Basic Electricity for the Bottom Billion

 There are about 700 million people worldwide without access to any electricity at all and another 1.18 billion people are estimated to be in energy poverty.  80% of those without any access are in Sub-Saharan Africa: Nigeria (86 million), Democratic Republic of Congo (76 million), and Ethiopia (55 million) have the highest numbers of people without access and Pakistan is home to 40% of the Asian population without access (40 million).

According to the IEA [International Energy Agency] (https://www.iea.org/commentaries/access-to-electricity-improves-slightly-in-2023-but-still-far-from-the-pace-needed-to-meet-sdg7), if current trends continue, about 660 million people are projected to still lack electricity access by 2030 and achieving universal electricity access faces significant challenges, including underfunding.

However, decentralized solutions like mini-grids and stand-alone systems are now the least-cost option for over half of those needing access while solar lanterns and chargers, smaller off-grid solar PV systems, are meeting basic and essential electricity services.

The IEA estimates around 18% of those previously without access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa now have solar lantern or multi-light and charger systems which provide basic services but are lower power than IEA's essential electricity standards:

"Basic electricity services or a basic bundle include more than one light point providing task lighting, phone charging and a radio. Essential electricity services or an essential bundle include four light bulbs that can run for four hours per day, a fan that can run for three hours per day and a television that can run for two hours per day. Solar home systems are off-grid solar PV systems with capacity above 10 Wp [10W peak power] and meet the IEA threshold for electricity access, providing basic or essential electricity services depending on size. Solar lanterns and solar multi-light systems are off-grid solar PV systems with capacity up to 10 Wp and do not meet the IEA threshold for access. For further information on these definitions, see the IEA’s Guidebook for Improved Electricity Access Statistics."
Source:  https://www.iea.org/reports/guidebook-for-improved-electricity-access-statistics

560 million people, roughly, are without access to electricity now in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The average household size there is 6.9 people which means there are roughly 81.16 million families without access.

Here are two minimal solar lights and chargers available now in Nigeria:
$5 solar lantern and phone charger
https://www.jumia.com.ng/generic-solar-led-camping-light-tent-lamp-usb-rechargeable-bulb-portable-lantern-310220583.html

$4.60 Solar Lantern with Mobilephone Charger and FM Radio
https://www.swiftermall.com/solar-lanterns/326-solar-lantern-with-phone-charger.html

At retail, a little over $0.4 billion would provide at least minimal electricity to all those families now without access to electrical power, enough for at least a light and a cell phone.

How do we accelerate these already existing economies and marketplaces to provide basic electricity to everyone who wants it?

Grameen Bank's no collateral loans and Grameen Shakti's financing system which was successful in helping to solarize Bangladesh might be one accelerant:

"He [Mr. Gazi who runs a small shop at a village market] can afford the solar system because he earns money using it.  In addition to selling groceries at the market, he is a small-scale energy service provider, a micro-utility, serving a clientele of three.  His solar system powers four lamps, but he uses only one to light his shop.  He rents the other three lamps to his neighbors, shop owners like himself.  All four benefit from solar electricity:  Mr. Gazi from the monthly rental fees and Shakti’s easy credit terms.

"Shakti’s financial model for micro-utilities is simple and adaptable.  Micro-utility entrepreneurs need pay only 10 percent down, pay no service charge, and enjoy an extended repayment period of three and a half years.  In the case of Mr. Gazi, a branch engineer first calculated if the shop owner could make a profit after paying his monthly installment. Shakti then provided one lamp for half price to help get him started.  He paid full price for the remaining three lamps and backed the expense by renting them to neighboring shop owners.  Branch staff provided training and maintenance free of cost and were close at hand when Mr. Gazi had problems.  Today, he has repaid his loan, owns the solar system, and enjoys additional income…. their [shop owners who are micro-utilities] monthly income from renting out lamps exceeds the amount of their monthly installments."

from my notes on Green Energy for a Billion Poor by Nancy Wimmer
https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/green-energy-for-billion-poor.html

These small solar lights and charging systems are what anyone should have on hand in case of emergency or disaster, too.  After all, Solar IS Civil Defense.  A buy one, get one [BOGO] program might be another accelerant, especially if we here in USAmerica get serious about preparing for the next weather emergency in ways that adapt and mitigate climate change.

In the 1980s there was a non-profit that worked in the Dominican Republic building small-scale solar called Enersol.  One of their techniques was to use motorcycle and car batteries as energy storage.  These days, e-mobility devices like bikes and scooters could serve as "rolling batteries" just like an electric vehicle and could be integrated into a local solar microgrid.  Bicycle chargers as well. 

There are opportunities all around us if we recognize them.

We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.
Lew Welch

Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous behaviors that will avoid extinction. 
R. Buckminster Fuller

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
Diane di Prima

Raising Hell in the Paradise Built in Hell

As the saying goes, never let a disaster go to waste.

Seems some people are reading A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit's book about the spontaneous mutual aid efforts that spring up about disasters [my notes at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/07/notes-on-rebecca-solnits-paradise-built.html] and deciding to raise Hell in any possible Paradise for their own political purposes.  These are the people who are spreading disinformation and misinformation in the wake of the recent back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton and even threatening FEMA workers.

There's a term for this, resilience targeting, interfering with "the ability to recover, whether physically, emotionally, socially, or geographically, from a disaster."  Much more at https://www.truthorfiction.com/how-to-fight-disinformation-part-v-resilience-targeting/

This reactionary anti-climate/environment/ecology pushback is likely to get worse as climate groups begin to do what they should have been doing for years, preparing practically for the next weather emergency in ways that speed the necessary transition, whether the emergency arrives or not, building the disaster relief infrastructure and practicing for the seven lean years or how to live within our own ecological limits. 

The Climate Mobilization Project (https://theclimatemobilization.org) is one climate group now organizing around community preparedness:

"We are launching a  movement to survive climate impacts, heal together, and rise up against fossil fuels."

Here's one of their projects in Kentucky:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOieLeLY0RY

I like Solar IS Civil Defense myself (https://solarray.blogspot.com/2024/03/one-easy-shift-to-solar.html) and The Footprint Project (https://www.footprintproject.org) has "deployed dozens of larger solar microgrids, solar generators and machines that can pull water from the air to 33 sites so far, along with dozens of smaller portable batteries."

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org)

Progressive People's Action (https://www.facebook.com/PPAofPinellas/)

Tampa Muslim Disaster Response (https://www.facebook.com/groups/tampamuslimdisasterresponse/posts/532858529339340/)

Florida For Change (https://flforchange.com),

and New Era Young Lords Florida (https://www.facebook.com/groups/279049263144607/)

are all doing hurricane relief and emergency preparedness work now.

Mystic River Watershed Association (https://mysticriver.org) has a robust "climate resilience" program (https://mysticriver.org/climate-resilience) and I expect other such watershed and conservation groups  do too.

There is also the Cajun Navy (https://www.cajunnavyrelief.com) which grew out of the response to Hurricane Katrina as did Burners Without Borders (https://www.facebook.com/BurnersWithoutBorders/),  and I remember when Recovers.org (https://recovers.org/) first began developing their software system for community preparedness and recovery.

The effects of climate change are accelerating and feeding into the polycrisis or metacrisis we are living through and we are going to need to work hard and work wisely in order to navigate these times with as little damage as possible and, perhaps, restore some of what's already gone wrong.

Heat Pumps: What I Imagine an Environmental Community Could Do

A friend pointed me to a recent Wired magazine story, "The hunt for the most efficient heat pump"

https://www.wired.com/story/heat-pump-maximum-efficiency/

Seems that friendly competition is generating interest in heat pumps in the UK and elsewhere with nearly 200 installations connected to real-time monitoring systems trying to score the highest Coefficient of Performance [COP] or Seasonal Coefficient of Performance [SCOP] at HeatPumpMonitor.org (https://heatpumpmonitor.org/).  Heat pumps with higher COPs and SCOPs provide more heat output for every input of electricity.  Standard installations are now at 2-4 COP, for every 1 kW of electricity in 2-4 kW of heat comes out.  There are some on the  leaderboard (mostly UK but at least one Danish and one USAmerican system) with COPs and SCOPs of 5 edging toward 6.

The International Energy Agency published a global estimate that heat pumps could reduce CO2 emissions by 500 million metric tons, the "equivalent to taking every car in Europe off the road."  

I dislike comparing everything to cars.  Since it's heating and cooling of houses, let's measure emissions reductions in terms of households:  "each home emits 10.97 metric tons of COS per year from all energy use combined, versus 7.27 metric tons of CO2 per year from electricity alone." 

Source:  https://www.epa.gov/energy/frequent-questions-epas-greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Calculations%20and,per%20year%20from%20electricity%20alone.

So 500 million metric tons is about 46 million households (and there are 127 million households in USAmerica).  Heat pumps could remove the annual CO2 emissions of more than a third of all households in USAmerica.

Switching from gas and electrical resistance to heat pumps will reduce the necessity to burn fossil fuels and reduce the demand for electricity due to their (much) higher efficiencies.  Natural gas boilers typically have COPs between 0.7 to 0.9 and conventional electric resistance heaters have a COP of 1.0.  Heat pumps would use at least half of the electricity we generate for HVAC now if not a quarter, fifth, sixth... as heat pump installations attain higher COPs and we build a better future.  

Of course, CO2 emissions is not the operative consumer criterion but cost per square meter, usually what homeowners are most concerned with, will go down as more installations and installers come into the market.  Heat Geek has an online tool to help you think through your own heat pump conversion at https://upgrades.heatgeek.com/;  and, if you want to participate in the COP monitoring race, a typical monitoring setup costs between £500 - 700 ($640 - 897, given current exchange rates).

I can imagine the environmental community speeding the heat pump transition.  Filling the HeatMonitor with more and more efficient heat pumps, speeding the hunt for the most efficient ones, training the HVAC professionals and the public about the advantages, economic, ecological, and social.  A report every Friday from the Future, a practical act of Extinction Rebellion.  

This is what I call a positive protest and the experience of Safecast (https://safecast.org/), developing citizens' science radiation monitoring equipment and a monitoring network in Japan after Fukushima, is one example that could be followed.  Safecast continues their work today.

There is another, additional energy efficiency aspect of heat pumps that I saw when I visited Vietnam in 2020, just before COVID-19 began.  In the apartment in one of the new high-rises in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) where I stayed, my cousin's, there were air to air heat pumps in every room.  The living room was next to the kitchen and that heat pump exhausted into the laundry room helping to dry the clothes hanging there.  I wonder if that use of energy is included in the present calculation of COP and SCOP.

Heat Pump Monitor is a project of Open Energy Monitor (https://openenergymonitor.org/) and more on Heat Geek at https://thenextweb.com/news/heat-geek-startup-heat-pumps-brits

One Easy Shift to Solar

Emergency electricity is technologically, economically, and practically trivial.  You don't need to know how to build lightbulbs, batteris, PV cells... from scratch.  They are all readily available for affordable prices as mass commodity products.  If you get them now before the fertilizer really hits the ventilation system (which is as good a descriptpion of the greenhouse effect as any other, at least for me).  If you also use them in your daily life, that will another infinitesimal drop out of the machinery of destruction and provide some personal security for yourself.

A solar light with battery charging capability for at least AA batteries costs about $10 retail. That provides you with the light, the power for a cell phone or radio, and recharging when the batteries run down.  I’ve used mine for years now and will probably get quite a few more years of use out it.

This is also entry level electricity for the bottom billion.

I’ve advocated for decades that cities like mine could do a bulk order for their citizens and help supply at least one of our sister cities around the world who needs such a program as well through a buy one get one program — solar civil defense at home and solar development abroad.

Add bicycles chargers and power take-offs for all electric vehicles, micro-mobility e-bikes/scooters/et cetera and we have an incipient emergency grid if we plan it right.  

Here’s one version of a Personal Power Set

http://solarray.blogspot.com/2018/09/personal-power-set.html

I recently suggested to a strategy session of the local Extinction Rebellion [XR] group that working on practical climate preparation can be an effective and positive protest.  I don’t know if they’ll do anything about it but we’ll see.  I believe that we could change USAmerican energy policy and REALITY in one growing season if we went to the farmers’ markets every week throughout the growing season teaching people what they can already do and helping them do it.  

 

Here’s one version of that vision

https://flourishfiction.substack.com/p/mister-franklins-folks

 

Preparing now for the next weather emergency or disaster, whatever that may be, is climate adaptation and can be good climate mitigation as well.  Organizing people to get ready that way is something, I believe, XR, Fridays for the Future, 350.org, as well as the mainline environmental groups should be doing as well as their street and legislative actions.

The Climate Mobilization Project is organizing around some of these ideas this year

https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/organizing/

as is the People’s Response Network

prncoalition@gmail.com

There’s also Communities Responding to Extreme Weather

https://www.climatecrew.org

Lots of possibilities.  In fact, we are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.  Who wants to go opportunity climbing?

"We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all."  Lew Welch

0Recommend

Two Solar Parabolic Troughs

 

The larger solar parabolic trough on the left I made in the 1970s for the New England Coastal Power Show, an energy show which traveled throughout the Northeast for a few years after the second Energy Crisis.  We used it to heat water, make tea, and demonstrate the availability of solar energy as well as many other working alternatives to nuclear power.

The smaller solar parabolic trough on the right is a solar oven now available from GoSun (https://gosun.co/) which has been making solar cookers for many years.  You can put it together and take it apart in a minute or two.  The collector has something I imagined back in the day but never built, a sealed insulated dark absorber to maximize solar heat collection.  

Another thing I imagined so long ago was applying heat pipe technology (https://www.heatpipe.com/what-are-heat-pipes/) to the absorber of a parabolic trough and wonder, now, if anyone has done anything with that.

I may modify the little GoSun trough so that it can also be a vertical collector like my older model.  The sealed absorber looks like it could boil water just as well as if not better than my old copper one.  

This is a good model for anyone doing public energy demonstrations at such events as science fairs or farmers' markets (https://flourishfiction.substack.com/p/mister-franklins-folks).

100% Wind Water Solar Not "All of the Above"

Why We Must Focus on Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage, Not “All of the Above,” For Solving Global Climate, Air Pollution, and Energy Security Problems

A slide deck from Mark Z Jacobson presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting on December 11, 2023

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSNoMN/2312-AGU-MZJ.pdf

Conclusion

Carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, non-hydrogen electro-fuels, and bioenergy even when powered by wind-water-solar (WWS), all increase CO2, air pollution, and social cost and either fossil mining and infrastructure or land use versus using the same WWS to replace a CO2 source CCS [Carbon Capture and Storage], DAC [Direct Air Capture] always increase CO2 and new nuclear increases cost, time-to-operation, emissions, and catastrophic risk versus new wind/solar.

However, a Wind, Water, Solar (WWS) Solution is practical and we can "electrify or provide direct heat for all sectors and provide [that] electricity and heat with 100% WWS. " The book “No Miracles Needed” explains how to transition to 100% WWS. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSNoMN/NoMiracles.html

I believe Mark Z Jacobson is doing essential work.

Stanford Scientists' Recommendations for a "True" School of Sustainability

 A coalition of "Stanford scientists invested in helping the Doerr School of Sustainability achieve its full potential as a beacon of research excellence that accelerates the energy transition, with the speed and scale necessary to avert catastrophe" are making recommendations for a "true" school of sustainability:

 

Summary of Coalition for a True School of Sustainability’s Recommendations

To take effect immediately: review, identify and eliminate benefits to industry donors that present a direct conflict of interest.
Ban: For all research programs, ban sponsorship from any company, trade group, or other organization that engages in the following (see below for details on each criteria):
Does not provide a credible transition pathway
Obstructs climate policy
Plans to explore for further reserves of fossil fuels and supports the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure beyond 2025/30
Establish a Third-Party Enforcement Board to oversee the dissociation process with industry partners on a case-by-case basis.
Disclose: strengthen existing disclosure requirements across the University, including by writing specific guidance for conflicts of interest involving the fossil fuel industry.

More at https://www.truesustainabilityschool.com/big-oil-entanglements

Here is a take on the subject coming from Stanford students filtered through Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIiCXHnKGl4

Hat tip:  Edmund Carlevale