Better data for better power grids

In 2022, the five-year, $316 million Ghana Power Compact came to a close. nLine sensor data supported the evaluation of a line bifurcation project under the Compact. This blog is adapted from Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) final learnings from this impact evaluation and highlights lessons for the design of future power infrastructure programs.

nLine has built the Plotly.js Panel for Grafana to explore visualizations and enable interactivity of our energy data for our analysts and partners. We’ve open-sourced the code and contributed it as a Grafana community plugin for anyone on the platform to use. So far we’ve addressed dozens of community issues, features, and suggestions and are nearing 1 million downloads. This blog provides a look a how the project came to be, from tenable fork to a robust rewrite that fits seamlessly within the Grafana ecosystem.

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), power quality and reliability (PQR) inequities and vulnerabilities remain a significant barrier to achieving equitable electricity access, especially in rapidly urbanizing areas. Poor PQR, a product of aging and lossy electrical grids, encompasses both frequent and long power outages and poor voltage quality and are anecdotally known to disproportionately affect low-income households and marginalized communities in urban spaces. To address PQR inequities, researchers and policymakers often rely on normative theories of energy justice, capability approach and multidimensional poverty index to interrogate how poor PQR impact and exacerbates domestic electricity vulnerabilities in urban spaces. While useful, these theories remain limited due to the absence of granular and robust PQR data to quantify and address PQR disparities.