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Journal articleJimoh A, Beath H, Markides CN, et al., 2025,
Enhancing solar mini-grid utilisation in farming communities: crop strategies to reduce costs and improve energy access
, Environmental Research Letters, Vol: 20, ISSN: 1748-9326Approximately 80% of the global population without access to electricity live in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with rural areas disproportionately affected. Solar-powered mini-grids are being used to increase rural electrification. However, their deployment is hindered by high costs, low electricity demand, and limited incomes in rural households. Agriculture constitutes 70% of rural incomes in SSA and faces threats due to a reliance on rainfall coupled with low irrigation levels in the context of climate change. Irrigation loads have been suggested as a strategy to enhance the economic viability of solar mini-grids by boosting electricity demand: reducing the levelised cost of used electricity (LCUE) whilst improving farmer yields and incomes. This study investigates a case study in Tanzania, selected based on the amount of population without access to electricity, the potential for irrigation, and the prevalence of photovoltaic solutions in the least-cost pathways for rural electrification. The seasonality and timing of irrigation demand, as well as crop mixes, are varied to optimise for the lowest LCUE using the open-source modelling framework continuous lifetime optimisation of variable electricity resources. Evapo-transpiration and energy-system modelling are used to estimate energy demand. We find that adding irrigation loads has the potential to increase the LCUE and lower asset utilisation (load factor) when compared to residential loads but that, by selecting crops with longer growth periods, optimising irrigation timing, and implementing multiple planting seasons, the LCUE can be up to 7% less than residential-only systems with an increase seen in asset utilisation. LCUE values of 0.54–1.30 $/kWh were found: higher costs were associated with shorter crop-growth periods, single planting seasons, and poorly timed irrigation loads whilst lower costs were observed with bimodal cropping and solar-coordinated irrigation times. The research highlights tha
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Journal articleBeath H, Mittal S, Lamboll R, et al., 2025,
An exploration and evaluation framework for climate change mitigation scenarios with varying feasibility and desirability
, Environmental Research Letters, Vol: 20, ISSN: 1748-9326Ensembles of climate change mitigation scenarios present users with a collection of strategies for limiting global warming. These strategies may differ in their associated feasibility challenges, mitigation co-impacts, and ultimately their relative societal desirability. Understanding these scenario characteristics is therefore crucial when scenarios are used to inform strategic decisions. One approach to enhance this understanding is to establish scenario archetypes and select contrasting illustrative scenarios from a larger ensemble. We present a new multidimensional framework for the systematic comparison of scenarios at the global or regional level. We illustrate the framework with comparisons in seven dimensions: economic feasibility, mineral resource availability, impacts on societal resilience, near-term scenario robustness, environmental sustainability, interregional fairness, and speed of societal transformation. Using cluster analysis, the framework can be used to select a group of illustrative scenarios with contrasting scores across the dimensions. Beyond the selection of scenarios, our exploration and evaluation framework also allows the identification of gaps in the scenario space that may be of interest but are not covered by the literature. We demonstrate these use cases by applying our framework to a set of mitigation scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 °C. Our results show our framework systematically selects contrasting scenarios, with our illustrative pathways having diverging energy mixes and uses of carbon dioxide removal. Further, we highlight considerable regional differences in the distribution of indicator and dimension scores as a key area for further investigation.
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ReportMoffett E, Gayford J, Woodward G, et al., 2024,
Biodiversity and ecosystem function: a global analysis of trends
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