It’s Time for Energy

By Hilmi Toros

With 1.6 billion people lacking access to electricity and 2.4 billion relying on primitive biomass for cooking and heating, phenomenal investment is needed to supply power and even more so to make it sustainable to additional users, according to energy experts at the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development.

“What is more shocking, in the absence of radical new policies, 1.4 billion will still have no electricity in 30 years’ time. This is not a sustainable future,” Robert Priddle, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said at a news conference as the summit began deliberations on energy, one of its five main themes.

It is estimated that some 2.1 trillion U.S. dollars in investment is needed over the next 30 years to reduce the number of those with no access to electricity from 1.6 to 1.4 billion.

But there is room for optimism, the IEA executive director told TerraViva. The summit could come out with a strong statement in favour of making access to electricity easier for the poor. He said funding for energy projects in the developing world is likely to increase.

High hopes are pinned on energy from renewable sources, particularly in remote off-grid areas, since it is both clean and renewable.

One target being mentioned is to obtain 15 percent of energy from renewable sources -wind and solar, chief among them -- by 2015 compared to 2 percent at present (4 percent if one considers (not all do) big hydroelectric dams as being truly renewable). The target does not include energy from biomass.

This target is considered far too ambitious, and the best that could be achieved is said to be 13 percent, including from biomass.

In addition, renewable energy is becoming a major rallying point mainly in the industrialized world where energy from traditional sources is not lacking and the aim is to shift from one source to another in line with reducing pollution.

In fact, the summit also became the venue for lobbying by renewable energy interests to press for the creation of a new U.N. agency dealing exclusively with renewable energy and energy efficiency. Its acceptance is considered unlikely.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank joined with other donors and NGOs have launched the Global Village Energy Partnership to bring energy services to 50,000 communities and 300 million people over the next 10 years.

UNDP also announced that current energy use is having a negative impact on health, with some 2.5 million deaths attributed to poorly ventilated stoves using tradition fuels. The organisation said it is instituting a new private-public partnership to increase the availability of Liquefied Petroleum Gases (LPG) as a clean fossil fuel to meet the world's rural heating and cooking requirements.

"It will not be possible to bring hundreds of millions of women and men out of poverty in the next decade unless people have access to reliable, affordable energy services." UNDP administrator Malloch Brown said. "Electricity and cleaner fuels are essential to do this."

Meanwhile, members of various Green Parties in the European Parliament assailed what they called provisions in the energy partnership initiative that would allow funding for nuclear projects from E.U. development funds. They said the 700-million-euro partnership initiative also gives too much weight to “clean coal”, admittedly cheaper than oil as a source of energy, but not as clean as it is made out to be, according to the Greens.

And Friends of the Earth announced that in back-room negotiations under way on the Plan of Action the United States is opposing any target for renewable energy, with Brazil proposing a target of 10 percent of primary energy supply by 2010. The environment group has given its support to the target proposed by Brazil.