As some of you may know, in addition to serving as President of Future Energy Advisors, I am also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Institute of Sustainable Energy (ISE) at Boston University (BU).
Resulting from my fellowship at ISE, I was recently asked to lead a donor-funded research effort to profile the current status of the electricity sector in Haiti, including an assessment of the national utility Electricite d’Haiti (EDH), independent power producers supplying electricity to EDH, and microgrids in rural villages not served by EDH.
The resulting report, Assessment of Haiti’s Electricity Sector, is now available here for public review.
For those who are interested in energy in Haiti, I believe you will find the report to be quite useful, as an overarching public assessment of the electricity industry in Haiti was heretofore lacking. True, many good studies are available covering certain aspects of Haitian electricity, and we certainly benefited from them. However, we found little that integrated the various topics into one cohesive perspective. With this report, we think this gap is fairly well closed — at least for now.
At ISE, work continues on improving electricity access in Haiti, where less than 40% of households have access to electricity — and this access is nowhere near available reliably 24 hours a day. A BU student team is currently investigating options to increase adoption of electric cookstoves to increase load on underutilized grids, and a next phase of effort involves estimating the economic drivers of microgrid development and operations.