MORE than now have access to electricity for the first time thanks to simple solar power systems that typically provide LED lights and a phone charger. More powerful versions include radios and even televisions.
The LEDs provide a clean and cheap alternative to the kerosene lamps normally used by those with no electricity. “People spend 50 cents a day on kerosene,” says Nick Hughes, co-founder of M-KOPA Solar of Kenya, which has sold 550,000 home solar power systems in East Africa. Some families spend on fuel for lighting. “It’s a crazy price for a poor fuel,” says Hughes.
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His firm has it needs to finance a million more systems, and Hughes thinks they could eventually sell up to 11 million in East Africa alone. And M-KOPA is just one of many companies now selling solar power systems to people who lack electricity around the world. There is, in short, no doubt that the off-grid renewable energy revolution has begun. But where is it going to end up?
In South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, about 1.3 billion people still lack electricity. Some think off-grid energy systems will expand to fill this gap. If so, that could let the world’s poorest people leapfrog conventional electricity grids powered by fossil fuels entirely and go directly to 100 per cent renewable systems.
“In South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, about 1.3 billion people still don’t have electricity”
Critics argue that low-power solar is no substitute for getting poor people onto more plentiful and cheaper grid electricity. However, for the hundreds of millions of those with no immediate prospect of getting such electricity, off-grid is better than nothing. And as the technology improves and prices fall, the systems will become ever more powerful.
Most of those who lack electricity live in rural regions far from the grid. Providing them with access to electricity isn’t just a matter of basic human rights and fairness. It has also , from improving educational attainment to boosting incomes. So there is wide agreement about its importance.
But how do you do it? Until recently, the main option besides grid connection was to set up microgrids covering multiple homes powered by diesel generators, which are expensive and highly polluting.
Light work
Now the falling prices of solar panels and batteries, along with more energy-efficient appliances such as LED bulbs and televisions, have created another option. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated earlier this year that solar home systems to another 70 million people over the next five years.
“Off-grid energy has incredibly high social consequences,” said Paolo Frankl, head of the IEA’s renewable division, at the report’s launch.
Indeed, some proponents of off-grid solar argue that it can while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That seems like a massive win-win situation: tackling poverty and climate change at the same time.
But it’s not that simple. “Anyone who tells you that this is about tackling climate change is misleading you,” says Varun Sivaram of the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, and author of a forthcoming book on solar power called Taming the Sun.
For starters, the poorest people use hardly any energy compared with the richest, whether they have electricity or not. “Rising levels of access to modern energy have a negligible impact on emissions,” .
What’s more, cheap solar power systems have their limitations. When Greenpeace set up a low-power solar microgrid in an Indian village in 2014, the villagers were so disappointed they .
They may have been right to do so, as several studies have found that basic home solar doesn’t appear to provide the broader socio-economic benefits of grid access. A by Michaël Aklin at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleagues found no evidence that after its introduction people saved more, started more businesses or spent more time working or studying. “It’s not a silver bullet,” he says.
The reason is probably that these systems provide so little electricity. Beefier systems are available but cost much more.
Home solar systems do at least reduce kerosene use, which is a . “That’s great news,” says Aklin. “Kerosene is nasty for health.”
When it comes to providing access to electricity, most gains will come from extending conventional grids, says Sivaram. And indeed many countries are trying to do exactly that. Both India, which has 260 million people without electricity, and Nigeria, which has 80 million, have .
But electrification will take time. A 2015 report forecast that will have access to electricity by 2040, for instance.
So off-grid solar does have a valuable role to play, says Sivaram. In the areas where grid access will be a long time coming or will never be practical, countries should be encouraging private companies such as M-KOPA. That means getting rid of import tariffs that make solar expensive in some African countries, as well as the kerosene subsidy in India, which makes it difficult for solar to compete.
Providing electricity alone, of course, isn’t enough. It’s no use having a socket if you have nothing to plug into it. This is where the innovative business models M-KOPA is pioneering could make a big difference.
Few people in poor regions can afford to buy a solar power system outright. Instead, using a payment system based on mobile phone credit, they pay M-KOPA a deposit followed by small daily payments. After a year, they own the system outright. If they miss a payment, the system stops working until they resume. “We can turn them on and off remotely,” says Hughes.
So M-KOPA is effectively lending money to people who would never normally be able to get a loan. “We have a really good repayment rate, in excess of 90 per cent,” says Hughes.
This approach could allow people to buy bigger appliances such as refrigerators, along with farming equipment and maybe even (see “Climate-friendly cooking“). “Our technology works with anything that turns on and off,” says Hughes.
“Less than 80 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans will have access to electricity by 2040”
Given this, full grid access won’t necessarily put companies like M-KOPA out of business, then. But more surprisingly, they may be able to keep selling solar systems even to people with grid access. The grids in many countries are extremely unreliable, so solar-powered microgrids are likely to be used in conjunction with the conventional grid. “The quality of the grid is very poor. There are lots of blackouts,” says Aklin. “I see potential for a combined system.”
These backup microgrids could remain separate from the grid, says Sivaram, or could be designed to feed power into it. In other words, off-grid renewables could end up merging with the grid, making it more resilient.
“It’s important to neither see off-grid as a magical perfect solution or useless,” says Aklin. “The truth is somewhere in-between.”
Climate-friendly cooking
Around 3 billion people – including many with electricity – such as wood, dung and charcoal. This produces plenty of indoor pollution and .
You might think that wood and dung are forms of renewable energy and thus climate friendly, but cooking with them produces black carbon and methane, both of which make the planet hotter. Phasing out traditional stoves would prevent tens of millions of premature deaths and reduce global warming by 0.1°C by 2100, .
India is encouraging people to switch to gas cookers, which are far less polluting. Moving to solar would be even better, says Mahesh Bhave, whose firm Bhave Power Systems plans to sell induction cookers powered by solar-charged batteries. “Nobody is thinking about [solar] cooking,” he says.
Running induction cookers requires 1500 to 2000-watt systems, which is much more than most home solar can currently provide, but is fast becoming achievable as the prices of solar panels and batteries fall.
Bhave is also targeting homes connected to the grid. He thinks he can sell solar microgrids that run induction cookers to relatively wealthy apartment blocks to act as a backup to unreliable mains power.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Catch the sun”
