A Utility Approach to Accelerate Universal Electricity Access in Less Developed Countries: A Regulatory Proposal

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the volume of investment that would be needed to achieve universal access to electricity by 2030 is $52 billion per year. Therefore, it is imperative to “think big” in order to address this problem in its true dimension. This necessarily means to create viable business models that can attract private investment.The supply of electricity requires the cooperation of activities of very different nature and electrification can adopt several modes. In this paper, we have focused on the activities that we have deemed as having the best chances for large investments for electrification purposes in developing countries: independent power production (IPP) with large generation, independent power transmission (IPT), electricity distribution and retail, mini/micro grids and stand-alone home systems.