Economic and climate implications of diesel backup power in outage-affected countries

Abstract

Chronic electricity outages can shift the burden of unreliable grid supply to local backup generation, yet cross-country evidence on the scale and consequences of this shift remains limited. This study develops a harmonized framework for 56 outage-affected countries that links reported outage exposure, power-system scale, and empirical seasonal demand factors to retained-demand scenarios, and evaluates the consequences of supplying the resulting backup-electricity requirement with a standardized diesel benchmark. Using source observations with their documented reference years retained (WBES outages: 2006–2024; power-system and grid-lifecycle data: 2022–2024; monthly demand: 2024; diesel-price and exchange-rate evidence: 2025), the R20 reference modeling scenario (20% retained demand) yields an expected annual backup-electricity requirement of approximately 4.275 TWh across the 56-country sample. At a reference generator efficiency of 35%, diesel fuel-cycle emissions are estimated at 3.971 MtCO2e/year, compared with 2.123 MtCO2e/year for the corresponding grid lifecycle counterfactual, yielding a net additional climate burden of 1.849 MtCO2e/year. For the 26 countries with complete matched diesel-price, grid-tariff, and exchange-rate evidence, the net avoidable operating-energy cost is USD 306.9–484.4 million/year, where the range reflects admissible tariff branches rather than probabilistic uncertainty. Country-level empirical P05–P95 ranges describe seasonal variation, while retained demand, generator efficiency, tariff evidence, and upstream diesel pathways are evaluated separately as scenario, sensitivity, and structural-robustness dimensions. The results reveal strong cross-country heterogeneity and show that aggregate burden and per-unit impact structure do not necessarily move together. The framework provides a transparent benchmark for comparing outage-driven diesel burdens and for future assessment of resilience and lower-emission backup transitions without relying on composite vulnerability scores or policy-priority thresholds.