Good decision :) I'm half way through. Gratuitous descriptions of tipping elements await.

The status quo here in Australia. Sadly.

Institutional frameworks and electrification planning models will need to evolve beyond the rural-urban binary to keep pace with these urbanization dynamics. Check out the paper for more detail (open access) here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our analysis identifies critical regions where this ‘gap’ is most acute, notably coastal West Africa, Ethiopian highlands, and the Great Lakes region encompassing Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC.

Institutional responsibilities and regulatory frameworks also often remain rigidly divided between rural electrification agencies and urban governance bodies. This rigidity creates jurisdictional gaps, potentially leaving large peri-urban and newly urbanizing areas underserved.

Least-cost electrification planning models typically rely on binary rural/urban delineation for demand estimation and sometimes for supply decisions. Such assumptions significantly influence technology choice, potentially misallocating resources by failing to capture emerging urbanization dynamics.

We find that 62% of the unelectrified population lives within or near expanding urban areas, especially in peri-urban zones surrounding smaller and medium-sized cities. This questions the notion of the majority ‘rural unelectrified’ and the binary urban-rural delineation in electrification efforts.

We combine the Urban Rural Catchment Area (URCA) framework with satellite derived spatial electrification datasets to highlight spatial patterns in electricity access gaps.