Abstract
Access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy remains a critical goal under the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, especially in remote areas of developing countries. Based on traditional engineering approaches, many energy solution planning tools have been developed for identifying the optimal solution in these areas to assess the competition across different technological options. Nevertheless, these approaches based on an economic optimum, do not necessarily grant long-term sustainability of the solution in specific local context, since they are not able to capture any of the social implication within the Energy-Development nexus. Moreover, also in the light of the 2030 Agenda, scientific and grey literature on energy access highlights how energy solutions planning methodologies developed in the last decades need to be complemented by a more comprehensive view, in order to integrate evidence from various disciplines, especially engineering and social sciences. Based on the above consideration, this paper introduces a novel framework under the name of Comprehensive Energy Solution Planning (CESP), where three engineering phases are complemented by other three social sciences-based phases, each one characterized by specific tools, to offer an informed decision framework for the local planner. CESP encompasses a set of techno-economic and socio-technical actions aiming at preventing potential failure as evidenced by a a counterfactual analysis used to identify the reasons behind past project failures. The CESP framework, presenting a sequential and iterative structure which underlines the cyclic perspective of an holistic decision process where : social sciences feed the engineering analysis, and vice versa The CESP, emerges as a practical and applicable framework for supporting energy planning in critical areas.
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