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African Villages Glow With Renewable Energy
Peace Corps Online writes "The NY Times reports that as small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries playing an epic, transformative role. With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford. 'You're seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,' says energy adviser Dana Younger. In addition to small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and 'mini' hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village. 'It's a phenomenon that's sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,' says Younger."
But where can I buy these cheap lighting systems? If they're cheap enough for a yurt, I can probably get a payment plan.
A yurt is essentially a surface biogas chamber. Owing mainly to the yak milk they drink all year long.
I keep seeing these stories about how some poor sod is able to light his house with HE solar lights. But that is kind of trivial. What people need is useful amounts of power. The kind that can run a computer, or a blender, or a power saw.
Without that, all you've done for them is saved them the trouble of lighting a torch. Or a lantern.
Don't underestimate the importance of having interior light after sundown. In many villages, it is impossible to do any reading or studying since there is no artificial light, and work must be done outside while the sun is up. We take for granted the ability to read a book after the sun goes down, but this ability is critical for poor people in developing nations to better themselves.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=232874
KIPTUSURI, Kenya (The New York Times) — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.
Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.
Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.
That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.
“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.
Since Ms. Ruto hooked up the system, her teenagers’ grades have improved because they have light for studying. The toddlers no longer risk burns from the smoky kerosene lamp. And each month, she saves $15 in kerosene and battery costs — and the $20 she used to spend on travel.
In fact, neighbors now pay her 20 cents to charge their phones, although that business may soon evaporate: 63 families in Kiptusuri have recently installed their own solar power systems.
“You leapfrog over the need for fixed lines,” said Adam Kendall, head of the sub-Saharan Africa power practice for McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. “Renewable energy becomes more and more important in less and less developed markets.”
The United Nations estimates that 1.5 billion people across the globe still live without electricity, including 85 percent of Kenyans, and that three billion still cook and heat with primitive fuels like wood or charcoal.
There is no reliable data on the spread of off-grid renewable energy on a small scale, in part because the projects are often installed by individuals or tiny nongovernmental organizations.
But Dana Younger, senior renewable energy adviser at the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private lending arm, said there was no question that the trend was accelerating. “It’s a phenomenon that’s sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,” Mr. Younger said.
With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford, he noted. “You’re seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,” Mr. Younger said.
In Africa, nascent markets for the systems have sprung up in Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Ghana as well as in Kenya, said Francis Hillman, an energy entrepreneur who recently shifted his Eritrea-based business, Phaesun Asmara, from large solar projects financed by nongovernmental organizations to a greater emphasis on tiny rooftop systems.
People in poor areas aren't running all those appliances; they're running 4-watt light bulbs per TFS. Plus prices in the US aren't the same as around the world.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
These are smaller panels, intended for basic needs--i.e. lights after dark. 4 Watts for several hours lighting a room, or even a small portion of a farm plot for plants or livestock... Now productivity doesn't stop at dusk. 18 hours days become possible... For cooking: the shi-t-reactors. Ever burn a buffalo turd? It burns. : )
I don't know why but this link bypasses the paywall: click.
They're essentially using scaled up versions of those stakes you stick in the yard next to your cement walk to light their houses. You know, the ones that cost 8 bucks and consist of a small solar panel, a couple of NiCads, an ic and an LED or two?
Aside from what other posters have noted, I think you forget one crusial point: You have access to a well maintained electrical system, an African village does not. The alternative to using decentralized renewable energy sources is to wait for the central government to build power plants and wires all over the country. Which requires a lot of organization and stability, not to mention that such structures are prime targets during the unrests that plague Africa.
To some extent this is similar to how phone networks are spreading in Africa. Building centralized phone networks and putting copper in the ground requires a large investment, making it somewhat infeasable. However, building a few mobile phone towers is a much smaller investment and, thus, much more feasable for a business. Over time, if the business yields a profit, more towers can be constructed, giving better coverage. Or one can make trade aggreements between the different service providers to ensure maximum coverage.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
...of you, to not know about the central problem of development we've been discovering since the 1960's. By the 90's, it was accepted wisdom and changes slowly began to be made, despite all the money to be made from selling them hydroelectric dams.
You see, attempting to catapult unready societies into the late industrial revolution from a 1700's-era starting point kept failing and failing and failing. Books like "The Road to Hell" by aid professional Michael Maren and "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins brought out how so much of that "aid" was to benefit the givers, not the receivers. Perkins was particularly damning about hydroelectric dams and power stations being built all over the world with "aid" money all those loans that went into default. It was a straightforward recipe:
(1) Bogus economic study of how the country would blossom and prosper if only they had power, a market would explode as soon as it was available, and the national or World Bank loan would be paid back in years. (Perkins' job - he goes over it in detail for Ecuador and Indonesia).
(2) Local "400 families" get extravagant cuts of the action, of course, and they approve the deal, being also the government.
(3) Dam is built, Western engineering firms do well, 400 families do well, local people are bumped off the reservoir land, sometimes at gunpoint, etc.
(4) No market actually arises, country wasn't ready after all, loan goes into default.
(5) People of country end up with higher taxes and lower services for about 40 years to pay back World Bank and IMF.
High capital investments come with high risk. You can substitute "coal-fired" for "hydroelectric" if you like, it actually makes it worse since you now have to develop TWO major plants - a coal mine and a power station - with a populace that has trouble keeping a local chlorine-drip 1-man water treatment plant running reliably.
We built up to a massively centralized economy with small numbers of very large stations and plants and factories and so forth for power and materiel production, only after more than a century of slowly scaling up from very small distributed ones. We thought we could take them straight to Big Industry, and we were wrong. And it was not an "honest mistake"; the decision to try that at all was highly affected by the profits to be made just attempting it, because others had to pay the price for the error.
lives. Give them a $20 cellphone and a $20 solar panel with LED light and battery charger; this alone will transform their life in a multitude of ways.
Solar panels are also being used to sterilize drinking water, cook, and even more exciting - provide refrigeration. Many batches of vaccines in the past have gone bad because of lack of refrigeration. Refrigeration also helps to preserve food nutrition.
To quote the Mosquito Coast, "Ice is civilization"
Bingo. Most of these commenters are clearly not reading TFA. It describes the woman having to take a 3-hour ride and pay a fee *to charge her cell phone*. This economic decision of hers wasn't made lightly, she shopped and worked it out the way you'd have to justify buying a car. With this trickle of power, she has lighting at night, and she can charge the cell phone, and she can charge others in the village to charge *their* cell-phones, though that payback is just for early adopters; everybody in her village will have them soon.
The picture gets better going forward five years. By then, most poor Africans will have cell phones. LED lighting is expected to double in lumens/watt efficiency in that time, and more so in economic efficiency as prices may drop by 40%. (The market for LED over here is going to explode soon, because Compact-Fluorescent is always going to look bluish and cold, but LED's are coming out now with CRI [colour indexes] as nice as incandescent. The economies of scale will start to kick in then.) And, of course, solar panels are improving too.
At some point, development in these places will reach a point where they have so many electrical needs that they will pay for a few local wires to a small generator. Once the locals pay to wire up the village, a market has just appeared for an entrepreneur who can get a line out to them from a real power station. At least we can hope that works, since 50 years of attempts to teleport these villages from nothing to mid-20th century in one Big Development have done almost nothing but fail.
I've put a solar panel array in the back yard....it wasn't cheap...
How much would it have cost you to have grid power if it hadn't been installed already at your house? If the nearest bit of the grid were just a mile away, you'd probably be out a good $50,000 -- and a lot of these villages are a lot further from reliable power than that. Don't forget that in some of these remote areas a long stretch of unguarded power line might as well have a "Steal me for free scrap metal!" sign on it, too. Gasoline or diesel (not to mention spare parts) for a generator are going to be costly and difficult to acquire.
If each home runs a pair of 4-watt LEDs for six hours each evening, that's 48 watt-hours: four hours of daytime sunlight from a small 12-watt panel (let's say five hours to allow for losses). That's well below-average sun for rural Africa, and even a modest battery should be able to carry them through a few days of cloud. (In a pinch, they can cut back to one lamp for a few nights, too.) There's no inverter costs or losses; the whole system can run at 12 volts DC.
~Idarubicin
You're basically right, but you're reading the numbers wrong. Those aren't birth rate numbers you linked: it's a ratio of births to deaths. Hence why the USA at 0.97 is considered falling. But the 2.15 figure means over twice as many births as deaths. Maintaining a population requires a birth rate of around 2.1, not 2.5; either way, the industrialized world is on the wrong side of the number.
Still doesn't change the fact that, by disallowing them to use the massive amounts of coal under their feet, we're disallowing them to build infrastructure and means of production so that they can accumulate capital.
How does a single village build a coal-fired power plant?
How does a rural community accumulate capital if they can only accomplish tasks during daylight hours -- and then can only accomplish enough to maintain a subsistence agricultural lifestyle?
~Idarubicin
Except as others have pointed out, this yields two incredibly important things:
1. More available hours to work. This means improved education (more time to study) and increased productivity.
2. More reliable communications - the solar power system allows villagers to charge cellular telephones and radios.
These things will improve the villagers abilities to do things for themselves rather than rely on aid dollars. Education and productivity produce wealth, not coal plants built by foreigners. With education and communication will come stability, and with stability the ability to create the solid infrastructure that will be important. Unfortunately I think you're putting the cart before the horse here.
I'm not sure I agree on your efficiency there. I have replaced 60+W incandescents with the curly CFLs that used something like 15W and am now replacing THOSE with LED that use 8W and are rated as "40W replacements". Except that they produce as much or more light than the CFL in the right fixture! In one case in particular the change in brightness was striking and a very large improvement.
I am using the $30 Sylvania "Ultra LED" lights which are new and part of their High Performance Series. Lowes, in the US, sells these cheaper than anyone I've found BTW. In a "can" fixture in the ceiling in my bathroom they proved to light instantly as compared to the slow glow curlies and to provide MORE light. In the light fixtures on my porch however they proved too directional and created bad shadows. In my normal bathroom sconces they work awesome and in my nightstand lamp they also work great. Used in a freestanding torch sort of light they threw too sharp a shadow line as most of the light went up and not out. I have yet to find one of either CFL or LEF that can replace a single bright 100W incandescent in a ceiling fan I have. :-(
I have begun using some other LEDs in a pendant fixture that used to use incandescent and it's working okay but not as well as the Sylvania bulbs. The LED is a much whiter\bluer light than CFL in my experience so far but they are WAY cooler and use way less juice. The cost is a bit rude but so far they seem to be holding up very well - for the price they had better.
In any case for efficiency I'd argue on the side of LED over CFL for sure based on my experience. Perhaps if I wasn't driving them from 120v mains that wouldn't be the case and I realize that in the case of running them off of a battery they aren't using 120v. I'd still argue for LED though since they are much less fragile!
What I'd really like to know is how well the Sylvania Ultra LED floods work. The price of admission has been too high for me to try them yet but if they work well I have several 150Watt floods I'd LOVE to dump! These are on motion sensors and swapping them so high in the air would be a chore but the overall cost savings long term might be worth it if someone could vouch that they don't suck :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Sometimes the poorest of the poor lead the way. Adoption of efficient lighting methods reminds me of the tendency of slum dwellers to recycle every item almost endlessly. One pair of pants may be used by three kids growing up. No beer can is safe in the trash from the poor scavenging for aluminum. Folks who are better off lack motivation.