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Energy Governance Map - China

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Energy Governance Map - Kenya

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September 29, 2017

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Visual anthropologist Austin Lord's photo essay on the Tamakoshi hydroelectric dam in Nepal.
http://www.austinlord.com/The-Turbulent-Interface/

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Getting to Grips with Sustainable Development Goal #7 and Energy in the Global South

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Getting to Grips with Sustainable Development Goal #7 and Energy in the Global South

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Elsevier Video with Prof Ben Sovacool

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EU Energy Policy and Regional Economic Cooperation

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Benjamin Sovacool discusses energy use in developing countries

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Introducing Energy Sessions, a forum which invites top researchers to give their thoughts on the BIG questions in energy. Benjamin Sovacool, Director of the Sussex Energy Group, Sussex University gives his thoughts on Goal 7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, discussing the social and behavioural dimensions of energy use in developing countries.

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Article looking at how Africa has become the leading market for leading solar technology

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Electricity at night, Global Map

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Last week's Marrakech climate summit shone a light on Morocco's clean energy plans, which have drawn praise from around the world. At the heart of King Mohammed VI's ambitions is a windfarm in the country's south-west region, which, due to an expansion over the summer, has seen off an array of challengers for the title of Africa's biggest.

Built in just two years and launched in 2015, the Tarfaya complex stretches more than 100 square km across the Saharan desert, its 131 wind turbines grinding out enough electricity to power a city the size of Marrakech every day.

But the renewable energy project is also controversial with some Sahrawi - the people who live in the west of the Sahara desert - who complain that it will deepen what they say is the occupation of their land.

The Western Sahara dispute traces back to November 1975, when Morocco oversaw a 350,000-strong " green march " from Tarfaya across the region, as Spain was beginning a haphazard decolonisation. A mass flight of Sahrawi refugees and decades of armed conflict followed, as the UN declared the region a "non self-governing territory".

When UN chief Ban Ki-moon described the situation as an occupation earlier this year, dozens of UN staff were expelled from the country.

Today, Tarfaya is a sleepy concrete village, sparsely surrounded by military checkpoints, camel trains, inlets dotted with flamingos - and 12 waves of turbines that rise from the Saharan sand dunes like a desert circus.

Their performance is a showstopper. Tarfaya annually saves 900 tonnes of CO2 emissions - and around $200m of oil imports. It has brought new transmission lines which, officials say, guarantee power supplies to Sahrawi communities, even if many still complain that they are excluded from the green tech industry.

Hafsa Tarfaoui, a 25 year-old civil engineer at the plant, herself Sahrawi, said: "It is not that Sahrawis don't find jobs in the windfarm industry. When we want to recruit a person, the priority is finding a person from this area. The problem is the lack of universities and places to study here. If you have no diploma, how can they offer you a job?"

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Hafsa Tarafayoui, a young Sahrawi who works at the Tarfaya plant. Photograph: Arthur Neslen

Tarfaoui got her first job at the plant after years of study but says: "If I was a Sahrawi with zero experience I wouldn't be here." Of the plant's 60 or so workers, there are two other Sahrawi office staff members and 15 security guards.

While Tarfaya sits on the Moroccan side of the Western Sahara border, four existing or soon-to-exist windfarms are situated on the other side.

By 2020, wind and solar resources in Western Sahara could provide more than a quarter of Morocco's clean energy, which will power 42% of Morocco's electricity.

The Tarfaya plant gives 400,000 Dirhams (£32,000) to a local town each year. It sponsors local projects and youth vacations, as well as funding a street lighting programme in Tarfaya.

Map shows existing and planned windfarms in the region.
Map shows existing and planned windfarms in the region.

But that has not stopped opposition to the windfarm. While a declaration signed with the EU in Marrakech should lead to an export deal for the country's clean electricity to Europe next year, 51 MEPs have already written to the European commission and Ban Ki-moon, protesting against any of it coming from Western Sahara.

Ali Salem Tamek, the vice-president of Codesa, a Sahrawi human rights collective, said in a email: "It is amazing to have green energy. It is our responsibility as human beings to protect the world we live in, but if you occupy your neighbours yard to produce that green energy - and sell it to them at the end - believe me, your neighbours will not be happy about it."

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Saharan activist Ali Salem Tamek has campaigned for the inclusion of Sahrawis in the clean energy process. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

A face-to-face interview with Tamek was impossible during the fortnight-long UN climate talks, after a security clampdown saw activists arrested and at least one Algerian journalist, Hamza Hamouchene, deported to Agadir. Morocco has been ranked 131 st out of 180 countries for press freedom.

Tamek warned of unrest if Sahrawi voices were shut out of the clean energy process. "Multinational companies are dividing our country's natural resources without consulting or benefiting the Sahrawi people and we have recently seen a huge protest in the refugee camps against Siemens and Enel," he wrote. "In the occupied territories of Western Sahara there is growing awareness about this, and growing understanding of the long-term consequences."

In Morocco, some environmentalists sympathise with the Sahrawis but wonder whether the planet has time to wait for "national liberation movements" to win their struggles before cutting carbon emissions. Others argue that without a just transition to low-carbon societies, public support will inevitably turn to disaffection, with undesirable consequences.

A recent report by Western Saharan Resource Watch, a network of pro-Sahrawi groups, accused the King of using the region's windfarms to enrich himself, and cement Moroccan dominion with vital energy infrastructure.

"Green energy production is making Morocco's plunder of the territory even more lucrative," the report said. "Siemens and the Italian company Enel ... win Moroccan tenders in Western Sahara by partnering with the energy company owned by the king of Morocco. Would the king be interested in a process of self-determination and decolonisation in Western Sahara when he, himself, is benefiting from the Moroccan army's illegal presence there?"

The report backed calls by Tamek for Siemens and Enel to withdraw from Saharan projects to help advance the region's moribund peace process.

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Tarfaya's windfarm features 131 turbines. Photograph: Arthur Neslen

Such demands provoke incredulity among Morocco's political elite. Hakima el-Haité, the country's environment minister, responded: "What would [they] prefer: to have energy or to be isolated? To have wind energy or be located near a coal installation?

"The political issue is solved," she added. "I don't know any 'Western Sahara'. In my country there is only the Sahara and the south of Morocco."

El-Haité insists that 90% of the local population are happy with the project, and just "0.0001% of the population" have criticisms. "Maybe the people you spoke to are not citizens of Morocco?" she said.

All the same, some public support is thought to have waned after hundreds of Sahrawi workers were laid off when the plant's construction finished. "It was a bit brutal," the engineer Tarfaoui admitted.

The huge state-owned OCP company, which mines phosphates for global fertiliser use has been a lightning conductor for Sahrawi protests. That has been partly fuelled by an OCP subsidiary's claim that 95% of its energy came from a nearby windfarm.

The suggestion appears questionable. Abdellatif al-Ghali, Tarfaya's director, said that specific industries could not be powered by the turbines. "We just transmit electricity to the national grid," he said. "Our exclusive customer is ONEE (the national electricity firm) and that is who we generate electricity for." On-site engineers confirmed this.

For now, the biggest threat to the remote renewable power plant comes from three highly poisonous snake species - and two types of scorpions - some of which can kill a person within 30 minutes. Signs instruct workers to kick the doors of power substation huts before entry, and then stand back, just in case.

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Maintenance engineer Nabil Fadili described the challenges that the Tarfaya complex faces. Photograph: Arthur Neslen

Nabil Fadili, a 28-year-old maintenance engineer at Tarfaya, said: "The biggest challenge we face is keeping the plant's availability all year round. We aim for 95% availability and it is really hard."

Western Sahara's coastal strip is one of the region's windiest areas with a wind load factor of around 46%. "It is windier than in the Netherlands or Belgium," el-Ghali said.

In the calmer winter months, winds can drop off dramatically but the 317MW plant was still operating at 73.5MW of capacity when the Guardian visited.

On the Saharan beaches that day, fishermen living in huts made of tarpaulin and rubbish unfurled their nets as usual, between jagged cliffs that looked as though someone had hacked them off with a saw.

At Tan Tan airport, security officials continued their heightened checks on new arrivals and departures, as the Marrakech climate summit continued, a world away.

"A planetary crisis on the scale of climate change can only be met by an approach based on fairness, between countries and within countries," said Friends of the Earth's Asad Rehman at the Marrakech conference. "Without that, no political leader will be able to convince citizens of the need for the transformation required, to create a safer and more equal world for us all."
Topics

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Africa's biggest windfarm sparks controversy in the desert

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Last week's Marrakech climate summit shone a light on Morocco's clean energy plans, which have drawn praise from around the world. At the heart of King Mohammed VI's ambitions is a windfarm in the country's south-west region, which, due to an expansion over the summer, has seen off an array of challengers for the title of Africa's biggest.

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Hydro-electric infrastructure in post earthquake Nepal 

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Hydro-electric infrastructure in post earthquake Nepal 

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In April 2015, Nepal was in the early stages of ambitious plans to develop its significant hydropower potential when the earthquakes inflicted substantial damage on the country's existing hydropower infrastructure. Many power plants went temporarily offline, and major repairs will be necessary in the coming months. Overall, the hydropower industry sustained estimated losses of $180 million: facilities representing one-seventh of the country's installed generation capacity were severely damaged; hundreds of miles of distribution lines will need to be reconstructed; and 600,000 households lost access to electricity. Projects currently under construction will be significantly delayed, as access roads remain blocked and the risk of landslides remains heightened during monsoons. As a result, the government of Nepal has retracted its recent commitment to end scheduled brownouts-up to fourteen hours daily-by 2018. In the short term, at least, progress toward turning Nepal into a "hydropower nation" has been stalled. But what about the medium- and long-term prognosis?

Since 2008, our research in Nepal has focused on evolving patterns of hydropower development. Well before the earthquake of April 25, hydropower professionals were reluctant to discuss links between seismic risk and hydropower production. Four developers went so far as to say that the economic need for development in Nepal outweighed the risk of earthquakes. According to these respondents, earthquakes were simply a fact of life and should not interrupt or delay the development of dams. Another engineer told us: "This is a silly question. All the components will be defined on the basis of earthquake risks." Here, seismic activity was presented as a calculable risk that could be managed through technological intervention. On one hand, this denial or omission of earthquake potential seemed to point out the ineluctable challenges that Nepal faces in attempting to integrate its economy into global markets, and on the other, it indexed the desire of the private sector to reap profits from hydropower in spite of obvious geophysical risks. Water activists have been pointing to this omission for years, especially in light of predictions that "the next big one" was already decades late. With less than 800 megawatts of electricity currently available, discussions of hydropower development in Nepal are very much about forecasting and extrapolating differently imagined futures based on competing claims to information. Whose future vision will prevail?

Future site of the Upper Karnali Hydroelectric Project. Photo by Christopher Butler.

The earthquake would seem to lend credence to those who advocated for a slower, more deliberative expansion of hydropower that prioritizes multipurpose projects over export-oriented projects built solely for electricity production and run-of-the-river projects over large storage/reservoir projects. It would also seem to suggest that developers ought to be required to consider the seismic and geomorphological risks inherent to certain projects. However, free-market advocates for expedited development with an eye for export and trade argue that revenue for Nepal's recovery is needed now. In Nepal, large projects take the form of public-private partnership agreements, where state and private entities enter into a agreement to share risks-a structure that relies on cheap financing from state-subsidized banks, which are now in decline in the global North following the financial crisis. How will new assessments of seismic risk shift these agreements? Central to these debates and their outcomes is the way that seismicity, realized or unrealized, shapes perceptions of financial risk.

At the same time, our own observations from the Rasuwa and Dolakha districts also indicate that the hydropower sector played an important role in disaster response, especially in rural areas where local government was lacking. After the earthquake, thousands of people found temporary shelter in hydropower project facilities. The hydropower sector distributed food and tarpaulins to dislocated communities, and used machinery to clear obstructed roads. More recently, hydropower companies have made commitments to rebuild homes, schools, medical posts, and other community buildings as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. These actions indicate that the hydropower sector could play a more integrated role in disaster management and planning.

So how will the hydropower sector account for earthquakes? Where will policymakers and the media stand on this issue? One indication is a recent New York Times op-ed, coauthored by leading Nepali politician Gagan Thapa, that argues for more attention to the seismic and ecological vulnerabilities of hydropower project sites and for an expanded focus on solar power, rather than a single-minded hydropower approach. This call for reevaluation indicates that the discourses on disaster preparedness, energy security, and hydropower development are evolving in Kathmandu as we speak. At one recent event, several hydropower actors expressed changing views on comprehensive risk assessment and project planning, stating that "we can no longer be complacent" and that "this is the time to rethink." How, then, will the rethinking of risk proceed?

Future research on hydropower production in Nepal will have to map a new landscape: whole regions have been devastated and recent developments in the political arena lead us to assume that the earthquakes will have institutional ramifications. How, researchers need to ask, will the earthquakes affect the relationship between "project-affected people" and the landscapes of hydropower? How will concerns over heightened risk affect their expectations and worries about planned hydropower plants? How will post-earthquake patterns of resettlement and national planning open or foreclose new opportunities for hydropower development? And finally, considering similar patterns of seismicity all over the Himalayas, in what ways might these recalculations and reorientations in Nepal shape the future of the broader Himalayan hydropower frontier?

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The Damage Done and the Dams to Come - Cultural Anthropology

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In April 2015, Nepal was in the early stages of ambitious plans to develop its significant hydropower potential when the earthquakes inflicted substantial damage on the country's existing hydropower infrastructure. Many power plants went temporarily offline, and major repairs will be necessary in the coming months.

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Introduction to d.light by Sam Goldman (filmed by Sankalp Forum)

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A video intro to d.light by Founder Sam Goldman

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Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016

The Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016 provides pioneering new research into energy access planning from the perspective of the energy poor in Bangladesh, Kenya, and Togo. It finds that bottom-up national energy planning is feasible, and that it is much more likely to deliver good results than are traditional top-down approaches to energy planning. It shows that decentralized energy options are more cost-effective for rural energy delivery, and faster to deliver.

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Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016 - Practical Action Policy and Practice

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The Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016 provides pioneering new research into energy access planning from the perspective of the energy poor in Bangladesh, Kenya, and Togo. It finds that bottom-up national energy planning is feasible, and that it is much more likely to deliver good results than are traditional top-down approaches to energy planning.

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New piece by former Edinburgh student Tristan Partridge

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(CNN) - South Africa has ramped up its green credentials by unveiling the continent's first solar-powered airport.

Located halfway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, George Airport will meet 41% of its energy demand from a brand new 200 square meter solar power plant built on its grounds.

The facility, which was officially unveiled in April 2016, has 3,000 photovoltaic modules, and will gradually increase capacity to deliver 750Kw power when it reaches full production.

It cost just over a million dollars to build, and is part of South Africa's commitment to introduce a mix of energy sources to all its airports.

"As an airports management company running nine airports nationally, part of our strategic objective is to minimize our environmental impact," Skhumbuzo Macozoma, chairman of the Airports Company South Africa Board said in a statement.

"Harnessing solar power is a viable cleaner energy source which contributes towards diversifying the energy mix. This plant will ensure that the airport is self-sustaining in terms of its power needs, and will eventually extend to the broader community within the George municipality," he added.

The airport serves the Western Cape town of George which lies in the heart of the scenic Garden Route, famous for its lush vegetation and lagoons which are dotted along the landscape.

It handles over 600,000 passengers a year, many of them tourists, but it's also a national distribution hub for cargo such as flowers, fish, oysters, herbs and ferns.

The George Airport project is the latest in the string of alternative energy investments designed to help relieve the burden of irregular electricity supply, which has long plagued parts of Africa.

Over 600 million people across Africa live without power, but things are improving and demand for electricity is expected to grow in the coming years.

Around 635 million people, or 57% of the population, are estimated to live without power on the continent, with that number climbing to 68% in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year, a UK start-up collaborated with Shell to build a solar-powered soccer pitch in the Nigerian city of Lagos, but governments are also increasingly harnessing the Sun's energy for major infrastructure projects.

Last month, Morocco switched on what will be the world's largest concentrated solar plant when it's completed. It is predicted to power one million homes by 2018. In Rwanda, a $23.7 million solar plant has increased the country's generation capacity by 6% and lighting up 15,000 homes.

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africa gets its first solar-powered airport - cnn

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Africa gets its first solar-powered airport

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(CNN) - South Africa has ramped up its green credentials by unveiling the continent's first solar-powered airport. Located halfway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, George Airport will meet 41% of its energy demand from a brand new 200 square meter solar power plant built on its grounds.

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UK Charity Practical Actions releases the latest version of their Poor People's Energy Outlook series.

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Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016

The Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016 provides pioneering new research into energy access planning from the perspective of the energy poor in Bangladesh, Kenya, and Togo. It finds that bottom-up national energy planning is feasible, and that it is much more likely to deliver good results than are traditional top-down approaches to energy planning. It shows that decentralized energy options are more cost-effective for rural energy delivery, and faster to deliver.

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Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016 - Practical Action Policy and Practice

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The Poor People's Energy Outlook 2016 provides pioneering new research into energy access planning from the perspective of the energy poor in Bangladesh, Kenya, and Togo. It finds that bottom-up national energy planning is feasible, and that it is much more likely to deliver good results than are traditional top-down approaches to energy planning.

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Production of silicon for use in solar panels

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Production of silicon for use in solar panels

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A large list of chemicals for different types of panels, but notes that silicon production reactors are cleaned with sulfur hexafluoride, one of the most potent GHGs.

http://www.solarindustrymag.com/online/issues/SI1309/FEAT_05_Hazardous_Materials_Used_In_Silicon_PV_Cell_Production_A_Primer.html

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Minerals and Metals Required for Solar Panel Production

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Minerals and Metals Required for Solar Panel Production

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These include: arsenic, bauxite, boron, cadmium, coal, copper, gallium, indium, iron ore, molybdenum, lead, phosphate, selenium, silica, tellurium, and titanium dioxide. (www.miningfacts.org/Blog/Mining-News/Mining-needs-to-meet-mineral-needs-of-renewable-energy/)

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Amazonian tribe in Peru takes hostages after oil spill

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Amazonian tribe in Peru takes hostages after oil spill

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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-peru-environment-idUSKCN0W929C

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The expensive luxury of electricity in Somalia

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The expensive luxury of electricity in Somalia

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Mogadishu, Somalia - It is 12.45 pm. The call to prayer is blaring from the loudspeakers atop the minarets of the city's mosques, and in the Medina neighbourhood of Mogadishu, a lady in a long red jilbab sits with her two daughters in front of her two-bedroom house. It is March, the height of the dry season, and the air is hot and humid.

In the family's living room, the fan which used to offer respite from the punishing heat and humidity is off, its cable dangling from the electricity socket.

"The children cannot sleep after lunch because it is too hot. I cannot give them cold water to cool them because I have switched the fridge off. If we use the fan or the fridge, the electricity company will send us a large bill that we cannot pay," Muhubo Abshir Farah tells Al Jazeera, sitting beneath the shade of a tree in front of her house.

Expensive electricity

The East African country of some 10 million people has electricity that is among the most expensive in the world. A kilowatt of electricity in the Somali capital can cost as much as $1 an hour. That is five times more expensive than in neighbouring Kenya and 10 times more than in the United States.

Somalia's energy sector was completely destroyed following the collapse of the central government in 1991. Residents were forced to depend on privately owned diesel generators while many were left in the dark. Currently, more than seven electricity companies operate in the city - all owned by private individuals.

City officials told Al Jazeera that the companies operate without a licence and pay no taxes. Customers accuse the electricity companies of charging them any price they want, an accusation the companies deny.

With thousands of people returning to the seaside city because of improving security after the withdrawal of the armed group al-Shabab in 2011, business has never been better for those in the energy sector. The companies use diesel generators and the low oil prices globally are leaving them with ever higher profits.

The capital's residents are, however, publicly complaining. More than half of the country's population, those between 15 and 64 years of age, is unemployed, and 40 percent of Somalia's population lives below the poverty line, according to the UN.

Electricity is a luxury that thousands of families in the city can only dream of. Many households in the Horn of Africa country depend on remittances from relatives living abroad and cannot afford the expensive electricity.

"Each month, they charge me between $35 and $40. I can't use it [the electricity] as I want because they will charge me a lot more," says Farah. "And if you want to change companies, they will charge you disconnection fees which we can't afford to pay, so they force us to stay with them. They are all the same."

Alternative sources of energy

With the return to normality, investors are back and putting their much-needed money into the country's fragile economy. But with high electricity bills, many investors have resorted to alternative measures.

In the same part of Mogadishu, at an ice-making factory, business is booming at this time of the year thanks to the heat and humidity.

Many families depend on this factory because they cannot use their fridges at home because of the high energy bill.

The turn in the factory's fortunes has also been due to a decision taken by the owner. Abshir Maalin Abdi bought a diesel generator to power his factory after all his profits were gobbled up by the hefty electricity bill.

The electricity offered by these companies can also be erratic, according to Abdi.

"They give you electricity when they want and stop it when they want," he says as he inspects blocks of freshly made ice before they were dispatched to customers.

"And in terms of cost, it is impossible to use these companies. If I were to use them, my electricity bill would increase by more than 80 percent. I would be working just so I can pay the bill they send me. I'm better off having my own generator," Abdi adds.

Cheap and affordable electricity

But the electricity companies deny they are only interested in maximising their profits while ignoring the welfare of their customers.

In the Kilometre Four area of the city, more than 30 workers in bright orange uniforms are in a rush. It is not yet 7am, but the workers are on a tight schedule because of the queue of people waiting to be connected to the electricity grid - demand for their services has never been higher.

The company, which uses a meter system, claims to offer the cheapest electricity in the country and says its prices are affordable.

"We charge everyone for what they use. We use a meter system that calculates what the customers use. Our electricity is the cheapest in the country," Ahmed Abdishakur Omar of Mogadishu Power Supply tells Al Jazeera.

"Today, electricity is the cheapest it has been in the last two decades. And we believe our customers can afford our price," Omar adds.

The Somalia government, which has its hands full fighting the rebel group al-Shabab, says it is aware of the customer complaints and is looking into the matter.

"The only thing we can do and the only thing we want to do is to bring about a legislation that will monitor these companies that provide electricity. We hope that these legislations, once passed by parliament, will affect the price of energy and trickle down to the public," Abdihakim Egeh Guled, deputy minister of energy and water resources, told Al Jazeera. Currently the country has no laws regulating the industry.

The electricity companies, following pressure from customers and with low global oil prices, say they are working on reducing the prices and hope to make an announcement soon.

The residents of the city hope the price reductions come sooner rather than later.

"I pray they start to charge us a fair price. They have made enough money from us," says Farah, the mother of two.

"It is time they charge an honest price."
Follow Hamza Mohamed on Twitter: @Hamza_Africa READ MORE: Somalia's forgotten soldiers READ MORE: Somalia's Sufi revival

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The expensive luxury of electricity in Somalia

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Mogadishu, Somalia - It is 12.45 pm. The call to prayer is blaring from the loudspeakers atop the minarets of the city's mosques, and in the Medina neighbourhood of Mogadishu, a lady in a long red jilbab sits with her two daughters in front of her two-bedroom house.

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A few interesting stories on Oil and global south

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A few interesting stories on Oil and global south

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Documentary on growing dissidence in Saudi Arabia (and links to oil crisis): http://www.wnyc.org/story/saudi-arabia-uncovered/

Smart tractors! http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/03/29/472129577/meet-a-tractor-that-can-plow-fields-and-talk-to-the-cloud

Venezuela's growing electricity and oil crisis:  http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/03/29/472252687/in-venezuela-an-electricity-crisis-adds-to-countrys-woes

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Energy beyond neoliberalism - a manifesto

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Energy beyond neoliberalism - a manifesto

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Larry Lohmann - Questioning the Energy Transition

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Larry Lohmann - Questioning the Energy Transition

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Challenging the epistemological framing of climate and energy issues

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The woman who electrified a village and took on a mafia

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Interesting how this is portrayed in relation to Rignall's article on the project
http://answersafrica.com/worlds-largest-desert-solar-plant-in-morocco-has-gone-live.html

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OUT in the farthest reaches of Lagos, a bumpy boat ride across the city's dividing lagoon, Egbin power plant is trying to light up one of the world's darkest nations. Six turbines growl in its huge belly, watched over by mechanics in a futuristic control room. They say the place is barely recognisable since privatisation in 2013. Output has rocketed since Sahara Group, a Nigerian energy conglomerate, took over. When running at full steam, Egbin generates almost a quarter of the whole country's electricity.
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That is not a particularly stretching target. Of Nigeria's many daily headaches, power is perhaps the worst. After years in which state-owned power plants decayed, the government changed course by selling power stations and the distribution grids that carry power to homes and businesses. This bold stroke was meant to turn the lights on, and indeed it has encouraged investors to put millions of dollars into upgrading the battered system. Yet the supply of power has failed to respond as hoped in the two years since privatisation. At the moment the country's big stations produce a pitiful 2,800MW, which is about as much as is used by Edinburgh. Only just over half of Nigerians have access to electricity, and it is still harder for businesses to hook up to the grid than almost anywhere else.

One reason why privatisation has failed to improve Nigeria's power supply is that the process itself was flawed from the start. Even as companies were bidding to buy power stations or distribution companies, striking staff prevented them from looking at what they were buying. Once the deals were done they found they had bought rundown equipment and companies whose books had been systematically cooked. More important, though, was that many could not get the gas they needed to power their plants. Government meddling held down gas prices, which meant that many producers would simply flare it off (while extracting oil) instead of bothering to sell it at a deep loss. Moreover, the pipes meant to carry the flammable stuff are rusting and regularly vandalised by thugs demanding money to protect them.

The privatisation process was also incomplete and left the transmission grid (which carries electricity from power stations to the local distribution grids) in the hands of the state. It has not invested much, so huge amounts of power fizzle out on its dilapidated lines. Even if power plants could generate more electricity, the grid would not be able to handle it. At Egbin a handful of people employed by the state-owned transmission network sit watching YouTube clips as their private-sector colleagues beaver away.

Power plants are also owed colossal sums by the agencies that act as middlemen between generation companies and the distributors. Egbin alone is some $225m out of pocket. The intermediaries, in turn, blame distributors, saying they have not been collecting cash from their customers. As for the distributors, they say that the tariffs they are allowed to charge are too low to cover their costs and that, in any case, Nigerians do not pay their bills. Depressingly, the biggest offender is the government, whose various departments and agencies owe almost $300m. "It's difficult for anyone to go to a military barracks and order them to pay-except if you've written your will," says one insider.

More than a year ago the Central Bank of Nigeria organised a $1 billion loan to plug the gap and avoid a wave of insolvencies among power generators, but only a fraction has been disbursed. Since then a falling currency and shortages of foreign exchange have made it harder for private power producers to service debts denominated in dollars, a currency many chose because it offered lower interest rates than borrowing in naira. Finding cash (and hard currency in particular) to buy gas, maintain machinery and pay technical partners is a growing strain. Dallas Peavey, Egbin's chief executive, reckons that without repayment or preferential access to foreign currency he can keep the country's biggest power station running for just another four weeks.

Still, there are glimmers of hope. In recent years the government has raised the price of gas, and supplies are growing more reliable. Distribution companies are installing new meters, which are harder to fiddle. Unpaid public electricity bills are being chased up. Most crucially, tariffs were increased in February by as much as 45%. It did not go down at all well with locals. But if Nigerians can be convinced to pay their bills, it ought to get some cash flowing through the system. That would be a start.

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OUT in the farthest reaches of Lagos, a bumpy boat ride across the city's dividing lagoon, Egbin power plant is trying to light up one of the world's darkest nations. Six turbines growl in its huge belly, watched over by mechanics in a futuristic control room.

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Iraq's Mosul Dam on the edge

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Iraqi engineers involved in building the Mosul dam 30 years ago have warned that the risk of its imminent collapse and the consequent death toll could be even worse than reported.

They pointed out that pressure on the dam's compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut.

The Iraqi engineers also said the failure to replace machinery or assemble a full workforce more than a year after Islamic State temporarily held the dam means that the chasms in the porous rock under the dam were getting bigger and more dangerous every day.

On Wednesday, the Iraqi government announced it had signed a €273m (£210m) contract with an Italian contractor to reinforce and maintain the Mosul dam for 18 months, following talks in New York between the Italian foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, and US and Iraqi officials. Italy has said it plans to send 450 troops to protect the dam site, but it is unclear how long it will take to replace damaged machinery and reassemble the required workforce.

The engineers warned that potential loss of life from a sudden catastrophic collapse of the Mosul dam could be even greater than the 500,000 officially estimated, as they said many people could die in the resulting mass panic, with a 20-metre-high flood wave hitting the city of Mosul and then rolling on down the Tigris valley through Tikrit and Samarra to Baghdad.

One of the Iraqi engineers, now living in Europe, described as "ridiculous" the Iraqi government's emergency policy of telling local people to move 6km (3.5 miles) from the river banks.

Nasrat Adamo, the dam's former chief engineer who spent most of his professional career shoring it up in the face of fundamental flaws in its construction, said that the structure would only survive with round-the-clock work with teams filling in holes in the porous bedrock under the structure, a process known as grouting. But that level of maintenance, dating back to just after the dam's construction in 1984, evaporated after the Isis occupation.

"We used to have 300 people working 24 hours in three shifts but very few of these workers have come back. There are perhaps 30 people there now," Adamo said in a telephone interview from Sweden, where he works as a consultant.

"The machines for grouting have been looted. There is no cement supply. They can do nothing. It is going from bad to worse, and it is urgent. All we can do is hold our hearts."

At the same time as the bedrock is getting weaker and more porous, the water pressure on the dam is building as spring meltwater flows into the reservoir behind it. Giant gates that would normally be used to ease the pressure by allowing water to run through are stuck.

One million people along the Tigris could be at risk from a 20 metre high flash flood if the Mosul dam collapses

"One of them is jammed, and when one of them is closed the other one has to be closed. They must work together," Adamo said. "Otherwise, you get asymmetric flow and that speeds up the erosion."

Nadhir al-Ansari, another Iraqi engineer from when the dam was built, also voiced concern about the rising waters in the reservoir.

"The fact that the bottom outlets are jammed is the thing that really worries us," said Ansari, now an engineering professor at the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. "In April and May, there will be a lot more snow melting and it will bring plenty of water into the reservoir. The water level is now 308 metres but it will go up to over 330 metres. And the dam is not as before. The caverns underneath have increased. I don't think the dam will withstand that pressure.

"If the dam fails, the water will arrive in Mosul in four hours. It will arrive in Baghdad in 45 hours. Some people say there could be half a million people killed, some say a million. I imagine it will be more in the absence of a good evacuation plan."

He said the government policy response, calling on the local population to move at least 6km from the river Tigris, was "ridiculous". The US embassy in Baghdad has urged American citizens to leave the area.

"What are all these people, millions of people, supposed to do when they get 6km away? There is no support for them there. Nothing to help them live."

The Mosul dam was first conceived in the 1950s, but its construction was postponed because of the problematic geology of that section of the Tigris, where much of the bedrock is water-soluble. It was finally built by Saddam Hussein's regime and seen at the time as a prestige project. At the time, Ansari was a scientific consultant at the irrigation ministry.

Nobody knows when it will fail. It could be a year from now. It could be tomorrow.

Nasrat Adamo, the dam's former chief engineer

"I went to visit the site and saw what kind of stone there was there. A lot of gypsum and anhydrite, which are very soluble. I was really concerned; I told the director general. He said: 'Don't worry. This is all being taken care of.'"

In the preceding years, successive foreign consultants had pointed out the weaknesses in the rock formations but all assured the Iraqi government the problem could be solved by grouting. The decision to go ahead was pushed through by one of the regime's vice-presidents, Taha Yassin Ramadan.

"Ramadan was very keen to have the dam," Ansari said. "He wanted to show Saddam he was doing something brilliant, and he came from Mosul, so he wanted to do something that brought jobs to Mosul. This sped up the decision."

The dam was designed by a Swiss firm of consultants and built by a German-Italian consortium in 1984. Water began seeping through in 1986, when it became apparent that the geological issues were worse than the consultants had predicted. From then on it required constant maintenance to fill the caverns being hollowed out by water running through the soluble bedrock. A total of 95,000 tonnes of grout of different types were used over the dam's lifetime.

"All you are doing with grouting is prolonging the life of the dam. There is no permanent solution except building another dam," Ansari said. A second structure, the Badush dam, was started 20km downstream, to prevent a catastrophe in the event of the Mosul dam's failure. But work on Badush halted in the 1990s because of the pressure of sanctions, leaving it only 40% complete.

An international conference has been announced in Rome in April to discuss ways of preventing a disaster, but by then it could already be too late.

"Nobody knows when it will fail," Adamo said. "It could be a year from now. It could be tomorrow."
Topics

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Mosul dam engineers warn it could fail at any time, killing 1m people

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Iraqi engineers involved in building the Mosul dam 30 years ago have warned that the risk of its imminent collapse and the consequent death toll could be even worse than reported.

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Success in Electrifying Inaccessible Villages in the Himalayas

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Success in Electrifying Inaccessible Villages in the Himalayas

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Interesting article on the successful electrification of remote villages. Provides insights on retaining the educated youth of villages, adapting the equipment to the local challenges and needs, and creating a local maintenance and payment system to ensure a continuous service. As the article shows, such methods have the capacity of being adapted elsewhere.

https://microgridknowledge.com/to-light-up-the-himalayas/

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Saudi Arabia's actions in the face of declining oil prices

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Saudi Arabia's actions in the face of declining oil prices

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Podcast on how Saudi Arabia is dealing with oil price decline. Previously no one paid any taxes (on anything!) and that is changing. Its an interesting reflection on the country and on its future.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/02/03/465476188/episode-681-the-oil-kingdom

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http://movingpoems.com/2009/03/standard-oil-co/

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When is an electrified village in India not electrified

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When is an electrified village in India not electrified

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Article from The Hindu, Feb 2016

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No one would believe that simply owning a smart phone would be enough to go online and get connected - one would still need a data connection for that to happen. Similarly, it is time that we added a similar level of service to define electrification, a focus area for the government.

A decade ago, a village was deemed electrified if it had a single light bulb connection. Subsequently, the definition was upgraded requiring at least ten per cent of homes to be electrified including all common or public areas such as schools and clinics. Based on this definition, the flagship Central government programme Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY) electrified over 18,000 villages annually for several years, leaving out only some five per cent remote and distant villages which were being targeted for off-grid (decentralised) electrification.

However, the 2011 Census showed that if we considered household-level data, only 55.3 per cent of rural homes used electricity as the primary source for lighting. The figures were lower for houses with a wire as per National Sample Survey data. This presents two problems before us. First, is the household electrified? More importantly, is there power when needed? A question in the FAQs (frequently asked questions) section of the RGGVY website explains this problem better: "My village has been electrified but there is no electricity, how could RGGVY help?" The answer to this goes thus: "Ensuring supply of power is the responsibility of the concerned State power utility. RGGVY does not have any role to play in this regard. Concerned power utility may be approached for the same."

Perils of load-shedding

Load-shedding - the bane of India's power supply system - is far worse in rural areas than metros or large cities. There are regular reports in newspapers of 15 hours of load-shedding in some areas. Until there is power supply available in villages, a household isn't meaningfully electrified, though it may have a line laid out.

Load-shedding is meant to handle a shortfall of electricity where supply is less than demand, inclusive of losses. An entire feeder is switched off for some time. This includes typically hundreds, if not thousands, of homes or consumers. In theory, there is meant to be a schedule for load-shedding, but many areas also face unscheduled load-shedding. Rural areas face an additional challenge in the supply schedule due to the use of irrigation pump sets, which are heavily subsidised and need three-phase power supply. To ensure households get supply during periods of need, most States only give the so-called single-phase supply during the evening (6-10 p.m.) - good for households but not for most pump sets.

Regulators aim to limit load-shedding, but targets are often violated, both by way of scheduled and unscheduled outages. Worse, we really don't know the true picture since most States don't report per feeder load-shedding, breaking it down to hourly or half-hourly data. Load-shedding actions are taken manually at the substation level so there is limited data. Karnataka is an exception here with a real-time monitoring system for every feeder. Analysing per minute feeder data across most of the State, we have verified the reality of very high rural load-shedding across multiple seasons. This is, effectively, a cross-subsidy from rural homes to urban homes. We believe this is not atypical, and most States are similar; some worse, some better, notably Gujarat.

Meaningful electrification

While we need and might even have a wire to the home as a first step, the first threshold for electrification should be at least 50 per cent of homes in a coverage area (i.e., the majority). More importantly, we should add actual service provision, including no load-shedding, to the definition of meaningful electrification. Given our supply shortfall which will take years to resolve, we could start by demanding, say, 98 per cent supply during the peak hours of 6-10 p.m. and 6:30-8:30 a.m., allowing a small buffer for unexpected shortfall in supply. If this isn't met, then the feeder, which covers more than a village typically isn't meaningfully electrified.

With such a norm in place, utilities will have to do a better job of managing shortfall, including monitoring where and when load-shedding occurs. When unavoidable, utilities must stick to a transparent, equitable and well-advertised schedule for load-shedding. Unscheduled load-shedding should be penalised. Finally, for household-centric basic supply provisioning, during the evening peak, utilities may need to procure additional peak supply from generators, which will raise overall costs slightly.

Gujarat, an exception

There is a proposed scheme of feeder segregation in rural areas to separate households from pump set supply, allowing them uninterrupted supply. This was originally implemented successfully in Gujarat, and now by the national-level Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Feeder Segregation programme. However, there are a few reasons to be cautious of taking the practice to the national level, since other States have tried similar programmes with varying levels of success. State-to-State variations were recently documented in a major World Bank report apart from other studies. Feeder segregation will only help the evening peak to the extent of avoiding unwanted pump set loads on single-phase supply through phase converters. This is only a small fraction since most pumps are already segregated as per phase supply. Most States have a large deficit, with the exception of Gujarat. Also, the consumer profile in Gujarat is different from many other States, amenable to rural non-pump set loads. Lastly, any scheme requires political will for enforcement and consumer trust in the utilities or the government, which again varies from State to State.

Feeder segregation should be taken up in parts, applying viability analysis to choose deployments instead of blanket roll-outs. Thinking of the future, instead of just differentiation of households from pump sets - which can be done in the most part in phases - it would be better if we think of the next level of transformation and put in place smart meters to differentiate one consumer from another. With such a scheme in place, not only can we give a minimum threshold, but also a lifeline supply of electricity to all consumers, including during shortfall. We can also easily give socially important users such as schools and clinics 24*7 power supply. This is before the many other benefits of a smart grid.

The earlier view of electricity as a commodity at a fixed price is changing, as we now recognise that not all units of power are equal - the time of day, location, and even source (fuel) impact its cost, price and value. The most valuable energy for a household is the first unit of power, invariably used for lighting and charging a mobile phone. Thus, we need meaningful electricity service, not merely a wire connection to every household.

(Rahul Tongia is a Non-resident Fellow at Brookings India, and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the Advisor to the Smart Grid Task Force, Government of India.)

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No one would believe that simply owning a smart phone would be enough to go online and get connected - one would still need a data connection for that to happen. Similarly, it is time that we added a similar level of service to define electrification, a focus area for the government.

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New World Bank project connects satellite imagery to big data, Feb 2016

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By Kwawu Mensan Gaba and Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño

Also available in: Español | Français

Electricity is integral to people's well-being across the world. With electricity, children can study at night, women can walk home more safely on well-lit streets, and businesses can stay open well past dusk. However, more than one billion people still lack access to electricity today. Governments and electric utilities around the world are mobilizing vast sums of money to close the access gap, especially in rural areas that are home to those lacking electricity.

So, how can we determine and identify who has electricity and who doesn't? What if we had the technology and tools to help us see lights from space every night, for every village, in every country? We could then closely monitor progress on the ground. We could even plan and optimize policies and interventions in a different manner.

That "what-if" scenario is now a reality. Our latest initiative, NightLights.io, monitors four billion light signals on earth each day, and visualizes night light data spanning the last 20 years. Nightlights.io was made possible by space agencies around the world. Combined, these agencies have around 1,300 satellites currently in orbit and capturing a wealth of data and information on our planet.

We began to explore the use of night light data to monitor rural electrification in countries with low electrification rates, such as Mali and Senegal, and then expanded our work to Vietnam, which has a 98% electrification rate. Last year, through the World Bank's Innovation Labs and Development Seed, we refined our approach and scaled up to look at the entire India, a country with a high density of villages. We analyzed the daily light signatures of more than 600,000 villages during a 20-year period (from 1993 to 2013), and visualized electrification trends on NightLights.io.

"This visualization will be a powerful tool to supplement the Indian government's efforts to ensure rapid electrification."
Onno Ruhl, World Bank Country Director for India

NightLights.io is an open source platform comprised of a pipeline to process massive amounts of data; an application programming interface (API) that enables technical partners to query light output; and a dashboard map to allow users to explore light output trends. This platform provides the ability to get high-level overviews, compare villages, plot trends, and share data. In addition, this platform is designed to be freely explored by users from any part of the world.

Night light data measured by satellite has been a useful resource for the development community for several years. Unfortunately the complexity of accessing, processing and manipulating this data has been a barrier to widespread use and scalability. Five years ago, a team from the University of Michigan, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the World Bank Group's Energy and Extractives Global Practice began to explore night light data in a scalable, systematic way.

We're now looking ahead and making decisions on where to focus our next electrification efforts. Where has electrification been successful? What other variables are related to faster electrification? What other sources can we combine with these results to learn more? Could we mash up this dashboard with other development indicators? These are all questions we'll begin to explore and hopefully answer in the coming months and years.

We launched this platform at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Government officials, the private sector, and many interested parties were gathered and invited to provide feedback. We would like to refine the platform, build new capabilities, and generate nuanced reports to meet the myriad needs of potential country-level beneficiaries. We also want to see how this approach could be replicated across the developing world.
Read more World Bank blogs.

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Eyes in the sky show India's night lights - World of Opportunity - Medium

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By Kwawu Mensan Gaba and Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño Also available in: Español | Français Electricity is integral to people's well-being across the world. With electricity, children can study at night, women can walk home more safely on well-lit streets, and businesses can stay open well past dusk.

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One of Africa's biggest dams is falling apart, New Yorker, Feb 2, 2016

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The new year has not been kind to the hydroelectric-dam industry. On January 11th, the New York Times reported that Mosul Dam, the largest such structure in Iraq, urgently requires maintenance to prevent its collapse, a disaster that could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless. Four days earlier, the energy minister of Zambia declared that Kariba Dam, which straddles the border between his country and Zimbabwe, holding back the world's largest reservoir, was in "dire" condition. An unprecedented drought threatens to shut down the dam's power production, which supplies nearly half the nation's electricity.

The news comes as more and more of the biggest hydroelectric-dam projects around the world are being cancelled or postponed. In 2014, researchers at Oxford University reviewed the financial performance of two hundred and forty-five dams and concluded that the "construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return." Other forms of energy generation-wind, solar, and miniature hydropower units that can be installed inside irrigation canals-are becoming competitive, and they cause far less social and environmental damage. And dams are particularly ill-suited to climate change, which simultaneously requires that they be larger (to accommodate the anticipated floods) and smaller (to be cost-effective during the anticipated droughts).

Mosul Dam's predicament is partly a result of the ongoing war; many maintenance workers have not returned there since August of 2014, when ISIS fighters briefly took control. (Iraqi and Kurdish forces soon regained it.) But the main issue is that, like many such dams, the project shouldn't exist in the first place. Opened in 1986, it was built on unstable gypsum bedrock, requiring grout to be constantly injected into the foundation to prevent the dam's collapse. That work has ceased. In 2006, long before ISIS began making headlines, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called Mosul Dam "the most dangerous dam in the world."

Kariba's difficulties are more complicated. It has been nearly incapacitated by ongoing drought, which has lowered the reservoir's volume to twelve per cent of its usual capacity. But if the reservoir is refilled, the dam faces the possibility of collapse. It was built in the late nineteen-fifties, and in the years since water flowing through the dam's six floodgates has carved a three-hundred-foot-deep pit, or plunge pool, at its base. The plunge pool extends to within a hundred and thirty feet of the dam's foundation; if it reaches the foundation, the dam will collapse. That seems hard to imagine now, with the reservoir at a record-low level. But the Zambezi River Basin, on which the dam sits, is the most susceptible of Africa's thirteen basins to exceptional droughts and floods, and climate change is intensifying both.

Kariba's collapse, like Mosul's, would constitute an epochal event in the history of energy development-the dam industry's Chernobyl. The ensuing torrent would be four times bigger than the Zambezi's biggest recorded flood, in 1958, and would release enough water to knock over another major dam three hundred miles downstream, in Mozambique. At least three million people live in the flood's path; most would die or lose their crops or possessions. About forty per cent of the electricity-generating capacity of twelve southern African nations would be eliminated.

The dam, four hundred and twenty feet tall and nearly two thousand feet wide, was built with financing from the World Bank to provide power for the copper mines of what was then Northern Rhodesia. The designers intended to make the dam impervious to a one-in-ten-thousand-year flood, but their calculations were based on only three decades of Zambezi flow data-a period too short to permit credible forecasting. This flaw became apparent in 1957, when the site, still under construction, was hit with a flood bigger than the designers' worst-case projection. The planners hurriedly enlarged the spillway, but in 1958 the project was hit by another flood, twice as big as the previous one, so the spillway was expanded again. More recent projections, cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that the Zambezi River Basin will experience still drier and more prolonged droughts and even bigger floods in years to come.

Since the nineteen-nineties, Kariba's operators have been allowed to open only three of the dam's six floodgates at a time, for fear of enlarging the plunge pool. If the reservoir fills to a dangerous level, the operators face two options: allow water to flow over the top of the dam and tumble down its face, threatening the foundation, or, more likely, open more than three floodgates, causing the plunge pool to expand. To head off a catastrophe, the World Bank and other international lenders agreed in November of 2014 to provide a loan of nearly three hundred million dollars to repair it, stating that the project requires "immediate attention."

But "immediate" means decades, not years. "It takes a long time to carry out the necessary due diligence and secure the financing for a complex project like this," Munyaradzi Munodawafa, the chief executive of the Zambezi River Authority, which operates Kariba, told me in an e-mail. "We're looking at a fifteen- to twenty-year process, in which we are five years under way." To repair the dam, workers will enlarge the plunge pool downstream, to reduce erosion near the foundation. But it's not certain to work, and major flooding could occur before the repairs are completed.

The World Bank and other international financiers like dams because they seem to offer large-scale solutions to energy and water shortages. Kariba is just one of more than two thousand large dams in Africa; Zimbabwe, one of the world's poorest nations, has at least two hundred and fifty-four. But maintaining a dam is expensive-and much less popular than building one. Even in affluent countries such as the United States-whose dam infrastructure is in sufficient disrepair to have earned a "D" rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers, in 2013-maintenance is often neglected; it's not likely to fare better in impoverished, corruption-ridden countries such as Zimbabwe or Iraq. Dams can't be drained, and dismantling them can be as costly as building them. It's the trap of Industrial Age technology: once mechanized systems supplant natural ones, they must be managed in perpetuity, or else they break down.

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One of Africa's Biggest Dams Is Falling Apart

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The new year has not been kind to the hydroelectric-dam industry. On January 11th, the New York Times reported that Mosul Dam, the largest such structure in Iraq, urgently requires maintenance to prevent its collapse, a disaster that could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless.

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Article looking at how Africa has become a leading market for the world's most advanced solar technology

http://qz.com/604232/the-worlds-most-cutting-edge-renewable-tech-is-powering-rural-africa/

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Distributed power-where electricity is generated locally, instead of delivered via complex grid infrastructure-makes lots of sense for Africa. About 600 million Africans don't have electricity. But sunlight is a widely available resource across most of the continent, making distributed solar power one of the more sensible options for electrification.

Plenty of companies see the potential. This has made parts of Africa a testing ground for cutting-edge solar power. Some countries are developing a whole new type of infrastructure not seen elsewhere in the world: mobile-phone-led, flexible, and controlled by the user rather than big utilities and government.

"We are now seeing the first innovation where the leading technologies are actually being deployed in Africa, not being deployed in the mainstream West," said Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Azuri Technologies. Azuri is based in Cambridge, UK, and installs rent-to-buy solar systems for homes in Tanzania and several other sub-Saharan states. Power from the panels are paid for by mobile phone or scratchcard. The payments also serve as installments towards owning the system outright. After about 18 months the homeowner has typically paid off the cost of the panels, or can buy them for a very small sum (say, $5).

Bransfield-Garth noted that other innovations, like mobile money, have blossomed first in Africa. The same now goes for energy, with cutting-edge technologies leaving traditional alternatives far behind.

"We're putting together a product that's got the latest LED lights, it's got lithium iron phosphate batteries which are similar to the batteries you get in Tesla supercars, we've got adaptive smart metering inside the product, and we've got artificial intelligence in the product," he told Quartz.

"And these are in $50 solar home systems that are sitting in rural Africa. And I compare that to the room I'm sitting in right now [in England], where light is controlled by two bits of wire and a mechanical switch, and has been for 150 years."

Azuri has installed about 60,000 systems so far in Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Sierra Leone and others. In November, it was recognized by the UN as one of 16 companies genuinely making a difference in the quest to halt climate change.

Others are getting into the act. Off Grid, a company focusing on Tanzania, also has a pay-as-you-go model, while M-Kopa covers that country as well as Kenya and Uganda.

Compare these state-of-the art systems to the often arduous process of getting solar panels installed on a home in Europe or America, and it becomes clear that Africa is not only a massive market for off-grid solar, but the leading one.
Sign up for the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief - the most important and interesting news from across the continent, in your inbox.

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The world's most cutting-edge renewable tech is powering rural Africa

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Distributed power-where electricity is generated locally, instead of delivered via complex grid infrastructure-makes lots of sense for Africa. About 600 million Africans don't have electricity. But sunlight is a widely available resource across most of the continent, making distributed solar power one of the more sensible options for electrification.

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Cape Verde wins SEFA grant to develop revolutionary wave-powered desalination system.

http://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/article/blue-economy-cape-verde-wins-sefa-grant-to-develop-revolutionary-wave-powered-desalination-system-15296/

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Documentary about energy poverty and related power struggles in an Indian town
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2016/01/powerless-india-160120083031006.html

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Chile today: hydro-sol, hungry fish, and the driest desert on Earth

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Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Editors' Choice, Energy, Environment, Featured, Green Economy, Headlines, Integration and Development Brazilian-style, Latin America & the Caribbean, Poverty & SDGs, Projects, Regional Categories, TerraViva United Nations, Water & Sanitation

- A novel energy project in Chile will combine a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant operating on seawater and a solar plant, to provide a steady supply of clean energy to a fishing village in the Atacama Desert, the world's driest.

The idea may seem unlikely, given the extreme aridity and lack of water in northern Chile, where copper, gold and silver mining corporations use most of the water and energy consumed.

But the initiative has drawn the interest of local and foreign investors. And in 2015 it won the Avonni National Innovation Award granted by the Chilean Innovation Forum, the National TV Station TVN, El Mercurio - the country's largest newspaper - and the Economy Ministry.

"Nowhere in the world have they managed to offer clean energy 24/7 at competitive prices, without subsidies," said Juan Andrés Camus, general manager and one of the two founders of Valhalla Energía, the local company that is carrying out the project.

"The convergence of these three elements is unique, and it's not a stroke of genius on our part but a wonderful gift of nature," he told IPS.

The company was founded on the premise that Chile is a country that is poor in the "energies of the past, but infinitely rich in energies of the future."

With an investment of 400 million dollars, the Espejo (Mirror) de Tarapacá will essentially operate as a big battery that will store up energy. Construction is to begin in late 2016 and it is set to come onstream in 2020.

The project includes the installation of a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant, which will pump seawater up a cliff on the coast using solar energy, to a natural storage basin at an altitude of 600 metres.

In the night-time, when no solar energy is available, the plant will generate electricity by releasing the stored water, which will rush down through the same tunnels. This will provide a steady round-the-clock supply of energy - 24 hours a day/seven days a week - overcoming the problem of intermittency of renewable energy sources.

El Espejo will generate 300 MW of electricity in Caleta San Marcos, in the extreme northern region of Tarapacá, 100 km south of the city of Iquique.

At the same time, the company will build Cielos de Tarapacá, a 1,650-hectare solar park in nearby Pintados that will produce 600 MW of energy, with a projected investment of nearly one billion dollars.

The solar project, which is waiting for an environmental permit, will operate with single-axis tracking technology in order to follow the sun during the day from east to west.

Camus said the solar park will be so large that "if it began to operate in 2015 it would be the biggest in the world."

At night, the plant will continue generating solar power, thanks to the energy stored in Espejo.

The salient aspect of the two projects is that they will harness the natural attributes that Chile has in abundance: seawater, coastal cliffs, and the Atacama Desert's solar radiation.

This will avoid the need to build dams and reduce construction of underground tunnels by up to 80 percent, according to the promoters of the project, who say it is one of the most innovative renewable energy initiatives in the world.

"More than in the technology employed, the innovation of Espejo de Tarapacá lies in the more efficient use of geography, which makes it possible to build the plant at the lowest possible cost," said Camus.

"The big opportunity is in the efficient use of the territory, more than in the technological barrier," he added. Chile is a long, narrow country between the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Andes mountains to the east. It has 6,435 km of coast line.

Valhalla has been working closely with the people of Caleta San Marcos.

The fishing village's 300 inhabitants, who make a living from small-scale fishing and harvesting shellfish and giant kelp, were initially wary, afraid the initiative would have a negative impact on local marine resources.

Working groups were set up to discuss things with the local community, who asked for advisers with expertise in marine issues and a lawyer to support them in technical and legal aspects.

Finally, after months of work, the company signed agreements with the local fishing union and the residents' association pledging to make contributions to the local community. They also agreed on a set of principles to guarantee transparent management of the plant, as well as a mechanism to address problems in case damage to the sea is detected.

"This has been beneficial, and I hope other communities can have access to this and will be able to decide for themselves, but with information, equal opportunity, while defending their rights, so that ignorance doesn't become a curb on development," said Genaro Collao, president of the local fishing union of Caleta San Marcos.

"At this tipping point the decision is: I put money in your pocket or I improve your life," he told IPS by phone from the village. "Money in my pocket is going to last one day, one week, one month. But life is an ongoing legacy, that's the concept."

This South American nation of 17.6 million people has a total installed capacity of 20,203 MW of electricity. The interconnected Central and Norte Grande power grids account for 78.38 percent and 20.98 percent of total electric power, respectively.

Of the country's total energy supply, 58.4 percent is generated by diesel fuel, coal and natural gas, while the rest comes from renewable energy sources - mainly large hydropower dams.

Only 13.5 percent comes from unconventional renewable sources like wind power (4.57 percent), solar (3.79 percent), mini-dams (2.8 percent) and biomass (2.34 percent).

In 2014, the government of Michelle Bachelet adopted a new energy agenda that set a target for 70 percent of Chile's electric power to come from renewable sources by 2050.

"Seventy percent of the greenhouse gases in Chile come from the energy sector," Environment Minister Pablo Badenier has told IPS. "That means it is our commitments in energy that will enable us to live up to the pledge to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030."

"Looking at the 2050 energy road map, it appears viable that by the year 2050, 70 percent of power generation in Chile could come from renewable sources. That is what makes it possible to seriously commit to this goal regarding greenhouse gases."

Studies indicate that Atacama has one of the highest concentrations of solar energy in the world. According to experts, the entire country could be supplied with electricity if less than 0.5 percent of the desert's surface were covered by solar panels.

"Projects like this one could offer an opportunity by putting Chile at the forefront of development of green technology that does not require people to pay more for it," said Camus.
Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

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Innovative Project to Provide Renewable Energy 24/7 to Chilean Village

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A novel energy project in Chile will combine a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant operating on seawater and a solar plant, to provide a steady supply of clean energy to a fishing village in the Atacama Desert, the world's driest.

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Thinking through Papua New Guinea's global energy governance regime

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Thinking through Papua New Guinea's global energy governance regime

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Thinking through Papua New Guinea's global energy governance regime

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Thinking through Papua New Guinea's global energy governance regime

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Vox looks into the town that rejected a solar farm because they thought it would 'suck up all the sun' and prevent photosynthesis http://www.vox.com/2015/12/18/10519644/north-carolina-solar-town

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Some great videos from Declan Murray's conference held earlier this year in London. Declan is currently doing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh looking at Solar waste: Understanding broken products in Kenya's photovoltaic economy. #SROGS2015

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Electricity in Africa, 11 Jan 2016

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AT THE edge of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's commercial capital, in a space roughly the size of a football field, stands hope for Africa's industrial future: the Ubungo power plant. Gleaming pipes emerge from the ground; five modern generators hum quietly. This was where, in 2013, Barack Obama announced his Power Africa plan to electrify the continent.
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The trouble with plants such as Ubungo is that there are not enough of them. Opposite the power plant, young men sell charcoal to burn for cooking and heat. At night in the city centre the streetlights are turned off. South of the Sahara there are only seven countries-Cameroon, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa-in which more than 50% of people have access to electricity. In a typical year the whole region generates less electrical power than Canada, and half of that supply is in South Africa.

Generating power in Africa ought to be a good business. Africans tend to pay extraordinary prices for electricity. Businesses rely on dirty and expensive diesel generators. Tanzanian mines are powered by generators burning diesel that has been trucked across the country; a kilowatt-hour can cost as much as $1. Grid power at an American mine, by way of comparison, costs less than a tenth as much.

So there ought to be a rush to invest in African power plants. But there is not. Tanzania, a country of 50m people with substantial recent discoveries of natural gas, illustrates some of the bottlenecks.

Tanzania has about 1,500MW of installed electricity-generation capacity-about as much as a small American city. More than a third comes from hydroelectric power stations. Because of drought in recent years, these rarely run at full capacity. In early October, at the end of the dry season, the country had to shut down all its hydroelectric plants. Tanzania is not alone in relying heavily on hydropower. In Malawi and Zambia almost all power comes from water, when it flows.

Tanzania wants to build new gas-fired plants, connected via a new pipeline from a newly discovered gasfield in the south. Plants such as the one at Ubungo ought to generate lots of extra power cheaply. But that is not happening as quickly as it should. The Ubungo plant, which is owned by an American firm, Symbion, did not begin running at full capacity on local gas until last September. Before that, shortages meant that production often relied on imported liquid fuels such as kerosene.

Gas is relatively clean, reliable and inexpensive. Indeed, the Ubungo power station could easily add capacity, says Magesvaran Subramaniam, Symbion's local boss. It is just a matter of buying more mobile generators. The trouble is neither a lack of gas to power the plant nor a shortage of demand for the juice it sends down the wire; it is that the only customer does not pay its bills on time. Tanesco, which has a monopoly on distributing power in Tanzania, is severely cash-strapped. Its outgoings are inflated by the need to buy expensive emergency backup fuel to keep the lights on when the supply from dams falters. In practice, payments to independent power producers such as Symbion often come last on its list.

On December 2nd SonGas, a private-equity owned firm that runs another gas-powered plant in Dar es Salaam, and which contributes as much as 20% of Tanzania's grid power, threatened to stop generating electricity unless it is paid money is it owed by Tanesco. SonGas, like other firms investing in power plants across Africa, has a guarantee from Tanzania's government that it will be paid-something financial backers generally insist on before investing in private power producers. But this does not help its short-term cashflow. Tanesco's arrears do not mean that SonGas can refuse to pay for the gas it buys.

For many, then, the best hope of getting the lights on is to bypass the grid entirely. M-Kopa, a Kenyan firm, is expanding across east Africa selling its solar-powered battery systems, which contain a torch and a mobile-phone charger. Customers are effectively given loans to buy them; repayments are made through mobile money.

Generating power at home may transform life in rural areas for the better, but factories, mines and mills need a reliable, large-scale power supply. If Africa is to industrialise, it needs power plants. These will not be built unless customers start paying their electricity bills.

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AT THE edge of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's commercial capital, in a space roughly the size of a football field, stands hope for Africa's industrial future: the Ubungo power plant. Gleaming pipes emerge from the ground; five modern generators hum quietly.