Sustainable Energy for All

Innovation, technology and pro-poor green transformations

David Ockwell, Rob Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317220503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars spent, two thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity, a vital pre-cursor to economic development and poverty reduction. Ambitious international policy commitments seek to address this, but scholarship has failed to keep pace with policy ambitions, lacking both the empirical basis and the theoretical perspective to inform such transformative policy aims.

Sustainable Energy for All

aims to fill this gap. Through detailed historical analysis of the Kenyan solar PV market the book demonstrates the value of a new theoretical perspective based on Socio-Technical Innovation System Building. Importantly, the book goes beyond a purely academic critique to detail exactly how a Socio-Technical Innovation System Building approach might be operationalized in practice, facilitating both a detailed plan for future comparative research as well as a clear agenda for policy and practice.

Chapters 1 and 6 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Beyond hardware financing and private sector entrepreneurship

DOI: 10.4324/9781315621623-1

Low carbon Africa?

An unimaginable number of people on the planet today lack access to electricity, something that is now fundamental to many aspects of human and economic development. For some, it is so important that we ‘might even … consider access to electricity as a human right’ (Winther 2008, p. 224). Globally, the number of people lacking electricity access sits at 1.1 billion (SE4All 2015, p. 2). In Africa, this translates to an average of two out of every three people, but this disguises huge variations across and within countries. In Kenya, the focus of much of this book, for example, the figure rises to almost four in every five people lacking access to electricity, and more than nine in ten in rural areas (SE4All 2015, p. 41). Nevertheless, examination of Kenya’s highly dynamic market in off-grid photovoltaic technologies (hereafter, solar PV) suggests ways in which to significantly improve these electricity access numbers and, hopefully, the prospects for human and economic development. Based on detailed empirical analysis of this promising Kenyan example – and supported by examples from research in Tanzania, India and China – it is the aim of this book to introduce a systemic conceptual framework through which to understand how research, policy and practice can provide more effective analyses and interventions to address the electricity access problem.

The statistics quoted above are abstractions that perhaps make it difficult to comprehend the enormous impact on everyday life they are meant to represent. Instead, for those of us living in the rich world or those who have long had access to plentiful electricity, it may be more helpful to reflect on how electricity is involved in our daily routines. Stop for a moment and look around you. Most likely, everywhere you look there will be electrical appliances (you may even be reading this on one). Think through your average day, from getting up in the morning through to going to bed at night, and note every time you rely on electricity: from boiling the kettle, to washing and ironing clothes, to lighting and heating your home, or simply turning on a television or radio, or charging a mobile phone. So many aspects of our lives, many of them basic human needs – lighting, heating, cooling, cooking, washing and communication – are made easier or, indeed, possible because of our access to electricity. Furthermore, many of the goods and services we consume, and many of the jobs we do to earn money, are also only possible because we have access to reliable electricity.

No wonder then, in the year 2015, such a stark difference between the lives of the world’s rich and the world’s poor has driven ambitious policy commitments to try to rectify the issue of electricity access. In 2011, under the leadership of Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations (UN) announced a commitment to providing ‘sustainable energy for all’ (SE4All) by 2030. Note the inclusion here of ‘sustainable’ energy, connoting the nexus between energy access and climate change, and environmental sustainability more broadly. It also raises the possibility of using renewable energy sources, often off-grid, to provide electricity to many of the people currently lacking access; certainly for those who live in rural areas where grid extension is prohibitively expensive, but also for those in slum urban areas where expense prevents connection to the existing electricity grid.

Africa’s ¹ economy and accompanying energy demands have almost doubled in size since the turn of the century and it is estimated it will see further increases in energy demand of up to 80 per cent by 2030 (IEA 2014). If initiatives such as SE4All succeed in getting large numbers of renewable energy technologies into use, then the prospect of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) locking into lower carbon development trajectories is a powerful one, although we should note that this is not without controversy. After all, most SSA countries are already ‘low carbon’ from a per capita or aggregate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions perspective. Considering that the energy needs of the poor are (currently) small, some analysts and practitioners argue that the poor should not be constrained to using low carbon technologies, as their GHG emissions will not significantly increase the global total even if they were to meet all their energy needs with fossil energy sources (e.g. see Sanchez 2010). This argument is linked to questions regarding the extent to which renewable energy technologies, particularly solar PV, can support economically productive activities, or anything beyond basic services such as lighting, mobile phone charging and social connectivity through television and radio.

On the face of it, these two points present challenges to the argument for promoting pro-poor low carbon development. But there are counter-arguments. First, while the poor may be surviving on small quantities of energy at present, projections that they will not increase their energy consumption much into the future could merely reflect limited ambition – or contestable modelling assumptions – on the part of analysts (e.g. see Bazilian and Pielke 2013). Building on this observation, Bazilian and Pielke (2013, p. 75) caution: In other words, the point of addressing energy access is to enable the poor to escape poverty, not to be a little less poor. As they become wealthier, we can expect them to increase their energy consumption and, as Wolfram et al. (2012) argue, this increase could be highly significant over the long term. In the meantime, if there are no carbon constraints, the establishment of the supporting energy infrastructure, social and technical practices, political and economic interests, sunk investments, laws and regulations, and so on, associated with fossil-based provision of energy would mean the poor becoming locked into high carbon development pathways (see Unruh 2000 for an explanation of the lock-in idea). That is, promoting fossil-based energy access would be promoting development pathways that just store up problems for developing countries that they will have to address later.

The lower the assumed scale of the challenge, the more likely it is that the focus will turn to incremental change that amounts to ‘poverty management,’ rather than the transformational changes that will be necessary if we are to help billions climb out of poverty.

The second point, which questions whether renewable energy technologies can support economically productive activities, is in some ways more difficult to challenge. Technically, there are few reasons why renewable energy technologies could not support the entire range of productive activities. Such activities, as we implied earlier, require energy in the form of electricity, or heat, mechanical power, etc. (Modi et al. 2005). But electricity generated from a solar PV module is still electricity; heat generated from burning biogas is heat; mechanical power generated from a windmill is mechanical power, and so on. When it comes to renewable energy technologies, the main technical challenge for supporting productive activities is not so much the kind of energy generated by a specific technology; it is, instead, about whether the energy can be delivered fast enough for the activity in question. That is, the challenge is whether the specific technology can generate enough power, and whether this power can be maintained as needed or whether there is an intermittency issue. The other main ‘technical’ challenge is whether the cost of generating power from a specific technology is cheap enough to ensure that productive activities are economically viable, especially when compared with other available options.

The power, intermittency and cost of renewable energy technologies are all dynamic characteristics rather than fixed quantities, and they are changing in favourable ways. Both power and intermittency issues could be addressed through energy storage and management technologies, such as better batteries and ‘smart’ grids, or a combination of both. While there is still a long way to go in this regard, an interesting development in battery technology – batteries that are designed to work on the grid as well as off-grid – was announced by the firm Tesla ² in 2015, but there is also plenty of other research into batteries that could yield important benefits (e.g. see Van Noorden 2014). And the evidence of favourable changes in the cost of renewable energy technologies is now strong and clear. For example, the costs of generating grid-connected electricity from renewable energies are falling rapidly and are already competitive with fossil fuel options, even after accounting for the costs of addressing intermittency (IRENA 2015).

These favourable changes in technical characteristics provide some of the reasons why the global deployment of renewable energy technologies has been accelerating. According to REN21 (2015, p. 17), in 2014, there were more additions of renewables to global power capacity than coal and gas combined, and renewables were able to supply almost a quarter of global electricity. Although these increases are not yet happening fast enough to meet the goals of policy initiatives such as SE4All, these kinds of changes are inspiring some analysts to investigate the feasibility of a rapid and complete worldwide replacement of fossil-based energy systems with renewables. One example is the work done by Mark Jacobson at Stanford University and Mark Delucchi at the University of California who, together, have published peer-reviewed work modelling the feasibility of providing energy for all global purposes by 2030 using only water, wind and solar power (see Delucchi and Jacobson 2011; and Jacobson and Delucchi 2011). Although their modelling has been critiqued (see Trainer 2012), they have strongly defended both it and their findings (Delucchi and Jacobson 2012).

But, returning to the policy commitment of sustainable energy for all, we can further interrogate the word ‘sustainable’ in relation to another aspect, going beyond the technical or physical that a focus on environmental sustainability privileges. That is, we can think about it in its fullest sense, drawing on the widely used definition of sustainable development as first articulated in the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report, Our Common Future. The familiar definition given in the report is, of course, ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987, p. 43). The report then expands on this definition and, in particular, emphasises that sustainability is not just about the environment. On the same page, it goes on to say: There are deeply political implications arising from this elaborated definition, not least of which is the concern for social equity. The expression used may be timid – ‘concern for social equity’ rather than, say, ‘commitment to achieving social equality’ – but it nevertheless points to an essential characteristic of sustainability: that development will not be sustainable if it ignores – or worsens – social justice outcomes. It follows, then, that a commitment to ‘sustainable’ energy for all must incorporate not just a commitment to environmentally and economically sustainable energy but also a commitment to its social dimensions as well. This has implications for the kinds of interventions that policies might drive. But it also has implications for the ways in which we might understand, analyse and recommend interventions, all of which arise to a large extent – although not exclusively – from academic debate.

Development involves a progressive transformation of economy and society. A development path that is sustainable in a physical sense could theoretically be pursued even in a rigid social and political setting. But physical sustainability cannot be secured unless development policies pay attention to such considerations as changes in access to resources and in their distribution of costs and benefits. Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.

Sustainable energy access and the scholarly deficit

We wrote this book in 2015 and the numbers above give some idea of the level of ambition that policy commitments like SE4All imply. ‘Transformation’ is an overused word in academic discussions on issues of sustainability these days, but providing sustainable electricity access to more than one billion people over the next 15 years (the UN’s 2030 target) implies nothing less than a transformation. The notion of ‘transformation’ is understood here to mean change that is both rapid and wide-reaching, in terms of the number of additional poor people gaining access to sustainable energy, but also change that works for social justice. Echoing the WCED sustainable development definition, we could accept the possibility of all poor people getting access to economically and environmentally sustainable energy (cf. physical sustainability) while achieving minimal social justice outcomes. For example, we could imagine a scenario in which every off-grid household gets a solar PV system without having any transformative impact on gendered power relations regarding intra-household access to clean lighting services (see Jacobson 2004 for some evidence of unequal access to electricity in solar-powered households in Kenya). We might describe this as a shallow transformation.

In some ways, mainstream ‘development’ interventions of the kind traditionally associated with institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) could, in this regard, suffice to achieve the SE4All transformation. These interventions have been concerned with economic growth, defining their ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy prescriptions primarily from a neo-classical economics perspective. Critiqued by many, this kind of approach is blind to contexts and different views on what constitutes ‘the good life’, and subordinates the social to the logic of markets (e.g. see Escobar 2012 for perhaps the most elaborated critique of this approach). However, if we are serious about realising social equity, which we have argued above is essential to sustainability, then we must also work for fairer social relations – what we might call a deep transformation. Such a deep transformation might be catalysed by initially shallow transformative action – perhaps through technical improvements in access to energy that mean more households gain solar PV systems or grid connections – that enable deeper changes to happen over time.

But we cannot assume that these will happen automatically. Rather, achieving sustainable energy for all, in its fullest sense (including social justice and social equity), will require political work, not just technical action (Scoones et al. 2015b) at all levels from local to international and among powerful actors well beyond the SE4All initiative. For example, sustainable energy access also forms a core pillar of efforts under the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP n.d.); the African Development Bank’s 2013–2022 strategy is predicated on driving industrialisation across Africa through Green Growth, maximising opportunities for low carbon energy technology markets (AfDB 2013); multiple international donors have reframed their strategic approaches around widely used, but ill-defined, concepts such as ‘green growth’, ‘low carbon development’ and ‘climate-compatible development’ (see Mulugetta and Urban 2010 for a discussion of the various interpretations of low carbon development); and, at the level of international climate policy negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the transfer of low carbon energy technologies to developing countries remains central to achieving both GHG emissions reductions and national development goals (UNFCCC 2015).

Importantly, these policy ambitions implicitly assume that such a trans...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: beyond hardware financing and private sector entrepreneurship
• 2 Innovation systems for technological change and economic development
• 3 Innovation in the context of social practices and socio-technical regimes
• 4 Emergence and articulation of the Kenyan solar PV market
• 5 Policy regime interactions and emerging markets
• 6 Learning from the Kenyan solar PV innovation history
• 7 Conclusion: towards Socio-Technical Innovation System Building
• References
• Index