Assessing reliability of electricity grid services from space: the case of Uttar Pradesh, India

Eugenie Dugoua, Ryan Kennedy, Myriam Shiran and Johannes Urpelainen

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: While most households around the world have access to electricity, the number of hours per day when the grid supplies them with adequate voltage can be low. Improving the reliability of electricity is crucial to make progress on energy poverty but measuring and monitoring it is difficult, especially in lower-income countries where official data is sparse. We develop a transparent method using only easily accessible data to track the reliability of electricity. We train a decision tree model to predict the number of hours with normal electricity in Uttar Pradesh, India, using monthly nighttime luminosity, village characteristics, and voltage data from monitors installed in households. The approach successfully predicts reliability across time and space, and we document that, in Uttar Pradesh, the average number of hours per day with normal electricity has increased by 0.6 h between 2014 and 2019. The predicted number of hours with normal/reliable electricity supply for 2019 remains as low as 8.1 h.

Keywords: electricity; reliability; India; nightlights; remote sensing; Nightlights; Electricity; Reliability; Remote sensing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 8 pages
Date: 2022-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Energy for Sustainable Development, 1, June, 2022, 68, pp. 441 - 448. ISSN: 0973-0826

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115140/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

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:ehl:lserod:115140

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().