Ranking projects in regional electrification plans considering technical and social criteria. Case study in Mexico

Plans to extend rural electrification usually face budget constraints, so must prioritize the projects to define the implementation order. The project ranking must be defined with a clear procedure to justify the order among all stakeholders. Moreover, techno-economic and also social criteria must be considered to maximize positive impact and ensure long term sustainability. The current literature in rural electrification still has an economic bias and mainly offers independent designs for each community but no prioritized order to guide the institution promoting the program. This study presents a multicriteria decision-aid procedure to define a hierarchical order of the electrification of the communities throughout a rural region considering technical and social criteria. The proposed procedure starts with an assessment of the region, to determine the socio-economic context of the communities and the local energy resources, Next, the electrification project of each community is designed and assessed considering 7 technical and 7 social criteria. Then, a hierarchical order of electrification of the communities is calculated combining AHP method and discrete compromise programming to find a trade-off ranking involving all criteria. The procedure is applied to 8 communities of the municipality of Cintalapa-Chiapas (Mexico). Ranking results are discussed and complemented with a sensitivity analysis to robustly assist decision-making when implementing the program. The procedure can be adjusted to be used in other contexts.