Planning Irrigation Electrification: Demand Formation, Dispatch Feasibility, and Solar Integration in Rwanda

Licentiate thesis, 2026

Irrigation electrification is a critical pathway for enhancing agricultural productivity and climate resilience; however, its broader implications for power-system planning remain insufficiently understood. In many load-assessment studies, irrigation is treated either as a farm-level technical sizing problem or as an exogenous electricity demand, which limits its usefulness for national-scale planning, infrastructure deployment, and system-level decision-making. This reveals a gap between irrigation development strategies and electricity-system feasibility assessment.

This thesis addresses that gap by developing a computational planning-oriented framework for analysing large-scale irrigation electrification as a coupled irrigation-electricity system shaped by spatial, temporal, and operational constraints. It links geospatial terrain screening, lift-conditioned irrigation water demand, pumping schedules, and operational strategies to the formation of hourly demand profiles, generation and storage configurations, and grid-exchange conditions. These configurations are evaluated against dispatch-constrained electricity-system operation to examine utility-level generation-capacity feasibility, cost, surplus, and system-planning implications.

The results show that irrigation electrification is not defined by energy use alone, but by the spatial, temporal, and operational configuration through which irrigation demand, on-farm solar generation, storage operation, and grid exchange are jointly shaped under dispatch constraints. The demand-formation process provides decision-relevant hourly profiles that reveal where irrigation demand becomes system-relevant, when it becomes compatible or incompatible with existing electricity-system operation, and how storage and solar-powered irrigation strategies reshape feasibility. Moderate irrigation electricity demand can become infeasible when concentrated in peak-coincident pumping windows, whereas coordinated scheduling and storage buffering can restore feasibility without reducing irrigation service. Storage does not remove constraints; rather, it shifts them toward charging behaviour, service reliability, and import-export balance. From a utility-grid perspective, on-farm solar-powered irrigation introduces aggregated surplus, making deployment strategies and export valuation important determinants of system performance.

Applied to Rwanda, the computational framework bridges local irrigation engineering with national electricity planning. It illustrates that irrigation acts as a system-shaping load in which demand, generation, storage, and grid exchange are co-dependent. The findings provide a methodological basis for integrated energy and agricultural planning in Sub-Saharan Africa, where irrigation expansion is increasingly central to food security, climate adaptation, and sustainable energy access.