Call for a New Type of Microgrid Research
Most countries’ energy infrastructure is fragile and/or unsustainable in one way or another.
This open secret is one of the many factors driving research on microgrids, particularly those that make renewable energy (especially solar power) available to consumers.
I’m very enthusiastic about this avenue of research, but I want to propose something unconventional, that we build microgrids around a different — and significantly less green — form of local energy production: diesel generators.

Why?
Five years ago, when I lived in the Kokomlemle neighborhood of Accra, we typically experienced two power outages every three days, with one lasting for about 6 hours and the other for about 12. Wealthier people dealt with the routine blackouts by purchasing generators, but most simply managed as best they could without electricity. Power shortages can complicate all kinds of activities that we normally think of as trivial, from food storage to charging phones to reading or doing homework after dark.
Things were still rough when I came back two years later, but during my current return visit I’ve been thrilled to observe that the city’s electricity situation has improved dramatically. Still, I know things remain challenging elsewhere in West Africa.
Last month I stayed in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, where my hotel’s generator was on most of the time, judging by the racket. I also visited Minna, the capital city of Niger State, which is nicknamed the Power State because, according to my hosts, it supplies about 80% of the country’s electricity. In spite of this remarkable statistic, the compound house where I spent much of my time in Minna received less than 12 hours of current per day, and my hosts told me that the rest of the city doesn’t fare any better.
In both countries, many of those who own “gens” have neighbors who can’t afford the overhead cost of buying them. In other words, I believe that large markets exist for microgrids that would provide generator-adjacent consumers with access to power when the main grid goes down (or, more typically, stops flowing as a result of so-called “load-shedding exercises.”)
But Wouldn’t That Be a Step Backwards?
The way I see it, no. While burning diesel on a small scale is obviously not the cleanest or most efficient way to generate power, plenty of West Africans do it regularly. Those living or working around generator owners could benefit from increased access to electricity in the short term, and in the long term, the generators could hopefully be replaced with renewable energy sources.
What Would This Look Like In Practice?
Based on some cursory research, it appears that typical home generators are equipped with a series of mechanisms which, at least up to a certain point, maintain a linear relationship between the amount of electrical load that a generator is asked to supply and the amount of fuel that it must burn to do so.
There are lots of different generators out there, though, so to work well, a gen-microgrid platform would have to allow generator owners to determine a maximum total electrical load that their machines could be responsible for producing.
For the sake of usability, it should also accurately measure local fluctuations in fuel prices and automatically adjust the price of electricity accordingly. Finally, with their machines being used to produce more power than before, generator owners would likely want the option to factor any possible extra wear-and-tear into the rates that they charge.
The Blockchain Connection
It’s been widely remarked that smart contracts on blockchain networks could help automate microgrids in important ways, including reading people’s electrical meters to determine when they need to make a purchase, determining a price that is acceptable to both buyer and seller, and executing the transaction.
However, as I noted in my previous Medium post on road maintenance and microtransactions, the greatest obstacle to implementing cryptocurrency microtransaction projects in West Africa will probably be onboarding folks who have never used crypto. I suspect that the relatively low adoption rates in the subregion, where more than a few people know what Bitcoin is, have to do with usability shortcomings and the level of risk involved in holding and transacting with cryptocurrency.
But that’s no reason not to start building microgrid solutions now. Just as solar panels can be plugged into these systems at a later date, microgrids don’t need to be integrated with a blockchain network right off the bat. Perhaps, by the time cryptocurrency is ready to be used by non-technical people, solar technology will be cheap enough to supplant diesel generators in West Africa.