Solar Power is the Only Answer to Light Up Rural Africa

Ecological break defining sub-Saharan Africa (Wikipedia)

by AbuBakr Bahaj, University of Southampton

It is estimated that around one and a half billion people globally have no access to reliable electricity.

Most live in developing countries where the cost of connecting rural villages to the electricity grid is, and will remain, prohibitively expensive.

This is certainly the case in sub-Saharan Africa, where remote villages lie in huge expanses of territory, far from electrified towns and cities.

The 48 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, comprising 800m people, generate power roughly equivalent to Spain, with a population of 45m.

And, incredibly, this figure is falling. Building infrastructure in Africa is a major challenge, and electrifying the continent is perhaps the biggest of all.

This challenge was the target of the our Energy for Development (E4D) programme.

The aim is to set up and implement easy-to-replicate, sustainable, decentralised, off-grid electricity generation for rural communities, which requires overcoming various scientific, engineering, and policy questions challenges.

A key aim was not just to electrify but to invigorate rural communities and village centres by providing a means to support self-governance, finance and entrepreneurship.

The Kitonyoni village market solar project established in Makueni County, southeast Kenya, involved setting up a community-based, energy supply co-operative. This would operate an electricity mini-grid to distribute solar powered electricity.

The mini-grid was designed to supply power to all buildings in the village centre, including shops, cafes, schools, health centres, and churches.

To ensure the project is economically sustainable, the village community contributes to the co-operative and is responsible for running and maintaining the 13.5kW power plant.

Income is generated by co-op membership fees, electricity sales and share ownership, and this covers all the running and maintenance costs. Surplus is also used to provide micro finance for the community, which helps to earn back the project’s initial capital cost.

Obviously the constant supply of strong sunlight throughout the continent makes solar power ideal to tackle Africa’s power shortfall. But solar power appears most commonly as very small scale systems such as for individual household lighting or water pumping.

Large scale projects are emerging however, for exmample the 250kW system in Kigali, Rwanda, and a 1MW plant due to open in December in Kericho County, Kenya, which will be the largest in East Africa.

Energy policy in African states is variable, and suffers from lack of long term investment. Of the US$269 billion invested in renewable energy projects worldwide, only US$4.5 billion was in Africa. The new Kenyan energy policy issued last year, for example, outlines targets for renewable energy.

But regardless, the high initial costs of equipment and lack of expertise has led solar power to be sidelined, national grids expanded to connect urban areas, and rural settlements overlooked.

This is why one of the key aims of the E4D project was to design a modular system that could be easily delivered and customised to suit different villages, and one that would be viable through electricity charges and membership fees within the community, with no expectation of support from government.

An estimated 3,000 local people will benefit from electricity provided in Kitonyoni.

The school, health centre, and the 40 businesses in the village centre have stable, round-the-clock power supply, which allows them to open longer and provide extra services, such as IT training, tailoring and hair dressing that require electrical equipment.

The canopy of the solar power system also collects rain, and the water is stored and sold by the cooperative year round.

The project has undoubtedly transformed the village centre, the villagers' lives, and has also provided the research team with a year’s data to better gauge the system’s performance.

In a year, land prices have more than doubled, five new buildings have been completed, new businesses started, business income has (in most cases) more than doubled and, most importantly, a new maternity ward has been been electrified.

The challenge now is to reduce capital costs and streamline the process of replicating the project elsewhere. A second project in Kenya and one in Cameroon are underway, with others planned in Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa.

Visitors have come from as far afield as the UK, Japan, Germany, Zambia, and from institutions such as the the World Bank and the private sector.

In most developing countries the cost of connecting the national grid to remote regions is too expensive. For rural areas, self-generation is the only viable option, with renewable off-grid solutions in most cases able to provide cheaper options with no fuel cost and low maintenance.

AbuBakr Bahaj receives funding from Research Councils UK, and DFID. The E4D project consortium comprises the University of Southampton’s Sustainable Energy Research Group and the Centre for Global Health Population Poverty and Policy, Imperial College's Business School, and industrial partners IT Power Ltd and GVEP International.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Key to Fighting Climate Change is in the Land

White Box-Yellow Box-Blakely's Red Gum Grassy Woodland and Derived Native Grassland Ecological Community (Photo credit: Australian Network for Plant Conservation)

by Penny van Oosterzee, James Cook University

Australia could lead the world in combating climate change. Wouldn’t you like to believe this was true?

Actually though, Australia has a world-beating model to deal with climate change.

But I’m not talking about energy efficiency programs. I’m not even talking about taxes or an emissions trading scheme. I’m talking about the land.

Climate abatement opportunities from the land are second only to abatement from the energy sector. What we might call the ecosystem sector could provide one third of the entire emissions reductions in Australia.

Here are just some examples of how: avoiding land clearing, changing grazing practises across the savannas, growing trees in salted soils, and managing crops by, say, reducing fertiliser use on sugar cane, and managing rice with less irrigation water.

These are opportunities reasonably well known in that they have methods to measure changes.

But there are large emerging opportunities, including growing mangroves as sea levels rise and sequestering carbon through wetland restoration so the sediment doesn’t flow into the Great Barrier Reef.

Ecosystems are the ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where they are front and centre.

To avoid dangerous climate change, the convention says, the world needs to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations within a timeframe that allows ecosystems to adapt naturally.

Fundamentally this is about how land is managed. Land management is central to our existence; a fact we seem to forget. It is our air and nourishment, our fresh water and shelter. It heals us. And the biodiversity that underpins it all is the context in which we operate.

The thing with climate change is that, worldwide, its impacts are regionally specific. The problems of the Great Barrier Reef are the problems of land management in its river catchments.

These are not the same impacts as those of the salt encrusted catchments running into the Murray Darling, nor the problems of the volatile and feral savanna catchments of the north, or the left-over forests in the catchments of the southeast.

The solutions, too, are regionally specific; which seems obvious. But it is a fact that only in Australia do we have a well developed framework that recognises this. It’s called, regional natural resource management a prosaic term that unfortunately works well at obscuring its great potential.

The regions are based sensibly on Australia’s bioregions, areas with similar ecological characteristics. Funding and grants are distributed to regional bodies which encompass a swathe of organisations, working together, and then on to innumerable projects on the ground.

Importantly, under this framework, the priorities are determined by those at the front line of managing the land’s wicked problems.

Almost incidentally this framework is a good foundation for combating climate change. Landholders could be paid for the ecosystem services they provide.

It’s a simple idea, but the effects could be huge. A pilot study in the Wet Tropics of Queensland, one of the smallest regions in Australia, found the potential carbon dioxide abatement was 1.8 million tons per year.

The pilot study (which incidentally was short-listed for the 2009 Eureka Science Prizes) showed this could be achieved by avoiding deforestation and logging, and reducing nitrogen fertiliser use on sugar cane - the main crop in the region.

It didn’t include reforestation or sustainable grazing, so the estimated carbon abatement is conservative.

If that’s what a small region can do, imagine what the rest of Australia could achieve. There are 55 other regions, and many have much greater potential for carbon abatement than the Wet Tropics.

Theoretically at least it may well be possible to meet Australia’s 5% emissions target by looking after our land and water alone.

But you would need a carbon price that pays landholders for their ecosystem services. The Carbon Farming Initiative is a good framework if it could be streamlined to allow for regional carbon pooling.

Credits generated could ideally be traded within emissions trading schemes, like the one we currently have, or sold to the government under direct action if this action guaranteed an allocation to land management.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics suggests that ecosystems services of our terrestrial ecosystems are worth up to A$325 billion per year. There is a lot riding on this: you don’t just buy emissions, you buy resilient landscapes.

Penny van Oosterzee occasionally consults to regional NRM groups.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.