LENA visits Ethiopia
The increasing amount of energy harvested from renewable sources, primarily sunlight and a simultaneous decline in conventional generation plants is becoming challenging to the dynamic security of power network operations. The necessary preconditions, system flexibility and the local requirements for profound transition towards renewable energy sources differ in industrialized countries like Germany from developing countries such as the Sub-Saharan Africa’s. A joint research project between OVGU and Mekelle university, in Ethiopia, has been established in 2019 to investigate the best coexisting integration paths of PV system in the national grid systems so that the utilization of solar energy is optimized.
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU) and Mekelle University (MU) both have expertise in their respective energy sector. OVGU, under LENA, leads efforts to integrate intermittent energy sources into German power grids and improve system stability. MU, through the Ethiopian Institute of Technology-Mekelle (EiT-M), conducts energy research to advance sustainable energy transitions in Ethiopia. OVGU and MU share a research agenda focused on renewable energy, particularly on solar energy. The collaboration aims to address the challenges of developing solar energy in Ethiopia, in order to facilitate its uptake and promote the transition to cleaner energy sources. The shared research interests of the two institutions led to the establishment of a research partnership. They received a grant from the German research foundation (DFG) to support the initiation of international collaboration in the areas of solar energy in the Sub-Sahara region of Africa. The initiation grant funded five activities: 1) identifying potential collaboration areas in the solar energy sector, 2) reviewing policy documents, publications, and regulations to better understand the energy landscape of partners, 3) identifying gaps in research to enhance future collaborative research proposals on solar energy, 4) Organize workshops in Germany and Ethiopia to grasp and discuss the research gaps and develop a collaborative research project proposal in the area of solar energy. As an outcome of the initiation grant from DFG, through consecutive workshops, a research project proposal is developed and will be submitted to DFG for project fund.
The project’s aim is to investigate, how photovoltaic (PV) systems can be efficiently integrated into concurrent large interconnected power systems, weak grids, and islanded microgrids, reflecting the current situation in Ethiopia. Taking lessons learned from Germany's solar integration, the project will aim to identify the most favourable technical and economic options of utilizing solar energy in Ethiopia. The project will achieve its goal through five main work packages which are: 1) reducing uncertainty in load and PV energy production forecasts 2) developing operational concepts for grid topologies in Ethiopia 3) analyzing the impact of large-scale PV plants on system security 4) dynamics assessment of grid operation with flexibility for reliability in PV-driven power systems and 5) analyzing the impact of energy policies and market regulations. Results of this project will help promote the adoption of solar energy systems in Ethiopia. The unique feature of this project is the availability of different parallel infrastructures and the resulting technical and economic integration optimization potential which has so far not yet been researched. The project leads to a substantial gain of new knowledge of societal importance for Ethiopia. On the other hand, the RES (renewable energy sources) penetration and high-impedance coupling between IBR in Ethiopia are a projection of the future European grid, thus also a high gain of knowledge for German researchers.
Here we see the LENA delegation and members of Mekelle University during a visit to the National Museum.