In cooperation with Ghanaian partners, scientists and practitioners are working on marketable, PV-based energy solutions for healthcare facilities in Ghana.
Institute: International Centre for Sustainable Development
Dauer: 01.06.2019 to 31.05.2022
Project Description
As in many developing and emerging countries, power outages occur again and again in Ghana. Added to this is the instability of the power grid. Both of these factors are causing considerable damage to the healthcare sector, as the light in the operating room may go out or life-saving medical equipment may fail. Although photovoltaic (PV) power could help, the PV market in Ghana is still relatively underdeveloped. In the German-Ghanaian joint project EnerSHelF, experts from science and industry of the various disciplines work together on both technical and politico-economic questions to improve and disseminate marketable PV-based energy solutions for health facilities in Ghana.
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Interdisciplinary search for solutions
Various disciplines are working together within the project: From a economic development perspective, options for strengthening governance structures in the Ghanaian energy and health sector are to be developed. This is based on empirical analyses of the barriers and drivers of institutional change towards a sustainable energy revolution and of the decision-making behaviour of decision-makers in healthcare facilities and companies regarding the adoption of PV solutions. From a technical point of view, field tests of PV-based solutions and the improvement of the data situation will initially be in the foreground (energy meteorological data and load data). The data serves as the input of newly developed tools and algorithms. The aim is to achieve greater reliability in the planning, design and control of PV-diesel hybrid systems as well as a context-specific electrification strategy.
Collaboration between technical disciplines (engineering and natural sciences) and social sciences (development economics) allows the project to gain an integrative understanding of the interplay between the institutional and technological transition in the health-energy nexus. In particular, this deals with the question of how the interaction between the development and dissemination of technological solutions and the specific institutional and political-economic country context works.
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Read the full article by H-BRS here.
