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In this image from the Smithsonian, you can see the lights of Europe at night, whereas most of Africa is dark.
As an inveterate night owl, reading this article in the Independent really made me think. The piece makes the point that most Africans don’t have access to electricity in the form of a grid, as we do here (where we seem to do our very best to waste it, but anyway), and therefore aren’t able to work much outside daylight hours. I can’t imagine being unable to work half the night away, whether I’m typing away on my laptop, watching a movie, reading, even vacuuming and doing yoga. I would certainly be less productive, and I wouldn’t be able to run this site, period since I do most of my writing for it between 11pm and 2am.
So how do we give the African people the ability to work all night if they want to, without sucking up fossil fuels to run these fun blinking machines? Setting up a grid like ours would not only be an environmental disaster, but it is a financial impossibility for impoverished nations.
Many of the continent’s poorest people are dependent on kerosene lamps or candles, and typically spend at least a 10th of their income on lighting
their shacks. The lamps often kick out more smoke than light, and there are frequent stories of huts going up in flames as they get knocked over. People
with a bit of extra cash may invest in a small diesel generator, but the extra illumination and the reduced danger does not quite compensate for the
noise and the polluting fumes.
The World Bank wants to sell LED’s, and suggests hooking them up to people-powered machines. LED’s use less than a watt of power to create light to read by, and while we may only be familiar in them for small lighting tasks, the technology for LED’s has come a long way, meaning they could provide an answer to part of Africa’s lighting puzzle.
Lighting Africa officially launches on 4 September, when organisers will unveil a competition for the design and delivery of low-cost, green lighting
products for low-income consumers in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 350 companies have already expressed an interest – from Africa-based small
businesses to multinationals like Philips.
Unfortunately, there’s no mention of solar power in this article, though this would seem to be the obvious answer, as much of the poorest parts of Africa are known for their direct access to equatorial (meaning very regular) solar energy. Large hydropower projects ARE mentioned, without any commentary provided on the environmental destruction of this form of energy generation, which would seem to be a major oversight in the article. It sent a shudder down my spine to think of Africa’s largest river, the Congo, dammed along it’s long and winding path, which would disturb all the ecosystems along its route if regular flooding events were to be eliminated. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be money enough for this kind of huge hydropower project, so I’m hoping in the meantime solar panels become cheap enough so that Africans who want to stay up half the night reading don’t have to sacrifice their environment to do so.
Thanks to RemyC for the link!
Right on Starre (and RemyC), thanks for the update.
While I agree that the prospect of more big hydro projects is scary at best, I’m still stoked and optimistic about the impacts of this initiative. I just read a compelling piece by Ethan Zuckerman in the Boston Globe, which painted a better picture of how energy in Africa could be revolutionized in much the same way as phone communication there (and in fact, how they could be directly linked). Its well worth a read:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/08/05/building_big_starting_small/
Also worth checking out, is a recent TED talk by Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda on aid to Africa. His talk seemed to light some fires in the audience, fueling the debate over the merits and impacts of Western Aid Programs. I wonder what he would think of this particular initiative.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/159
Do we really want to export our sleep-deprived, overworked, pseudo-productive mass-consumerized lifestyle in the name of green progress?
I’m a huge fan of solar power (I have to be) – and find it preferable to hydropower – but I do think the issue of utilizing solar energy has to be considered in greater depth than this. It’s not necessarily a cost factor that keeps many from acquiring solar panels; rather it’s a cultural dilemma. At the PV Conference last year, many of the panel manufacturing companies highlighted their “developing world” projects, which had me really excited until they showed pictures of that electricity in use … televisions and microwaves are not my idea of progressive necessities. I have to say, I agree with Chris’s last comment, even if following that philosophy means that all the off-grid projects my husband’s working on don’t come to fruition.
In one instance that sounded like a beautiful idea because of its functional purpose, where the panels were used to run a well pump to keep women from walking 3 miles a day to get water from a dirty river, the villagers sabotaged the pump because it took away from their gossip hour and they liked that time to walk there and back with their friends. Frankly, I think it’s time for us to stop trying to “Save Africa” by introducing Western ways and start collaborating to learn from them (I mean, seriously, without all that light pollution imagine the galaxies you could see each night… and how much energy we’d save)
There’s one thing you can’t argue about, it’s the need for reading light… PVs and LEDs go together… they both function at peak in DC mode… New PV nano-chemistries are making them cheaper, much more C2C kinder in manufacture… Sadly, most PV companies are owned by oil companies, and don’t share the green life style changes that also needs to take place with the use of renewables. Energy independence is also necessary for a paradigm shift taking place. Clean water, refrigeration… but yes, I really appreciate the story about the sabotaging the pump. New Urbanism, where city centers are in fact kinder to the eco-system, allowing vast tracks of land to return to their natural state, restoing forests on a grand scale. Saving Africa is necessary to keep out oil, coal and nuclear… as more and more solar industries loosen the stranglehold oil and utilities have on them, regions in ways of development stand a chance of putting their best green foot forward.
I don’t mean to nitpick, Remy, but I have to disagree on at least one front … maybe solar in the US is oil company owned (actually, not maybe; it’s not a huge number anymore – not since Shell was bought out by Solar World; and though BP’s marketing team might have you believe they’ve got a huge market share, their PV panels were randomly catching on fire and they dropped the ball on fixing these problems so many installers in the US won’t use their panels anymore)… but in the rest of the world, where many of these solar companies are located, the manufacturers and installers aren’t owned by oil companies. Past technology was derived from oil money but that’s just not the case anymore. The two largest PV manufacturers in Germany (billion Euro industries) are Q-Cells and Solar World, both independent. And utilities don’t have a stranglehold on PV – the silicon industry and political processes do. Until governments subsidize the added costs of renewable energies and stop subsidizing the construction of nuclear power plants (the US lists nuclear as renewable, unfortunately), PV remains a world away…