Big Social Costs Tallied in Regions With Scant Energy Access

After reading this Guardian article — “Energy poverty deprives 1 billion of adequate health care, says report” — I dug into the underlying analysis this morning. The report, by the British nonprofit group Practical Action, is a valuable effort to assess the full costs of inadequate energy access through indirect impacts on hospitals, schools and the like. Click here for the executive summary.

The Guardian story focuses on the impact on health care. Here’s an excerpt:

In India, nearly half of all health facilities – serving an estimated 580 million people – lack electricity, according to this year’s Poor People’s Energy Outlook (pdf), published on Wednesday by the NGO Practical Action. A further 255 million people are served by health centres without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa, it says, where over 30% of facilities lack power.

“For critical and urgent health services such as emergency treatments and childbirth, staff have no option but to cope as well as possible in low lighting or in the dark, increasing the risk for all patients, including mothers and babies,” the report says.

Even where health centres have access to power, frequent power shortages significantly hamper the ability to provide quality care, it says.

In Kenya, for example, only 25% of facilities have a reliable energy supply, and blackouts happen at least six times a month, for an average of 4.5 hours at a time.

I found the section on schools equally troubling. See the chart at the top of this post and note how fewer than half of the primary schools in India — soon to be the most populous country on the planet — have electricity. The 2007 photo of students in Guinea doing their homework under streetlights has been a visual mantra here to drive home this issue. (I’m trying to find out if electricity access in slums there has improved since then; tips welcome.)

It’s great, in light of such data, that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has made “Sustainable Energy for All” a top priority. (Please read what he has said about his own experience with energy poverty.)

But it’s even more fortunate that entrepreneurs and engineers are making this a priority. Here are just two of many examples:

– Vijay Modi, a Columbia University engineering professor whose work on energy access first caught my attention in 2005, has a thriving research lab at the university working on distributed solar power systems for communities that will never be on a grid.

– Harish Hande, whose work and company, Selco Solar, have been featured here, is providing energy consulting and systems in under-served areas of India.

Here’s how Hande describes the company’s goal and niche:

It was conceived in an effort to dispel three myths associated with sustainable technology and the rural sector as a target customer base:

1) Poor people cannot afford sustainable technologies;
2) Poor people cannot maintain sustainable technologies;
3) Social ventures cannot be run as commercial entities.

Selco aims to empower its customer by providing a complete package of product, service and consumer financing….

I’m all for efforts to cut energy use and advance non-polluting options in rich countries. A great example is Mosaic, the startup that’s created what amounts to a crowd-funded solar utility, in which the up-front costs of installing panels are paid for by investors, who are paid back with interest. See David Bornstein’s Fixes post from earlier this week for more. (To test drive this concept, I put in $400 two months ago; I’ll report back late this year on how things are going).

But in developing countries, the opportunities and payback — in social gains, particularly — are, by my calculus, far greater.

This is why I keep saying that the “energy quest” that’s needed to smooth the human journey in this century has two faces — one figuring out how the haves can use energy more wisely, the other figuring out how to get the benefits that come with modern energy to the billions without sustainable options right now.

Looking at such opportunities more broadly, this is how Paul Polak, the author of “Out of Poverty,” explains the situation:

Ninety percent of the world’s designers spend all their time working on solutions to the problems of the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers. A revolution in design is needed to reverse this silly ratio and reach the other 90 percent.

Please read “Can the world fight climate change and energy poverty at the same time?“– Brad Plumer’s excellent post building on the themes explored here.

He cites Roger Pielke Jr.’s sobering analysis of how some calculations of paths to “clean energy for all” would leave a billion or two people cooking in smoky darkness even by 2035. Plumer cites Pielke’s recent Breakthrough Institute essay noting that “almost 6 billion people in non-OECD countries…collectively consume as much energy as the 1.2 billion in OECD countries” and adding:

The world of the future will consume vastly more energy than the world today. The only questions are how efficiently and effectively we get to that high energy world. Putting energy access at the center of policy discussions would be a smart first step.