Exploring Implication of Renewable Energy Transition on the Cost of Electricity and Green House Gases Emission in East African Countries

East Africa’s electrification is at odds with United Nations goals to provide clean modern energy for all by 2030 despite possessing a vast potential for Renewable energy (RE). The increasing demand for energy coupled with continuous reliance on non-renewable energy resources as the least-cost power generation option contributes highly to climate change. This study aims to explore the implication of RE transition on the cost of electricity generation and greenhouse gas emission. The study applied a scenario capacity expansion model (System Planning Test) to investigate the implication of changing penetration level of RE from the reference least-cost solution in existing policy documents on the overall costs of building and operating an electrical system and the derived carbon dioxide emission level. The results showed that the relationship between RE and the electricity system cost is nonlinear. This implies that small changes in the level of renewable penetration relative to the least-cost solution result in small changes in the system costs while large deviation leads to large changes in the system costs. The higher levels of RE deployment lead to high reduction of carbon dioxide but with higher overall system costs. While lower levels of RE leads to higher carbon dioxide emission levels at lower system costs. Thus evaluating the trade-off between emission saving and system cost, shows that cost of avoiding emissions is incremental to RE deployment and declines as RE is curtailed. Thus initiatives to promote RE growth in order to meet the Sustainable Development Goals have been proposed.