A STEEP-cum-SWOT approach for maintenance strategy evaluation for an off-grid PV-powered street lighting system

Abstract

Recently, the installation of street light systems in remote communities has experienced significant improvement. This improvement has a direct relationship with the innovations in off-grid standalone energy sources. However, there exists sparse information on standalone PV-powered street light system maintenance. This is because existing models consider mainly the technical aspects of this system maintenance. The current study, therefore, presents a robust perspective on this system maintenance. It presents a framework that evaluates maintenance strategies for off-grid PV-powered street light systems; the framework considered STEEP (social, technical, economic, environmental and policy) requirements during maintenance activities. These requirements were used to design a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity and threats) framework that analyzes maintenance strategies for this system using a standard TOPS IS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) and a fuzzy TOPSIS (F-TOPSIS) methods. Data from a community in Nigeria were used to test the proposed STEEP-cum-SWOT framework performance. It was observed that risk-based and condition-based maintenance strategies are the least and most suitable strategies for a standalone off-grid PV-powered street light system in the community.