It's hard to imagine that 1.5 billion people - a fifth of the world's population - are without access to commercial electricity. It's a figure that was frequently quoted at the Energy Indaba, in Sandton, last week, and one that hit home a little harder each time.
In a world where being cut off from your laptop or BlackBerry seems unthinkable, millions can't even switch on a light or stove. Thanks to rocketing population growth and rising environmental concerns, the need to provide sustainable energy sources has gained a new degree of urgency.
It's now widely accepted that without access to electricity, it's impossible to achieve the other Millennium Development Goals, including the eradication of poverty, reducing child mortality, and ensuring universal primary school education.
With the UN declaring 2012 the “International year of sustainable energy for all”, it has called for universal access to modern energy services by 2030. It also set the goal of reducing energy intensity by 40% by that same year. If those two goals are met, says the UN, global emissions will increase by only 1.3%.
The issue of how to balance development and environmental needs has raised various questions around technologies, frameworks, and financing - all without clear answers.
World Energy Council secretary-general Christophe Frei uses Maslow's hierarchy of needs to explain the motives driving energy policies. Just like extreme hunger is a more powerful driver than, say, the need for social acceptance, so a person without electricity will probably choose lighting and heating their home over reducing their carbon footprint.
The sad irony is, of course, that supplying electricity quickly and cheaply to developing regions often leads to conditions that exacerbate global warming and climate change - which will have the greatest impact on these very communities.
Prioritising energy access above “higher order” considerations has led to huge investments in fossil fuel projects in developing countries, with long-term impacts on human and environmental wellbeing. SA's Medupi coal-fired power station and India's coal power complex, in Gujarat, for example, both received billions in funding from the World Bank, despite international outcry.
Why give someone an option that's less harmful when you can give them something that's safe?
Lezette Engelbrecht
While these projects are punted as employing “clean coal” technologies, and a quick and cheap way to provide universal access, they're short-term solutions that don't factor in the real costs of fossil-fuel-based power. The burden of loan repayments, health complications and environmental degradation will weigh heavily on poor communities. But then, many of the existing methods, such as burning wood or dung, are also unsustainable, and have equally negative effects on CO2 levels and people's health.
This is why renewable energy solutions, for all the objections about cost and availability, make much more sense. Any other approach is merely delaying the inevitable - coal and oil will eventually run out, and supporting new plants that will fuel global warming for another 40 years for the sake of expediency is both irresponsible and risky. Why give someone an option that's less harmful when you can give them something that's safe?
As usual, the trouble doesn't lie so much with technology, but with making it available within systems and markets designed around cheap and abundant power. As Einstein said, we aren't going to solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. It will require extensive planning and integrated systems, a distributed versus centralised power supply, and a more diverse energy mix, not to mention huge investments in skills and infrastructure. But it will also give people access to vital services, without taking shortcuts with their health and safety.
Impossible is nothing
A recent WWF study shows it's possible to switch to 100% renewable energy supply globally by 2050. Easy? No. But possible? Certainly. The argument is always that renewable sources like solar energy are more expensive. But with increasing electricity prices, the precarious oil situation, and possibilities of a carbon tax, conventional electricity sources won't be competitive for long.
Given it costs around R20 billion to R100 billion to electrify a rural village using conventional means, off-grid solutions suddenly look a lot more promising. Off-grid renewables are already seeing great success in places like Kenya and India, where 300 000 and 100 000 rural households, respectively, are benefitting from solar systems.
The winning formula here is the application of technology to local needs. In Kenya, most of the electricity is dependent on expensive hydropower, making off-grid, small-scale solar a relatively low-cost option for the 85% of Kenyans without electricity.
The UN Foundation's Richenda van Leeuwen notes that, while large solar arrays in developed countries are expensive, solar options for lighting and cellphone recharging work out relatively cheaply for those otherwise forking out money on candles and kerosene.
Thomas Taha Rassam Culhane, co-founder of the NGO Solar Cities, explains that we need to focus on “parts and patterns” rather than “packages and services”. “People can be fairly easily given capacity building training to solve their own energy problems,” he adds.
Critics can go on about costs and impossibilities, but all this does is stall the progress, while people suffer. These problems can be solved within reasonable financial parameters and without harming the environment, shows a recent report by the International Energy Agency, along with the UN's Development Programme and Industrial Development Organisation. It found that providing modern energy to the very poor would require an investment of about $41 billion per year over the next five years - just 0.06% of global GDP.
Supplying renewable energy won't be easy; it will require the kind of collaboration, investment and upskilling we've never embarked on before. But if humankind only did things that were easy, we wouldn't have progressed much further than caves and club-slinging. It wasn't easy to end slavery or find cures for disease or fly to the moon. But there is money (if we could find a way to bail out our banks, we can find a way to bail out the planet), there is innovation, and there is an enormous and growing need. Now it's time for a light bulb moment.
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