Haiti

NREL and USAID are helping Haiti improve access to affordable and reliable energy to by deploying advanced energy technologies, particularly minigrids. This collaboration will enable broader energy sector planning and policymaking in Haiti.

Haiti Energy Access Partnership

Haiti has experienced repeated natural disasters including hurricanes, tropical storms, flooding, and earthquakes. The country's infrastructure and small national grid are vulnerable to blackouts, energy price volatility, and other destabilizing forces making access to reliable power limited—currently one quarter of the population has access to electricity. As such, rebuilding Haiti's energy systems with a focus on stability and affordability is critical. Without access to reliable power, Haiti’s efforts to spur economic growth, improve access to education, and enhance quality of life are hindered.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) established the Haiti Energy Access Partnership with NREL to provide unique technical support for scaling up and deploying advanced energy systems, particularly minigrids. This collaboration will focus on:

Haiti’s Energy Sector Master Plan, which is being supported NREL, The World Bank, The International Development Bank (IDB), and the consultancies TramaTecnoAmbiental (TTA) and Village Infrastructure Angels. NREL will conduct a stakeholder-driven modeling effort using the ENGAGE energy modeling tool to support Haiti’s Energy Sector Master Plan development. ENGAGE is a publicly available, free tool that models energy systems with high shares of variable generation and storage at geographic scales ranging from remote villages and urban districts to islands and entire continents. NREL will also leverage its resilience expertise to develop a resilience matrix with stakeholders.
As part of the Energy Sector Master plan, NREL’s Mini-Grid Support task making excellent progress on development of the mini-grid regulation. A full framework for the regulation has been developed in consultation with Energy Cell (EC), National Regulatory Authority of the Energy Sector (ANARSE) and the other PHARES (Haitian Program for Access to Solar Energy in Rural communities) donor partners, and work is now progressing on drafting and reviewing the individual sections of the regulation. The team will also use NREL’s REopt™ model, a techno-economic decision support platform, which will be used for analysis of minigrid costs and configurations and help inform ongoing discussions of tariff and subsidy levels.

NREL and USAID also updated the geospatial analysis tool Renewable Energy (RE) Data Explorer with wind and solar resource, environmental, and grid data to aid in decision making for renewable energy deployment in Haiti.

Minigrid Capacity Building Trainings

Minigrids can improve energy access in rural areas by enabling power supply for communities that would otherwise be without reliable electricity. To support minigrid development in Haiti, NREL provided a training to 30 renewable energy developers identified by the Government of Haiti as prequalified bidders followed by a three-day virtual training to Government of Haiti stakeholders on developing a broader policy environment for minigrids and use of the RE Data Explorer to support renewable energy deployment more broadly.

Read more about the trainings and access recordings here.