Optimizing an equitable micro-hydropower deployment: Application of a multi-objective method for rural Indonesia

Much of the developing world is still struggling to provide electricity to rural populations. Extending the grid is frequently not feasible or too expensive in rural and remote areas. In such situations, micro-hydropower (MHP) can be a cost-effective source of renewable off-grid electricity and can be easier to implement and more reliable than a number of other generation technologies. This study employs multi-objective mixed-integer-linear programming (MOMILP) to identify nondominated MHP portfolios to meet rural electricity needs across Indonesia. Besides maximizing the new MHP generation capacity within a fixed budget, this study also incorporates equity as an objective. The equity issue becomes crucial to ensure that government resources are deployed in a manner that considers impacts for the entire population. The MOMILP optimizes a weighted objective function that applies different relative weights to the objectives of generation capacity and equity, subject to several constraints on resource availability and capacity shortfall, as well as budget. In this way, we identify solutions on the Pareto frontier for investment in MHP generation in remote Indonesian rural communities. We illustrate the tradeoffs involved in meeting capacity shortfalls with and without considering equity across provinces and identify non-dominated MHP portfolios that the Indonesian government could implement to increase rural electrification efficiently.