Solar versus Combined Cycle Electricity Generation in Capital Constrained African Economies: Which is Greener?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many public electric utilities and countries in Africa are capital constrained while the growth in demand for electricity is increasing. In this paper an economic analysis is carried out that investigate the efficiency of investing in solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants for grid generation in such a capital constrained countries. The major benefits of the solar power generation are reductions in operating costs (mainly fuel), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and other pollutants of displaced fossil fuel generation. These same benefits could be realised if efficient thermal power plants were used to displace fuel inefficient thermal plants. The amount of fuel savings, GHG emission mitigation, levelized cost of electricity generation are calculated for both solar PV and combined cycle power plants to determine the economic feasibility of introducing solar generation facilities. Investing in combined cycle power plants powered by heavy fuel oil (HFO) is three times as effective in reducing greenhouse gases as the same investment made in solar PV plants. Even If solar investment costs fall as anticipated, it will take at least 16 years of continuous decline before solar generation technology will become cost-effective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".