Kammen, D. (2016). Empowering Communities with Sustainable Energy. Solutions 7(2): 33–37. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/empowering-communities-with-sustainable-energy/
Perspectives Empowering Communities with Sustainable Energy by Daniel M. Kammen
O
f all the global challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, two seem likely to overshadow the rest: persistent, widespread energy poverty (and associated lost economic opportunities), and rapid disruption of the global climate. These crises are inexorably linked. A lack of modern energy services impacts every aspect of life, and the legacy and future of fossil-fuel use threatens the climate for everyone, but the poor most immediately and most acutely, since they are the most vulnerable to environmental disruptions. Recent advances in clean energy technologies and market innovation to support clean energy dissemination have resulted in reduced planning for universal, clean energy access even while many hurdles still stand in the way of our implementing this future. Mini-grids and products for individual end-use of energy, such as solar home systems and pay-as-you-go solar energy products, have benefitted from dramatic price falls and advances in the performance of solid state electronics, cellular communications technologies, and electronic banking as well as a sharp decline in solar energy costs.1 This mix of technological and market innovation is contributing to a vibrant new energy services sector that, in many nations, is outpacing the growth of traditional centralized electricity grids. Around the world, access to electricity is strongly linked to a wide range of social goods. When people have access to electricity, their gross national income, life expectancy, educational attainment, gender equality in educational opportunity, and the percentage of students who reach key milestones goes up while the
Russell Watkins/DFID
A woman in Bariadi, Tanznia displays her solar lighting kit.
proportion of people who are poor or affected by childhood mortality both decline (Figure 1).2 Grid expansion has roughly kept pace with the increase in global population, but has not significantly decreased the persistent gap. About 1.5 billion people in 2013 were completely off-grid, mostly in rural areas and underserved city fringes. The electricity-poor rely mostly on kerosene and traditional biomass, including dung and agricultural residues. But, even as grids expand and the population grows, this access gap persists. Traditional grid extension programs will be too slow to reach these communities, relegating a very large number of people in the neediest
countries to lives with substantially fewer options for self-development. Even in the developed world, many connected people experience significant power outages from 20 to 200 or more days per year, and current forecasts suggest this number could remain roughly unchanged until the year 2030. One opportunity to cut into the large numbers of people who have no access, and to improve the reliability of the current and emerging grids, is to take greater advantage of the decreased cost and increased functions possible with the new generation of communication technologies and the data capacity of modern information systems.
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