Research needs for meeting the challenge of decentralized energy supply in developing countries
Highlights
► Lack of systematic evaluation of decentralized electricity systems. ► Research community for this field is not clearly defined. ► Future research should integrate users' needs in technology development. ► Important to look at embedding accompanying services and productive use. ► There is a need for inter- and transdisciplinary research in this field.
Introduction
Worldwide, about 4 billion people live on less than $8 per day. Next to food and housing, energy often is the biggest expense for low-income households IFC and WRI (2007). Most energy expenses are spent for cooking, heating and lightning. Having no or only infrequent access to energy especially affects the poorest segments of society, which often have to diversify their energy sources and buy them in small, expensive units. This has severe consequences for their household spending: according to IFC and WRI (2007), they spend up to 30% of their household income on energy.
It is expected that the world population will reach 9.1 billion people by 2050. According to UNDESA (2009), the largest increase in population is to be experienced in the least-developed countries,1 whose total population is projected to double from currently 0.84 billion in 2009 to 1.7 billion in 2050. All developing countries taken together will experience population growth from 5.6 billion in 2009 to 7.9 billion in 2050.
International organizations estimate that, in 2030, 1.3 billion people – or 16% of the world's population – will still not have access to electricity, compared to 1.5 billion in 2008 (OECD and IEA 2010). The greatest share of people without access to electricity will be found in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the numbers are estimated to increase (from 587.1 million in 2008 to 698.3 million in 2030), while they are expected to decrease in South Asia (from 613.9 million to 488.6 million) and China and East Asia (from 195.1 million to 72.5 million). At the same time developing countries will have to deal with the growing cost of importing fossil fuels.
The majority of people without access to electricity – 85% – live in rural areas and informal urban settlements in developing and emerging countries (OECD and IEA 2010). In many countries the existing grid is not adequate to meet the demand and requires technical upgrades and rapid expansion. Especially poor households and small business owners who are highly dependent on reliable and cost-effective electricity access are affected by fluctuating electricity supply and frequent blackouts.
In its ‘Special Report Renewable Energy Sources’ the IPCC (2011) states that renewable energies are an affordable and economically viable option to react to the electricity needs of people in developing countries. Already now, tens of millions of households are being supplied by renewable energy from different sources. The ‘Renewables 2010 Global Status Report’ (REN21 2010) estimates that about 3 million households use small solar PV systems to generate electricity. For more than 3 decades, different types of decentralized electricity from renewable sources have been implemented by governments, development agencies, NGOs and, in a few cases, private-sector initiatives.2 Besides a few success stories and best practice examples, there have also been many failures in introducing these technologies under difficult context conditions (Nieuwenhout et al. 2001).
As stated above, there has been much experience with decentralized energy supply in different continents during the last 3 decades. Many times, however, there has been no systematic evaluation of these experiences or sufficient transfer of the results of such evaluations between regions, countries and continents. Faced with the necessity of efficiently providing access to electricity for the poorest segments of society during the next decades, a more systematic evaluation and transfer of experiences seems to be essential.
Parallel to the decentralized character of off-grid electricity supply, research in this field seems to be scattered across disciplines and numerous institutions in various continents, without many institutionalized occasions and forums which allow systematic comparison of “lessons learnt” and drawing of joint conclusions about future strategies in this field.3 Since research in this field is often done with few resources, case studies of applying certain technologies in a specific context are common. To be able to compare the results of case studies of decentralized energy supply in different countries of the developing world, it would be very helpful to be able to agree on minimum standards and an accepted framework for the evaluation of case studies in the international research community. This would include discussions about which type of methods and results are transferable to other regional and cultural contexts and which types of results cannot be generalized because they are context specific.
Another characteristic is that research in this field is seldom financed by public scientific funds, which would allow a transparent discussion of outcomes and results. Particularly evaluations are often financed by international or national development organizations. Since these organizations have to prove the success of their funding programs, it is often not easy to discuss difficulties or failures openly in these contexts or to publish critical results. These circumstances bear the risk that practitioners such as NGOs, funding institutions or implementers will get caught in the same traps over and over again.
Against this background, there seems to be a need for neutral scientific forums and formats, which would allow for addressing problems, questions, bottlenecks and difficulties openly and without negative impacts on future funding. This kind of forums could be a first step towards community-wide learning from previous experiences.
The international conference ‘Micro Perspectives for Decentralized Energy Supply,’ which was held in April 2011 at the Technische Universität Berlin, was attempting to provide such a forum.4 It aimed at reflecting the state of the art of current scientific activities in the field of decentralized energy supply and starting an open discussion about difficulties and challenges. Presentations included research conducted in more than 30 different countries on all continents.5 Various aspects of the main topics – “implementation and business models”, “technology”, “user experience” and “regulation” – were discussed in 17 thematic sessions with 120 participants.6 The following section presents some of the challenges of implementing systems of decentralized energy supply in remote areas, based on the presentations and discussions of the conference. As most papers received for the conference were focused on decentralized electricity supply, the rest of this paper focuses on decentralized electricity supply. However, it is important to mention that research areas outside of this focus also merit attention due to their importance and pressing nature in development contexts.
Section snippets
Challenges of implementing systems of decentralized energy supply in remote areas
Remote rural areas in developing or emerging countries are often characterized by a lack of infrastructure such as transport, education and health facilities and – closely linked with these deficiencies – a lack of human capital. The difficulty of overcoming long distances between urban settlements and remote areas is intensified by roads, which are in bad condition. These circumstances make it difficult or expensive for service suppliers to guarantee regular visits and hinder local populations
Systems of decentralized energy supply need robust and adaptable technologies
The demands on technology of decentralized energy systems are especially high due to the difficult context conditions mentioned above (see Laufer & Schäfer, Tillmans & Schweizer-Ries in this issue as well as Lindner, 2011, Müggenberg et al., 2011). Technology needs to be robust, maintainable and reparable with low-level technical skills. While a certain standardization is necessary to avoid high costs, it needs to be possible to adapt technologies to specific context conditions. “One size fits
Characteristics of an adequate research type
The former section has outlined some of the necessary approaches in research and development in the field of decentralized energy supply. It is easy to recognize that interdisciplinary cooperation is necessary in order to be able to answer most urgent questions and develop strategies which go beyond providing purely technical solutions. To elaborate concepts, like Product Services Systems, for different forms of decentralized energy supply requires knowledge from various disciplines. Expertise
Conclusions
The implementation of different systems for decentralized energy supply is not a new topic — much experience in this field has been gained in different cultural contexts during the last 3 decades. However, due to current discourses and global governance strategies, for example in the fields of poverty reduction (Millennium Development Goals) and climate protection (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), the issue has gained priority. Various national and international
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