A Profound Inequality


Spurring Global Electricity Access



  BY Jim Rogers
  former chairman and CEO of Duke Energy

Have you visited your doctor lately? Imagine if there was no choice but to be examined by candlelight, or worse, with no light at all - the doctor might have missed something. That's the scenario for 1 billion people around the world whose health clinics lack electricity.

Imagine attending third grade in a room dependent on natural light. Over half the primary school children in the developing world learn like this, in rooms without power.

My interest in the lack of access to electricity in many countries of the world began with a chance meeting with a young man in a Kenyan village. He was holding a cellphone in the middle of nowhere, with not a power line in sight.

"How do you charge that thing?" I asked.

"I walk three hours to the charging station," he said.

Wow, I thought. He walks three hours to the charging station - six hours in one day - to charge his cell phone. I can barely stand it when I check into a hotel and find there's not an outlet conveniently placed next to my bed.

I've spent most of my career providing electricity to millions of people, and I'm stunned by the global statistics: one in six people worldwide lack access to electrical power. That means 1.2 billion people have no Internet, no water pumps, no bright lights to study by. Around another billion and a half people or so have limited access. There's no question that electricity is the foundation for economic development, education, women's rights, health and efficient farming. Let's give these people the chance to get ahead and take better care of their families. It is a human imperative. I believe that together we can make access to clean and sustainable electricity a basic human right.

 There are many fine minds working on this issue in countries all around the world. I approach this as a student with a pretty solid background. No one has cracked the code on how to create access to cost-effective electricity. Moreover, each country has its own unique characteristics that must be understood and respected. Nevertheless, I believe that people from utilities in the developed world have a lot to offer to places that lack access to electricity. I also believe they have an opportunity to help the 600 million people in a few dozen countries in Sub Saharan Africa, 400 million people in India, and 70 million in Indonesia. Another 1.7 billion people in the world don't have access to a reliable, 24/7 supply of electricity.

Right now, the UN doesn't consider access to electricity to be a basic human right. This is a bit ironic, because you need electricity in order to fulfill a lot of other designated human rights, such as clean water, education and medical care. The UN has focused on energy for rural areas with its Sustainable Energy for All initiative (SE4ALL). In 2015, the UN will have an opportunity to extend the SE4ALL program by declaring access to electricity an official human right, and I'm personally going to push for that. I'm also going to push for electricity access to be added to the UN's list of Millennium Development Goals, with the hope that it will help governments of developing countries prioritize electricity access. That's going to change the world for the better.

Access to electricity just grows in importance as the Internet transforms education, banking, employment and political thinking. Electricity allows for the knowledge that's necessary to be an informed and effective member of society in the 21st century. Everyone should have that chance. As Bob Freling, the director of the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) wrote: "Energy is essential for life. It is essential for achieving the MDGs. And it is essential for safeguarding a broad range of human rights." 

In the U.S., the provision of universal access to electricity was considered the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century by the National Academy of Engineers. Many thought it couldn't be done. Today, many don't believe we can provide access to electricity in the next several decades to 1.2 billion people worldwide. I believe we can.

My first stab at the access challenge was to cofound the Global BrightLight Foundation that has distributed more than 70,000 combination solar lanterns and cellphone chargers in Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Nepal, Peru, Bolivia, Haiti and Guatemala. After starting with a philanthropic approach, we quickly shifted to a market model whereby we recycled the proceeds from sales to buy and distribute more solar lanterns. 

Soon after, as chair of the Global Sustainable Electricity Partnership (GSEP), a consortium of 13 of the world's largest electric utilities, I led Duke Energy and several other companies in GSEP in an effort to bring sustainable electricity to Cochico, a remote village in Patagonia, Argentina. The newly built micro-hydro facility gave a regional primary school access to electricity almost 24 hours a day rather than the four hours a day they previously had from a diesel generator. The children live at the school for three weeks and then return to their homes for one week each month of the school year.

I am writing a book about solving the challenges of bringing clean, sustainable electricity to the 1.2 billion in the world who lack it, to be published next year. I'm also co-teaching, with Tim Profeta, director of Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, a graduate course on the deployment of renewables to the rural poor in Africa, India and Indonesia. The students have a lot of remarkable insights about overcoming the barriers to access. Finally, I plan to use what I've learned to start a social enterprise in 2015 that will spearhead this movement towards worldwide access.

Providing access to power is an enormous challenge. Despite all the innovative ideas and efforts from NGOs, foundations, businesses and governments, a model is still needed that can overcome the barriers to scaling up, which include everything from government interference, technology hurdles, finance gaps and lack of local understanding to ways to ensure routine operation and maintenance of facilities.

I'm still increasingly convinced we can solve the issues, particularly by embracing micro-grids, renewable energy from the sun, and emerging battery technologies. Just as in the developed world, we have to deliver electricity in a way that balances affordability with reliability, sustainability and increasingly clean production. By pulling from our own experiences, we may bring real light to the remotest areas of the world in a way that sustains all of us.

 

  
A Profound Inequality: Spurring Global Electricity Access   

Jim Rogers is former chairman and CEO of Duke Energy, and currently a University Fellow at Duke University. His new book, "Brighter," will soon be published  by Palgrave Macmillan.

 

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