African Villages Glow With Renewable Energy 172
Peace Corps Online writes "The NY Times reports that as small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries playing an epic, transformative role. With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford. 'You're seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,' says energy adviser Dana Younger. In addition to small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and 'mini' hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village. 'It's a phenomenon that's sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,' says Younger."
Re:I hate to be selfish (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of the work is being done by http://www.lightingafrica.org/ [lightingafrica.org] and you can look at the member list there. It's pretty unwieldy, since Africa is a giant continent, but the article itself mentions at least two companies:
http://www.fireflyledlight.com/ [fireflyledlight.com]
http://www.huskpowersystems.com/ [huskpowersystems.com]
Re:Wow, that's amazingly obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
...of you, to not know about the central problem of development we've been discovering since the 1960's. By the 90's, it was accepted wisdom and changes slowly began to be made, despite all the money to be made from selling them hydroelectric dams.
You see, attempting to catapult unready societies into the late industrial revolution from a 1700's-era starting point kept failing and failing and failing. Books like "The Road to Hell" by aid professional Michael Maren and "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins brought out how so much of that "aid" was to benefit the givers, not the receivers. Perkins was particularly damning about hydroelectric dams and power stations being built all over the world with "aid" money all those loans that went into default. It was a straightforward recipe:
(1) Bogus economic study of how the country would blossom and prosper if only they had power, a market would explode as soon as it was available, and the national or World Bank loan would be paid back in years. (Perkins' job - he goes over it in detail for Ecuador and Indonesia).
(2) Local "400 families" get extravagant cuts of the action, of course, and they approve the deal, being also the government.
(3) Dam is built, Western engineering firms do well, 400 families do well, local people are bumped off the reservoir land, sometimes at gunpoint, etc.
(4) No market actually arises, country wasn't ready after all, loan goes into default.
(5) People of country end up with higher taxes and lower services for about 40 years to pay back World Bank and IMF.
High capital investments come with high risk. You can substitute "coal-fired" for "hydroelectric" if you like, it actually makes it worse since you now have to develop TWO major plants - a coal mine and a power station - with a populace that has trouble keeping a local chlorine-drip 1-man water treatment plant running reliably.
We built up to a massively centralized economy with small numbers of very large stations and plants and factories and so forth for power and materiel production, only after more than a century of slowly scaling up from very small distributed ones. We thought we could take them straight to Big Industry, and we were wrong. And it was not an "honest mistake"; the decision to try that at all was highly affected by the profits to be made just attempting it, because others had to pay the price for the error.
Re:Panels and batteries still pricey and crappy (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo. Most of these commenters are clearly not reading TFA. It describes the woman having to take a 3-hour ride and pay a fee *to charge her cell phone*. This economic decision of hers wasn't made lightly, she shopped and worked it out the way you'd have to justify buying a car. With this trickle of power, she has lighting at night, and she can charge the cell phone, and she can charge others in the village to charge *their* cell-phones, though that payback is just for early adopters; everybody in her village will have them soon.
The picture gets better going forward five years. By then, most poor Africans will have cell phones. LED lighting is expected to double in lumens/watt efficiency in that time, and more so in economic efficiency as prices may drop by 40%. (The market for LED over here is going to explode soon, because Compact-Fluorescent is always going to look bluish and cold, but LED's are coming out now with CRI [colour indexes] as nice as incandescent. The economies of scale will start to kick in then.) And, of course, solar panels are improving too.
At some point, development in these places will reach a point where they have so many electrical needs that they will pay for a few local wires to a small generator. Once the locals pay to wire up the village, a market has just appeared for an entrepreneur who can get a line out to them from a real power station. At least we can hope that works, since 50 years of attempts to teleport these villages from nothing to mid-20th century in one Big Development have done almost nothing but fail.
This doesn't match my experience (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure I agree on your efficiency there. I have replaced 60+W incandescents with the curly CFLs that used something like 15W and am now replacing THOSE with LED that use 8W and are rated as "40W replacements". Except that they produce as much or more light than the CFL in the right fixture! In one case in particular the change in brightness was striking and a very large improvement.
I am using the $30 Sylvania "Ultra LED" lights which are new and part of their High Performance Series. Lowes, in the US, sells these cheaper than anyone I've found BTW. In a "can" fixture in the ceiling in my bathroom they proved to light instantly as compared to the slow glow curlies and to provide MORE light. In the light fixtures on my porch however they proved too directional and created bad shadows. In my normal bathroom sconces they work awesome and in my nightstand lamp they also work great. Used in a freestanding torch sort of light they threw too sharp a shadow line as most of the light went up and not out. I have yet to find one of either CFL or LEF that can replace a single bright 100W incandescent in a ceiling fan I have. :-(
I have begun using some other LEDs in a pendant fixture that used to use incandescent and it's working okay but not as well as the Sylvania bulbs. The LED is a much whiter\bluer light than CFL in my experience so far but they are WAY cooler and use way less juice. The cost is a bit rude but so far they seem to be holding up very well - for the price they had better.
In any case for efficiency I'd argue on the side of LED over CFL for sure based on my experience. Perhaps if I wasn't driving them from 120v mains that wouldn't be the case and I realize that in the case of running them off of a battery they aren't using 120v. I'd still argue for LED though since they are much less fragile!
What I'd really like to know is how well the Sylvania Ultra LED floods work. The price of admission has been too high for me to try them yet but if they work well I have several 150Watt floods I'd LOVE to dump! These are on motion sensors and swapping them so high in the air would be a chore but the overall cost savings long term might be worth it if someone could vouch that they don't suck :-)