Cost-effective energy billing mechanisms for small and medium-scale industrial customers in Uganda

Hassan Qudrat-Ullah, Aymen Kayal and Andrew Mugumya

Energy, 2021, vol. 227, issue C

Abstract: Many African countries are facing an astronomical rise in electricity tariffs resulting in the shutdown of many promising small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs). Increases in energy costs get reflected in the cost of production of goods and services making some local products even more expensive than the imported goods. This study finds an alternate cost-effective energy billing system for SME industrial customers to lower their cost of production. As a case study, a solar hybrid system of a coffee processing industry in Uganda is designed. The system is compared with the existing grid backed-up with a generator and the grid alone systems. From the analysis, the coffee factory had huge savings within one year reducing the simple payback period by 5 years. The findings of this study suggest that for sustainability and long-term growth of small and medium scale enterprises, distributed generation systems with net metering mechanisms are the most economical energy supply systems in Uganda. Other African nations with similar energy resources and challenges can support the development of their SME sectors through the establishment of net metering policies to enable a cost-effective energy billing system.

Keywords: Cost-effective electricity; Energy billing for SME; Electricity tariffs; Net-metering; Solar hybrid system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221007374
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:227:y:2021:i:c:s0360544221007374

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2021.120488

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().