How Africa is Inventing Decentralized Electricity Networks : An Original Analysis Based on Machine and Deep Learning

Abstract

After several decades of effort, electricity sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa remain underdeveloped. More than 600 million sub-Saharan Africans still have no access to electricity services, a figure that has increased in recent years due to the region's significant population growth.This thesis shows that the electricity sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa are now embarking on a development path of their own, different to that of the industrialized countries. In grid-covered areas, faced with the weaknesses of the centralized power sectors, individuals and businesses are tending to become independent of the central grid by investing in decentralized systems, for economic reasons or for security of supply.These phenomena of consumer autonomy from the central grid and their consequences have been covered only marginally by academic research. Using original Machine Learning methods to collect and analyze novel data, this thesis studies the dynamics at work in the sub-Saharan electricity sectors and the effects of the deployment of decentralized technologies on the organization of centralized networks in the region.Using Deep Learning tools, this thesis has analyzed several million satellite images, and shows that the deployment of decentralized solar technologies in large African cities is significant and that these systems are mainly adopted by consumers belonging to the most affluent segments of the population. This thesis has also used Machine Learning algorithms to analyze an original database of several hundred thousand electricity consumption observations of grid-connected Nigerian businesses using auxiliary generators in parallel. This analysis reveals that there are several types of usage behaviors of these decentralized systems with respect to the grid. Finally, this thesis shows that these phenomena of consumer autonomy from the central grid are likely to increase in the next decade and significantly affect the development of the entire sector.The regio