Almost 1.3 billion people are without access to electricity
globally and another 1 billion people don’t have access to stable electricity
resources. Out of all of them nearly 97 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa and
developing Asia. This has a trickle down effect on other areas of social
development such as education, manufacturing and even retail. [1] Hence
energy is fundamental to the wide array of issues that contemporary social
innovation is concerned with including health, education, women’s empowerment
and poverty [2]
Some of the examples of the use of energy on basic concerns
of people belonging to the bottom of the pyramid are given below for
understanding the far reaching impacts of energy of basic human needs:
Health: Refrigeration
of vaccines and other medicines
Education:
Electricity for reading and doing assignments at night, access to internet
Women’s Empowerment:
Liberating women from difficult time-consuming labor such as washing clothes.
Poverty: Needs of
the businesses to generate electricity for economic activity[2]
The key to providing access to cheap energy for the said
benefits is to have a distributed energy systems, also call the distributed
energy resources (DER). Typically the sources of energy used in this case are
renewables including biomass, hydro and solar in the most part. DER can be used
to address the most pressing situation in the energy sector especially in
Sub-Saharan Africa where centralised system of energy access is insufficient to
provide adequate energy for basic needs.
The greatest barriers to distributed renewable energy
systems are not technical obstacles, but financial, political, and social
hurdles.[3]
Installers of such energy system (technical personnel) often face city and
rural planners with little renewable energy experience and no formal education
to ensure system security and reliability in the long run. Hence it breeds a
lot of skepticism from people who are in need of such solutions to energy
innovation. Some of the policy and design issues that such systems face are as
follows:
·
Consistency of costs to ensure equitable cost
sharing between consumers and system providers
·
Appropriate mechanism to inform developers of
sites more suitable for distributed energy sources
To read about more in depth about the effects of reaching
the poor neighbourhoods through micro wind farms in India please read the
article “Are distributed Energy Systems Optimal in India” published by the
Georgia Institute of Technology. The article is available for free on the
following link
Link to article: http://www.adl.gatech.edu/archives/adlp06070601.pdf
[1]
Five innovations that will electrify Africa http://ssir.org/articles/entry/five_innovations_that_will_electrify_africa
[2]
Energy philanthropy is high impact philanthropy – Rachel Pritzker
[3] Distributed
Renewable Energy Systems – Introduction (http://www.gracelinks.org/2687/distributed-renewable-energy-systems-introduction)
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