contexts. It shows the concept has considerable viability in many African countries, that there are significant sizeable markets (millions of potential users), and that within the next five years the anticipated costs of eCook are highly competitive against existing ‘commercialised polluting fuels’