Finding a better path toward renewable electricity in rural Botswana

Botswana, like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, contains many remote, rural communities relying on fossil fuels such as diesel for power. Replacing these sources with renewable or carbon-neutral electricity generation is uniquely challenging.

Eli Sumarliah and Ashley Olebogeng developed an integrated approach to evaluate multiple hybrid energy systems, with the goal of determining which approach would be most effective at bringing electricity to rural Botswana.

The authors examined three combinations of renewable energy sources: solar-biomass, hydro-solar, and battery-solar. Rural Botswana has the potential to employ all of these, and considering multiple sources simultaneously offers greater flexibility over employing just one type of electricity generation.

“Given the abundant solar and biomass sources in Botswana, we aimed to create a low-cost, sustainable energy system via hybrid systems,” said Olebogeng. “Existing research focuses on single technologies, while our integrated optimization-decision framework ensures an optimal trade-off between cost, intermittency, and scalability — requirements of rural areas.”

The team used the Multi-Objective Jaya algorithm for optimization and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) algorithm for multi-criteria decision making. This integrated approach allowed them to incorporate multiple factors such as cost, reliability, and land use into their analysis. They found that standalone solar and battery-solar were the best options, followed by hydro-solar.

The authors hope this analysis will guide not only the construction of renewable energy in Botswana but also similar projects in other parts of the world.

“We hope that the system can be replicated in other off-grid regions with similar resources, like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia,” said Olebogeng. “We hope the optimization-decision convergence can guide policymakers in technology trade-off comparisons.”

Source: “Assessing solar-biomass system for rural electrification in Botswana using the integrated multi-objective optimisation and TOPSIS,” by Eli Sumarliah and Ashley Olebogeng, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0268253 .