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RENEWABLES: A Little Light Returns to Afghanistan

Sanjay Suri

BONN, Jun 1 2004 (IPS) - New photo-voltaic panels provide power to the offices of Sayed Abdullah in Kabul. Which is as it should be, since he is director of the renewable energy department in the ministry of water and power.

That Afghanistan should have a department of renewable energy at all might surprise outsiders more than Afghans.

“We had solar power units in the past, but they were all destroyed in the war,” Abdullah told IPS. The heating needs for rooms and for water at a Kabul hospital were met by solar power. Solar units also met energy needs in scattered but vital installations.

The wars left almost nothing of that. “The solar collector in Kabul was destroyed twice and then looted,” deputy minister for power Ghulam Jelani Jelis told a meeting earlier at the International Conference for Renewable Energies in Bonn Tuesday.

The loss of the solar unit was of course only a tiny part of the overall loss. “Over a quarter of a century from 1978 everything that had military or economic value was destroyed, stolen, looted, transferred to neighbouring countries,” Jelis said.

That included much of the electricity supply infrastructure until “only a few kilometres of overhead lines were left standing.” In 1994-95 Kabul had almost no electricity, and how staff still managed to keep essential supplies going was an effort “beyond imagination,” Jelis said.

That legacy carried over into peace. The fighting ended, but the infrastructure was gone. Much of the staff in the electricity department “fled or died” and those who returned were “in an advanced stage of retirement,” Jelis said.

New infrastructure is now coming up in Kabul, some streets have lights again. The task now is much bigger. Returning refugees means that instead of 800,000 people, about three million will need power.

And still, that is the good news, because that is Kabul. Only about six percent of Afghanistan’s 29 million people have access to electricity, and practically none in the rural areas where most people live.

And that is where Afghanistan really needs renewable energy, Abdullah says. Because the alternative to renewable energy is nothing other than the present practice of burning cow dung and wood – such wood as remains in the four percent of land area still covered by forests.

“And so we are organising a lot of research studies for use of renewable energy,” Abdullah said. “Monitoring machines have been set up to check feasibility for wind power. And we are looking at many possibilities for setting up photo-voltaic units.”

More hydro power through a series of small plants is being explored. And Afghan officials are looking at uses of biomass that could replace more traditional fuels.

Afghanistan does not expect to do this on its own. German and French companies and institutions are taking the lead in developing decentralised energy projects within Afghanistan.

These projects are not all donations. “We are playing the role of facilitators for business which is sustainable,” Ulrich Stohr-Grabowski, senior manager for energy and infrastructure with the government-funded and independently run German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) told IPS. “Otherwise, if it is not a business, the project breaks down if we leave.”

People are willing to pay for power, he said. GTZ û that is providing the secretariat for the Bonn conference û has as a consequence put Afghan departments in touch with companies and micro-finance banks that fund development of renewable energy projects. Funds are also available for such projects from the national solidarity programme in Afghanistan supported by the World Bank.

About 90 percent of Afghanistan’s energy needs are thermal. That means the need for heating, and also for conserving heat. New efforts are also going into insulation of buildings in what the world of renewable energy calls passive solar architecture. That means introducing design elements to make sure that heat once collected is not allowed to escape in a hurry.

Relatively simple modifications to design have been able to save up to 50 percent heat in old buildings and 60 to 80 percent in new buildings. Such changes are expected to make a big difference to Afghanistan where some schools are closed six months a year because the buildings get too cold.

Burning of wood and use of old-fashioned stoves to cook and provide warmth in these conditions has had devastating consequences. The World Health Organisation has estimated that a million people die every year in the Asian region due to smoke in the kitchen and carbon dioxide poisoning from stoves. Afghanistan is believed to be among the countries most strongly affected by this problem.

Violence in Afghanistan grabs the headlines. But the bigger killer is the cold and the business of trying to stay warm. Which makes Afghanistan the kind of place where renewable energy can come as oxygen.