Reports on Renewable Energy (Or Anything Else) Can Be Misleading
Here are the I’m always amused by experiments that prove nothing, or, in this case, actually serve to obscure the truth.The trial was done in areas with no subsidies for solar and huge substitutes for the competitive (and lethal) solution: burning kerosene. Therefore, the subjects of the experiment, all desperately poor, had huge financial incentive to choose a cheap energy source that would harm their health as well as the environment.
Guess what? Those who chose the more expensive of the two, under these grossly artificial circumstances, didn’t save money.
So what did we learn? Markets can be twisted so that clean energy is relatively expensive and its users pay more for it. Shocking. Alert the media.
Craig,
This will always be a problem when ill-conceived subsidies create artificial pricing.
However, solving the problem of supplying energy to very poor members of any population isn’t as easy as giving away free solar panels.
Traditionally, power for the poor was automatically subsidized by large utilities which needed mass distribution to justify the construction of huge scale power plants and wide distribution infrastructure.
(the same as economic justification for street lighting, ie; the rich can’t have the street lit just for themselves alone).
The massive investment required was financed by raising (or creating) capital investment which required decades to repay, often only governments could raise such capital so large scale projects requiring a combination of industrial and domestic usage to include the widest possible number of customers was essential.
Electrification brought enormous benefits, expanding prosperity through industrial expansion to the general population.
One of the problems for renewable energy, is it’s designed to be a replacement, or supplement energy generation for populations with existing electrified infrastructure and wealth.
The combination of industrial, commercial and domestic use, where industrial and commercial usage provides the benefits of scale for domestic supply, doesn’t exist with micro-grids. Micro-grids don’t provide the sort of huge surpluses of power required to transform subsistence farmers into industrialized, prosperous urban communities.
There’s a danger of Micro-grids creating permanent poverty traps.
Not easy.