Evaluation of electrification alternatives in developing countries-the SOLARGIS tool

This paper presents a methodology developed within the SOLARGIS project-a Joule project-aiming at evaluating the potential of integrating renewable forms of energy into dispersed electricity production. With this project, the authors also wanted to demonstrate the efficiency of GIS-geographical information systems-as a tool to analyse the integration of renewable forms of energy. In this paper, the authors present the methodologies developed to identify renewable resources in a given geographic region, to detect high potential areas for wind farm siting and to evaluate the efficiency and market of isolated systems to be used for dispersed rural electrification. In this last methodology, the authors used fuzzy models to describe the uncertainties in demand and cost values