Energy Access, Poverty, and Development

The Governance of Small-Scale Renewable Energy in Developing Asia

Benjamin K. Sovacool, Ira Martina Drupady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138261747
• eBook ISBN: 9781317143734
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book showcases how small-scale renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, cookstoves, biogas digesters, microhydro units, and wind turbines are helping Asia respond to a daunting set of energy governance challenges. Using extensive original research this book offers a compendium of the most interesting renewable energy case studies over the last ten years from one of the most diverse regions in the world. Through an in-depth exploration of case studies in Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka, the authors highlight the applicability of different approaches and technologies and illuminates how household and commercial innovations occur (or fail to occur) within particular energy governance regimes. It also, uniquely, explores successful case studies alongside failures or "worst practice" examples that are often just as revealing as those that met their targets. Based on these successes and failures, the book presents twelve salient lessons for policymakers and practitioners wishing to expand energy access and raise standards of living in some of the world's poorest communities. It also develops an innovative framework consisting of 42 distinct factors that explain why some energy development interventions accomplish all of their goals while others languish to achieve any.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Introduction

Energy poverty—lack of access to electricity and dependence on solid biomass fuels for cooking and heating—remains an enduring global problem. Approximately 1.4 billion people still live without electricity, and an additional 2.7 billion people depend entirely on wood, charcoal, and dung for their domestic energy needs.¹ Lack of access to modern energy not only limits opportunities for income generation and blunts efforts to escape poverty, it also severely impacts women and children and contributes to global deforestation and climate change. The search for energy fuels and services is therefore an arduous, daily grind for billions of people around the world, most of them in Asia, where serious repercussions of energy poverty assume different forms depending on geographical terrain, population size, and climatic variations.

However, small-scale renewable energy technologies—solar home systems, residential wind turbines, biogas digesters and gasifiers, microhydro dams, and improved cookstoves—offer these households and communities the ability to tackle extreme poverty, enhance gender equality and education, reduce hunger, provide safe drinking water, improve health, and ensure environmental sustainability. Innovative collaborations and programs involving governments as well as businesses, nonprofit organizations, banks, and community based cooperatives have emerged in recent years to expand access to these technologies and the energy services they offer. All over Asia, these burgeoning partnerships have come in different forms: some focus on improving technological performance, others on providing low-cost loans, still others leasing out systems according to a “fee-for-service” model. But regardless of their approach, such technologies and the programs that support them can drastically improve living standards for some of the poorest communities in the region.

Based on extensive field research, our book showcases how these small-scale renewable energy technologies are helping Asia respond to a daunting set of energy security challenges. The book offers a compendium of the most interesting renewable energy case studies over the last ten years from one of the most diverse regions in the world. This book examines ten different case studies of the developing and scaling up of renewable energy technologies, six of them successes, four of them failures, in Bangladesh, China, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea.

What Makes This Book Special

As the United Nations International Year of Sustainable Energy kicks off this year in 2012, four things set this book apart from other research works supporting efforts to expand energy access, improve efficiency and increase the use of renewable energy worldwide.

First and foremost, the book focuses intensely on the topic of household energy security in developing countries, mostly in rural areas. Roughly one-third of the entire population of developing countries consumes less than the equivalent of $1 per day in goods and services; one-fifth of them have no access to modern healthcare services; one-third lack safe drinking water; and two-thirds lack access to sanitation.² These regions therefore face entirely distinct energy security threats than the ones confronting industrialized economies such as the United States or those comprising the European Union.

Although energy poverty is a global problem of epidemic proportions, it is frequently neglected in energy planning discussions and academic publications. Already more than a decade ago, Daniel Kammen and Michael R. Dove wrote that advanced and modern technologies related to electricity and motorized transport (such as “nuclear reactors” and “electric vehicles”) were highly favored topics of energy research yet “mundane” technologies such as cookstoves, biogas units, heating and cooling systems, and other less “state-of-the-art” topics were minimally investigated, even though these technologies affected the greatest number of people and had the most substantial impact on the environment in everyday life.³ Ten years later, Fatih Birol, the Chief Economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA), argued that “unfortunately, the energy-economics community has given far less attention to the challenge of energy poverty among the world’s poorest people.”⁴ And most recently, a series of content analyses of the top energy journals noted that only three percent of authors came from least developed countries and less than eight percent of papers addressed topics related to energy poverty and energy development.⁵

This lack of focus is alarming, for without access to electricity, many households across the developing world must rely on candles, biomass, and kerosene lamps that burn fuel for lighting. One in three people in the world obtain light from such fuels and pay $40 billion per year, or 20 percent of global lighting costs, to do so. In spite of bearing these costs, they only receive 0.1 percent of the world’s lighting energy services.⁶ In the realm of cooking, “conventional” or “traditional” stoves emit a great deal of smoke into the home (akin to “living constantly inside a giant cigarette”), which can cause acute respiratory illnesses among inhabitants that regularly lead to death.

Second, the book offers a neutral, critical evaluation of notable energy access projects harnessing renewable energy sources. Neither of the authors is associated with any of the projects studied nor the institutions involved with them. We are thus able to offer dispassionate, objective analysis of the strengths and weaknesses evident in different national approaches and programs. As part of this critical analysis, our book discusses six case studies of success, commonly referred to as “best practices,” alongside four case studies of failure, or “worst practices.” Our inquiry comes at a time when the need for a rigorous, independent and comprehensive evaluation of renewable energy access efforts is becoming more apparent. One recent study found, for example, that no less than 140 countries (including 50 least developed countries) have some type of national energy access target or program, figures reflected in Table 1.1.⁷ Yet most of these programs lack independent monitoring and evaluation, so it remains difficult to share credible information about best technologies and practices.⁸ Our book fills this gap.

Third, our book is comparative, looking at ten countries and cases, and sociotechnical, meaning we examine not only technologies but also the influence of things such as social behavior, governance regimes, regulations, and price signals. All case studies uncover the increasingly conventional wisdom of polycentric approaches, where desired elements such as equity, inclusivity, accountability, and adaptability are better achieved in seamless power sharing between overlapping and multiple scales of governance, mechanism and actors.⁹

Table 1.1 Developing countries with energy access targets

Put another way, our research sits at the nexus between technology, politics, development, and energy security.¹⁰ We identify not only the programmatic factors that often result in the success or failure of individual case studies, but also the complex agendas of international and bilateral energy and development agencies, manufacturers, research planners, politicians, and community leaders. The narrative that results is more complex, though we believe accurate, than assessments and reports that commonly assess only one or two of these variables in isolation.

Lastly, our books adds to the body of knowledge on renewable energy development through primary data collection that arises from original extensive research interviews with more than 400 energy experts, representing roughly 200 institutions, over a period of four years. These interviews have been supplemented by an exhaustive review of contemporary scientific and technical literature on energy governance, access, and security issues, as well as by 90 site visits and consultations with 781 community members. Our book therefore allows for a rich and meaningful analysis that addresses the breach between perceptions of stakeholders and facts on the ground experienced by the energy poor themselves.

The remainder of this introductory chapter begins by investigating the concepts of energy poverty, the energy ladder, and energy equity. It then details the most up-to-date statistics on rural energy use and energy poverty in Asia before summarizing the research methods utilized in the book. The final part of the introduction previews the case studies and chapters to come.

Conceptualizing Energy Poverty

As there is no simple definition of poverty, conceptualizing “energy poverty” is a somewhat arduous process. Recent work, including the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report, has noted that poverty is not a static or fixed state, but instead a multi-dimensional concept encompassing caloric intake, life expectancy, housing quality, literacy, access to energy, and a variety of other factors.¹¹ Such poverty is frequently expressed from an income perspective: to be “poor” is to earn less than $2 per day when adjusted for the purchasing power parity of countries. Under this definition, a shocking 40 percent of the global population is poor.¹² Sticking with the UNDP’s multidimensional notion of poverty, factors such as health, education, and living conditions can be just as important as sources of employment or wages. Within this list of nonincome dimensions, two energy indicators are found: electricity (having no electricity constitutes poverty) and cooking fuels (relying on wood, charcoal, and/or dung for cooking constitutes poverty). Such a conception of energy poverty has been confirmed by the IEA and other multilateral organizations which state that energy poverty is comprised of lack of access to electricity and reliance on traditional biomass fuels for cooking.¹³

Thus, the UNDP explicitly defines energy poverty as the “inability to cook with modern cooking fuels and the lack of a bare minimum of ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Note on Authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Benefits of Renewable Energy Access
• 3 Grameen Shakti in Bangladesh
• 4 The Renewable Energy Development Project in China
• 5 The Rural Electrification Project in Laos
• 6 The Rural Electricity Access Project in Mongolia
• 7 The Rural Energy Development Project in Nepal
• 8 The Energy Services Delivery Project in Sri Lanka
• 9 The Village Energy Security Programme in India
• 10 The Solar Home Systems Project in Indonesia
• 11 The Small Renewable Energy Power Program in Malaysia
• 12 The Teachers Solar Lighting Project in Papua New Guinea
• 13 Lessons Learned
• 14 Conclusion
• Appendix List of Institutions Interviewed/Visited
• Index