Africa's Power Infrastructure Anton Eberhard, Orvika Rosnes, Maria Shkaratan, Haakon Vennemo
2011, 04-11-2011, 20110101
eBook, Book
Open access
This study is a product of the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD), a project designed to expand the world's knowledge of physical infrastructure in Africa. The AICD provides a baseline ...against which future improvements in infrastructure services can be measured, making it possible to monitor the results achieved from donor support. It also offers a more solid empirical foundation for prioritizing investments and designing policy reforms in the infrastructure sectors in Africa. The book draws upon a number of background papers that were prepared by World Bank staff and consultants, under the auspices of the AICD. The main findings were synthesized in a flagship report titled Africa's infrastructure: A time for transformation, published in November 2009. Meant for policy makers, that report necessarily focused on the high-level conclusions. It attracted widespread media coverage feeding directly into discussions at the 2009 African union commission heads of state summit on infrastructure.
Power is an all-pervasive, and fundamental force in human relationships and plays a valuable role in social, political, and economic interactions. Power differences are important in social groups in ...enhancing group functioning. Most people want to have power and there are many benefits to having power. However, power is a corrupting force and this has been a topic of interest for centuries to scholars from Plato to Lord Acton. Even with increased knowledge of power’s corrupting effect and safeguards put in place to counteract such tendencies, power abuse remains rampant in society suggesting that the full extent of this effect is not well understood. In this paper, an effort is made to improve understanding of power’s corrupting effects on human behavior through an integrated and comprehensive synthesis of the neurological, sociological, physiological, and psychological literature on power. The structural limits of justice systems’ capability to hold powerful people accountable are also discussed.
Africa's ICT Infrastructure Williams, Mark D.J; Mayer, Rebecca; Minges, Michael
2011, 06-23-2011, 2011-06-23
eBook, Book
Open access
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been a remarkable success in Africa. Across the continent, the availability and quality of service have gone up and the cost has gone down. In ...just 10 years dating from the end of the 1990s mobile network coverage rose from 16 percent to 90 percent of the urban population; by 2009, rural coverage stood at just under 50 percent of the population. Although the performance of Africa's mobile networks over the past decade has been remarkable, the telecommunications sector in the rest of the world has also evolved rapidly. Many countries now regard broadband Internet as central to their long-term economic development strategies, and many companies realize that the use of ICT is the key to maintaining profitability. This book is about that challenge and others. Chapters two and three describe the recent history of the telecommunications market in Africa; they cover such issues as prices, access, the performance of the networks, and the regulatory reforms that have triggered much of the investment. This part of the book compares network performance across the region and tries to explain why some countries have moved so much more quickly than others in providing affordable telecommunications services. Chapter four explores the financial side of the telecommunications revolution in Africa and details how the massive investments have been financed and which companies have most influenced the sector. Chapter five deals with the future of the sector. The final chapter synthesizes the main chapters of the book and presents policy recommendations intended to drive the sector forward.
Northeast Utilities Company adopted an ambitious new competitive
strategy in the mid-1980s, seeking to become the low-cost supplier
in New England electric power markets bracing for deregulation.
...Given its high-cost nuclear facilities, doing so required a
corporate turnaround. For a decade Northeast faced increasing
public and employee resistance to cost cutting at its nuclear
plants. Though management achieved many of its goals, curtailing
outlays on nuclear operations meant high risk that the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission would close the plants because of frequent,
prolonged outages. This is just what happened in 1996. Did
management's deliberate cost-containment strategy take nuclear
operations to an inevitable regulatory shutdown, and if so, why?
Was it the pursuit of executive compensation tied to cost
containment that caused undue risk of regulatory shutdown? Paul
MacAvoy and Jean Rosenthal describe ten years of corporate
performance preceding the shutdown, detailing aggressive executive
decisions, mounting regulatory actions in response to increasingly
severe operational failures, and--at the same time--overall
improvement in corporate earnings, stock prices, and executive pay
packages. They relate the complexities of managing declining
nuclear plant operations under ever more pressing budgetary
targets. Their discussion of the increasing risk of outages raises
the issue of the tradeoff of profit and conservative management of
hazard operations. All the more timely in light of the massive 2003
East Coast blackout, Corporate Profit and Nuclear Safety represents
a powerful and cautionary commentary on industrial practices that
goes to the heart of effective corporate governance.
Integration of dynamic grid support is required for distributed power systems that are interconnected with medium voltage grids. This study proposes a comprehensive control solution to enhance fault ...ride through (FRT) capability for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) power plants. Based on positive and negative sequence control schemes and PV characteristics, the approach alleviates dc-bus double-line-frequency ripples, reduces voltage stress on inverter power switches and DC-link capacitors, and minimises undesirable low-order voltage and current harmonics that are presented on the ac side. The study proposes a new feature to achieve superior FRT performance by using the overload capability of grid-tied inverters. A weak electric grid is used for the test case including a wind turbine induction generator, diesel engine driven synchronous generators and various loads. A comprehensive simulation verified the capability of the proposed control schemes for mitigating the voltage dip, enhancing the voltage response and further improving the stability of interconnected distributed generation in reaction to severe unbalanced voltage conditions because of asymmetrical grid faults.
This book offers a collection of 30 scientific papers which address the problems associated with the use of power electronic converters in renewable energy source-based systems. Relevant problems ...associated with the use of power electronic converters to integrate renewable energy systems to the power grid are presented. Some of the covered topics relate to the integration of photovoltaic and wind energy generators into the rest of the system, and to the use of energy storage to mitigate power fluctuations, which are a characteristic of renewable energy systems. The book provides a good overview of the abovementioned topics.
From the bottom up Tenenbaum, Bernard William; Greacen, Chris; Siyambalapitiya, Tilak ...
The World Bank eBooks,
2014., 2014, 1-23-2014, 2014-01-15, 2015-03-18
eBook, Book
Open access
Rural Africa's low level of electrification is a topic of much discussion. One widely cited estimate is that only fourteen percent of rural households in Sub- Saharan Africa have access to ...electricity (2012). As a first step to improving access, most governments in the region have developed national electrification strategies. Virtually every one of those strategies recommends a two-track approach to providing greater access to grid-based electrification. Although there is widespread agreement on the need for a two-track approach, most national electrification strategies contain few, if any, details on how the two tracks should be implemented. This guide focuses on the regulatory and policy decisions that African electricity regulators and policy makers must make to create a sustainable decentralized track and how the decentralized track can complement the traditional centralized track.
Power lines Needham, Andrew
2014., 20141026, 2014, 2015-01-01, Volume:
107
eBook
In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a ...metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other cities. Exploring the postwar developments of these two very different landscapes,Power Linestells the story of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of metropolitan growth, and the roots of the contemporary coal-fueled climate change crisis.
Andrew Needham explains how inexpensive electricity became a requirement for modern life in Phoenix-driving assembly lines and cooling the oppressive heat. Navajo officials initially hoped energy development would improve their lands too, but as ash piles marked their landscape, air pollution filled the skies, and almost half of Navajo households remained without electricity, many Navajos came to view power lines as a sign of their subordination in the Southwest. Drawing together urban, environmental, and American Indian history, Needham demonstrates how power lines created unequal connections between distant landscapes and how environmental changes associated with suburbanization reached far beyond the metropolitan frontier. Needham also offers a new account of postwar inequality, arguing that residents of the metropolitan periphery suffered similar patterns of marginalization as those faced in America's inner cities.
Telling how coal from Indian lands became the fuel of modernity in the Southwest,Power Linesexplores the dramatic effects that this energy system has had on the people and environment of the region.
Protection of Low-Voltage DC Microgrids Salomonsson, D.; Soder, L.; Sannino, A.
IEEE transactions on power delivery,
07/2009, Volume:
24, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this paper, a low-voltage (LV) DC microgrid protection system design is proposed. The LV DC microgrid is used to interconnect distributed resources and sensitive electronic loads. When designing ...an LV DC microgrid protection system, knowledge from existing DC power systems can be used. However, in most cases, these systems use grid-connected rectifiers with current-limiting capability during DC faults. In contrast, an LV DC microgrid must be connected to an AC grid through converters with bidirectional power flow and, therefore, a different protection-system design is needed. In this paper, the operating principles and technical data of LV DC protection devices, both available and in the research stage, are presented. Furthermore, different fault-detection and grounding methods are discussed. The influence of the selected protection devices and grounding method on an LV DC microgrid is studied through simulations. The results show that it is possible to use available devices to protect such a system. Problems may arise with high-impedance ground faults which can be difficult to detect.
