Thursday, April 30, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
ENERGY: Not So Small, And Beautiful
Sanjay Suri
- While the big debate continues about oil prices, the alternatives to oil and the development of biofuels, scattered groups are finding new successes in generating all the energy they need, doing it cleanly – and now doing it on an impressive scale.
Just the top ten low carbon energy pioneers picked by the Britain-based Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy this year reach nine million people and save 1.9 million tonnes of carbon emissions, the group says.
The savings in emissions these groups bring in Asia and Africa are equivalent to the total domestic emissions of about 700,000 citizens of Britain, the report says. In Bangladesh, just one solar programme has installed more than 160,000 solar home systems, compared to 2,300 domestic solar panel installations in the UK.
The systems being installed in Bangladesh by the group Grameen Shakti (Village Power) are an extraordinary case of the small-scale going big. “We started in 1996 installing a few hundred such solar systems a year,” Dipal Barua from Grameen Shakti told IPS. “Now we are doing 8,000 a month. We had a target of a million by 2015, but we expect now to pass that in 2010.”
Typically, one such solar system can provide power for up to five hours of electricity to run four lamps, a black and white tv set, a radio, and a charging point for a mobile phone, Barua said. “It costs about 400 dollars, but we do not ask for down payment. We take a small advance, and our engineers collect the rest over a period of two or more years.”
The solar systems are making a tremendous difference to life, Barua said. “Kerosene for lamps is expensive, and it is not environment friendly. This way we give steady light in the evening hours for children to study at home, and for shopkeepers and others to run their business.”
The rapid demand has seen Grameen Shakti grow to an organisation that employs 2,000 engineers, with an annual budget of 30 million dollars.
In Nepal’s villages, new biogas systems are being installed, which digest animal dung to produce gas for cooking and lighting, replacing wood fires and kerosene lamps. These cost about 400 dollars each. Households get subsidy for one third, contribute one-third in kind, and pay the remainder through microcredit.
Like the solar systems in Bangladesh, one such installation provides for essential household needs for energy. The demand for such units, and production, is rising rapidly. And now Grameen Shakti is also developing biogas plants and new technology to improve the cooking stove.
In India the International Development Enterprise, India, has developed human operated treadle pumps for irrigation that are effectively replacing diesel pumps. The Solar Electric Light Company has developed a wide range of solar pumps and other appliances. In both these cases, these are not just something alternative for a few. The demand is in thousands of units monthly, and growing rapidly.
“All this is going beyond a nice idea or some niche concept,” Ben Dixon, programme manager at the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy told IPS. “We are reaching the tipping point beyond which such technology will benefit millions.”
The challenge now, he said, is to “explore opportunities to replicate these successes, to take them to other projects and places.”
The scaling up of such successes is the way forward, says a report identifying the clean energy ventures prepared by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in collaboration with GVEP international, a London-based network to promote modern clean energy in rural and semi-urban areas.
The small and medium enterprises that developed these technologies shared a strong social orientation and a mission to bring energy to poor people, says the report that was commissioned by Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID). “It is striking that all of the programmes had grown over a significant length of time – in seven cases over ten years or more. This has enabled the development of local expertise and supply chains, and the continuous incorporation of new approaches and ideas.”
Most of the programmes, the report says, “were led by people who had been there from the start, and the continuity of leadership and vision may have played a significant role.” The report says such successes need not remain as scattered as they are, and that they can be replicated widely through transfer of technology and financing mechanisms.
Apart from switching to such technology, the clean new technology can be widely adopted for people who have inadequate access to any energy source, the report says.
The report points out that 2 billion people worldwide have no access to electricity, and 1.6 billion still rely on fuel wood and open fires for cooking. “This is a critical issue for health, education and poverty reduction – escalating energy prices and growing demand mean that centralised energy systems are unlikely to fill this gap,” the report says.
The ten programmes the report highlights provide simple and affordable energy technologies such as improved cooking stoves, solar home systems, biogas and water pumps.
“The technologies are having significant environmental benefits such as reduced carbon emissions and deforestation, but also important social and economic impacts, transforming the lives of beneficiaries through better income and health, food security, cleaner air and more opportunity for study,” the report says.
A key finding of the report is that potential beneficiaries need to have access to affordable credit. “This is because upfront costs of new technologies such as solar panels can be a barrier – even though high prices for kerosene and other alternatives mean that the payback times can be surprisingly short,” the report says.
The report recommends microfinance backed by soft loans and government subsidies, and to specifically designed carbon finance as a way to support such energy sources.
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