Long-term energy planning and demand forecast in remote areas of developing countries: Classification of case studies and insights from a modelling perspective

The work also provides specific insights, useful to researchers interested in rural energy modelling. Few studies assume a dynamic demand over the years and most of them do not consider any evolution of the future energy load, or forecast its growth through arbitrary trends and scenarios. This however undermines the relevance of the results for the purpose of long-term planning and highlights the necessity of further developing the forecasting methodologies. We conclude that bottom-up approaches, system-dynamics and agent-based models seem appropriate approaches to forecast the evolution of the demand for energy in the long-term; we analyse their potential capability to tackle the context-specific complexities of rural areas and the nexus causalities among energy and socio-economic dynamics.