What Drives Electricity Adoption? A Review of Connection Charges in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Doug Barnes

Household Electricity Meter
Picture Credit: Douglas Barnes

Today many development agencies focus on the price and physical presence of access to electricity as being the main issue for lack of electricity in developing countries.  They may want to alter their thinking.  This is not to say that physical access and the price of electricity are not important, for clearly they are very important.  But a new study on Electricity Adoption and Connection Charges in Sub-Saharan Africa finds that an equally important factor may be electricity connection charges for new consumers.  Africa is the region with the lowest electricity access rates in the world (only 1 in 8 rural households and 1 of 2 urban households have electricity) and also is the region with the highest initial service connection charges.  One question not explored in this paper is the extent to which high connection charges are an indirect way for power companies to confine service to more profitable high income electricity users and to avoid political pressure to extend electricity to poor, low electricity using households. 

For electricity companies, expanding electricity to all makes quite a bit of sense for long term business development.  Electricity would contribute to economic development, and then more people could afford electricity.  As incomes grow even poorer people would buy more appliances and increase their electricity use, making them more financially attractive for electricity companies.  Thus, in the long term policies to expand electricity service make both solid financial and economic sense.

Small Photovoltaic Lighting Systems: Niche or Not

The small technologies such as solar lanterns and small lights have always been a challenge to promote under development programs.

Solar Lantern in India

The wind up radio, which is now in the mainstream market for developed countries, was originally introduced as a possibility to improve communication in developing countries. Except for emergency situations such as Haiti, it is not a staple product for international donor programs because such products are now readily available in the marketplace, sold through large chains, retail stores and shops at retail prices.

The question is will small photovoltaic lighting systems have a similar fate? In part to answer this question there is a recent report that has been published by GTZ with the long title, What difference can a PicoPV system make? Early findings on small Photovoltaic systems - an emerging low cost energy technology for developing countries.  Here is the link. That must be a literal German translation of the title, but my preference given the content of the report would be something like The Role of Micro-Photovoltaic Lighting Systems in Developing Countries. But admittedly that is more boring.

Rural Energy Subsidies: “It's Déjà Vu All Over Again”

By Doug Barnes

I have noticed that there has been quite a bit of material circulating recently on energy access and subsidies.  The World Bank has prepared

Cooking with Ecofogon Stove, Nicaragua
Photo: PROLEÑA/Nicaragua

a background paper that will be published soon, and it is quite good. However, in reading this paper and other related material, I almost felt I had read it before—a kind of déjà vu.  So in this period when everybody is asking "Where is my bailout?" it seems a good time to review the justifications and implementation challenges for energy subsidies.

Jonathan Halpern and I had written both a paper and a short note on this subject about 10 years ago at a time when there were strong anti-subsidy sentiments in many development agencies. This blog contains a summary of that paper on energy subsidies published in 2000. So go to the original paper and read it, or read on. Or read on and then go to the paper! This work hopefully has withstood the test of time, but you can be the judge.

Why should we examine the role of energy subsidies for access to energy?  The answer seems obvious.  Energy policies that have the purpose of alleviating poverty must in some way bring down the costs of safe, clean, reliable energy services to make them more affordable. Low-income households often lack access to or cannot afford the initial costs of “modern” energy services. A good subsidy scheme is one that enhances access for the poor while sustaining incentives for efficient delivery of energy services without significant distortions in energy markets. But that is not all: the subsidy scheme must also be within the financial and human resource constraints of the government. This is quite a balancing act.


Much more below the break....

Comparative Cooking Costs in Developing Countries

By Douglas Barnes and Keith Openshaw

Kerosene Lamps and Stoves, Hyderabad, India by D. Barnes

Recently we have just reviewed many of programs for improved stoves in developing countries, and we were quite surprised to find that there were few analyses of comparative cooking costs. In the glory days of country energy assessments comparing the cost of cooking to enlighten energy policy makers was very common. Today we stress energy efficiency, combustion, emissions, and carbon. However, if people are going to adopt these stoves the comparative cooking costs are an obvious important place to start. Keith Openshaw who has extensive experience with improved stoves is a coauthor of this posting. 

To revive this lost art, we will explain the steps for calculating comparative cooking. The first step is to assemble the necessary data. This includes:

• Cost of the stove;
• Lifetime of the stove;
• Efficiency of the stove;
• Price of fuels used burned by the stove including wood or other biomass fuels;
• Fuel collection hours for biomass fuels;
• Quantity of fuel consumed in the household per month; and
• Average wage of agricultural workers.

One caveat is that the comparative costs in this analysis are hypothetical because they assume that families cook exclusively with one fuel. Also, we use world market prices and average fuel consumption levels as defined by many different household energy surveys. Thus, these figures can be considered as typical but they do not relate to any one country due to various policies to tax and subsidize household fuels. They at least give us some perspective on the comparative costs of cooking in developing countries.

For much more continue below....

Eight Steps to Successful Rural Electrification Programs

The pace of rural electrification over much of the developing world has been painfully slow, especially in South Asia and Africa. Rural electrification programs can undoubtedly face major obstacles. The low population densities in rural areas result in high capital and operating costs for electricity companies. Consumers are often poor and their electricity consumption low.  This post is on grid rural electrification and there will be a similar future post on offgrid rural electrification.

The Challenge of Rural Electrification:  D. Barnes

Yet in spite of these problems, many countries have been quietly and successfully providing electricity to rural areas. In Thailand, well over 90 percent of rural people have a supply. In Costa Rica, cooperatives and the government power utility provide electricity to nearly 100% percent of the rural population. In Tunisia, over 90% percent of rural households already have a supply. In studying countries like these and others there appear to be 8 steps to achieving successful rural electrification. These steps are taken from my book called The Challenge of Rural Electrification: Strategies for Developing Countries. that examined 10 successful programs from around the world including the developed countries of the United States and Ireland. I know that it appears these programs are in middle to high income countries, but many were low income when they initiated their programs. 

To read more click below to continue.

Cooking with LPG: Climate and Poverty Issues

What is the largest improved stove program in the developing world? The answer may surprise you. It is the Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) stove. The use of LPG worldwide has been growing for many years. It is not a renewable fuel like biomass energy, but it is clean burning and provides much greater efficiency than even the best improved biomass stoves. For those not familiar with LPG, it is quite similar to propane.

Retail LPG Use in India in Millions: Industry Source

LPG is quite commonly used in urban areas of developing countries and is becoming increasingly common in rural areas. In India alone since 1985 the petroleum industry reports that over 100 million households have switched from other cooking sources to LPG. Today even close to 20% of rural household are using LPG mostly for quick heating such as water boiling, and this amounts to about 30 million households. Not only is LPG subsidized in India, but it has become more widely available over the years.

India has had an aggressive LPG promotion campaign for years and just recently announced that there will be a program to provide free stoves to households below the poverty line. The subsidies no doubt are expensive for the government and as the program continues to expand one can question whether such subsidies are justifiable given the ready acceptance of LPG by the mostly high and middle income consumers. But one also might just imagine the positive health impacts of the widespread substitution of LPG for fuelwood. Cooking with LPG gives off minimum pollution and alleviates indoor air pollution.

LPG Cooking in Hyderbad India: by D. Barnes

One little understood fact is that LPG is used mainly by middle to high income families, but it also has indirect impacts on poor urban households who do not even use it. Why is this? The main reason is the pattern of dynamics of energy pricing. Obviously high taxes on LPG raise its overall price and conversely subsides lower the price. The price of fuelwood for cooking quite often mimics price of LPG or kerosene in large urban areas after taking into consideration energy efficiency. Poor people in urban areas generally purchase biomass fuels such as fuelwood or charcoal, so high LPG prices mean high prices for biomass energy. The poor spend quite a bit of their income on energy; it can be as high as high as 15 to 20 percent. Thus, the price of biomass energy is obviously very important for their welfare.

Concerning climate change, encouraging the substitution of LPG for biomass fuels actually may be a winning prospect. It actually takes just over 11 kilograms of wood to provide the same cooking heat as one kilogram of LPG due to higher energy content and greater efficiencies of gas stoves. After some further conversions, for the same cooking task wood burned in open fires actually gives off 4 times more CO2 compared to LPG. It is true that some wood is from renewable sources, but do we really know how much? Also, is it really relevant? Perhaps, but the CO2 is going into the air regardless of its source.

This also does not mean that we should give up on making biomass stoves that are less polluting and more or efficient (see previous blog on new generation of improved stoves). Some new stoves give off levels of pollution that similar to using LPG. There is also a role for cooking with other fuels and technologies such as biogas or perhaps even alcohol in developing countries.

The ultimate goal is to alleviate energy poverty and there are many ways to do it. This might even include the promotion of LPG for cooking. What do you think?

poll by twiigs.com

For more continue reading below.

Improved Biomass Stoves: The Next Generation

There is a new sheriff in town. Today around the world there is an entirely new and innovative variety of improved stoves that are being manufactured in factories or workshops and sometimes backed by large international companies. These new types of stoves generally are made of quite durable materials that will last for 5 to 10 years or even longer and some come with guarantees. The goal of the marketing of these new stoves is to improve energy efficiency of cooking, to lower indoor air pollution, and to reduce labor or cash expenses required for cooking for the poorest half of the world’s population. The idea is to supply the nearly 3 billion people around the world that still use biomass energy with a stove that that is more modern and efficient than the traditional ones that they now use. Will these new stoves bring order to the wild west of improved stoves programs characterized by hundreds of models made out of vastly different local materials and produced by local artisans?

Traditional Stove in India: Photo by S. Desai

Stoves have existed since the beginning of human history. They have come in various sizes and styles, having been adapted to myriad cultures and food preparation methods. As society has progressed, more sophisticated stove models have been developed. Today’s modern kitchen reflects the many types of standardized and specialized cooking devices available from coffee and tea pots to toasters and gas cooktops. In contrast, the poor in developing countries still burn biomass energy in what amounts to open fires. The smoke produced by these primitiave stoves has been associated with a number of diseases, the most serious of which is acute respiratory illness such as bronchitis and pnemonia.

Envirofit Stove Model G-3300 in India: Photo by Envirofit

The development of improved biomss stoves has witnessed several overlapping stages over the last 30 years and today there are actually three types of programs around the world. One type of improved stove is locally made by small businesses or the even those in household members after they trained. Such stoves are very inexpensive at less than 10 dollars each and sometimes even less than 5 dollars. These artisan-made stoves provide relatively good performance when new, but performance degrades over the short one or two year live of the stove. The second type of stove involves manufactured parts, which are assembled on site with local materials. These stoves are still inexpensive but are a bit more expensive and more durable than the artisan stoves. There will be a later blog on these two types of stoves.

Stovetec Stove: Photo by Aprovecho

The competition is heating up for the “next generation” of stoves that are manufactured in their entirely in factories and workshops world. They include efficient biomass stoves, alcohol stoves, stoves that use pellets, and others. Some of the world’s largest companies have become involved including Shell Foundation, Bosch Siemens, Phillips, British Petroleum and others. There are two interesting examples for wood stoves including the Envirofit stoves and the Stovetec produced by Aprovecho. Others innovations include the Worldstove, First Energy’s Oorja Stove, Gaia’s Dometic (Gaia project), Bosh-Siemens Protos stove, the Onil stove in Guatemala, and the Justa stove in Honduras. A very interesting new initiative by the Government of India endorses the concept of manufactured stoves and implementation is in the planning stages.

The international donors have been slow to embace or support these new generaton of stoves and admittedly this is still an incomplete picture. However, it may just take some time for the realization to set in that such programs can probably be as important as increasing electricity access in terms of improved health and quality of life such as less fuel collection, shorter cooking time, reduced releases of carbon, and less pressure on local forests.

Its nice that there is more international competition in developing new products. However, the question is should there be more interational attention to this problem?

More resources below.