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Thursday, October 9, 2014
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Alternative & Renewable Energy
Could Africa be the Global Epicenter of Renewable Energy by 2030?
By: Dr. Lawrence E. Jones, Posted on:
Comments: 1
Today,
headlines like “Africa Rising” and “Africa Ascending” are often used
around the world to describe the unprecedented transformation and steady
economic growth on the continent. Over the past 12 months, I have
attended several conferences in Africa and other parts of the world
where this theme has been sounded. The promising economic prospects for
sub-Saharan Africa is also highlighted in the Africa Progress Panel
2014 report titled, Grain, Fish Money – Financing Africa’s Green and Blue Revolutions. But, this should come as no surprise, since in recent years, six of the world’s fastest growing economies are in sub-Saharan Africa. In spite of the positive economic news, currently 74% of the population has no access to electricity, and should the current trend continue, over 800 million people could still be without access to power in the next sixteen years. At the same time, its fast growing population is projected to exceed 1.5 billion people by 2030. Yet, it is well-known that to fuel economic growth and meet the growing consumption will require significant increase in access to energy. This must be done using ways and means that are both environmentally and financially sustainable.
Africa has vast and largely untapped endowment of renewables and is now seeing greater interest in using hydro, solar, wind, and geothermal to address the vexing problem of lack of access to electricity. In Chapter 3 of Renewable Energy Integration, “Harnessing and Integrating Africa’s Renewable Energy Resources,”, Ijeoma Onyeji provides a thorough discussion of the continent’s renewable landscape, and the potential challenges and the opportunities of tapping clean energy resources. Whether grid connected or off-grid systems, appropriate long-term policies along with adequate investment in infrastructure and human capacity are vital to harnessing the renewable energy in African countries.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the African Development Bank, the World Bank, the United Nations Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL), and other organizations, tens of billions of dollars will be needed annually to address Africa’s energy access challenges. Some estimate that at least $93 billion per year is required over the next decade.
Leaders of African countries and their bilateral partners realize the urgency to close investment gaps and have made energy a top development priority. For example, U.S. President Barack Obama last year launched a public-private sector initiative called Power Africa which aims to catalyze investments to support energy projects that will result in increasing energy access for 20 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Power Africa will use various mechanisms to help accelerate the completion of transactions on the continent so that actual power projects can be implemented. This effort and other programs related to promoting investments in Africa’s energy infrastructure are expected to be discussed at the US-Africa Leaders Summit this week in Washington, DC. Heads of State from nearly all Africa countries will meet President Obama as well as other leaders from the U.S. Government and the private sector.
With 40% of Africa’s population living in rural areas by 2030, it is clear that centralized power stations connected to the grid will not be adequate nor economically feasible for providing universal and sustainable energy access to the millions of people in rural parts of the continent. It is therefore important to point out that Power Africa will not only focus on centralized power stations and the grid. Instead, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Ernest Moniz recently launched a new framework under Power Africa called “Beyond the Grid”. It will leverage over $1 billon of commitment from the private sector into off-grid and small scale energy solutions for underserved mostly in rural communities of Africa.
In addition to the U.S. led efforts, governments in Africa are being flooded with project proposals from foreign and domestic investors seeking to cash in on Africa’s new energy bonanza. Partly fueling this bonanza is the fact that several countries are putting greater emphasis on how to best harness their abundant renewable resources. Investors are being attracted, in part, due to improved regulatory environment and policy incentives in countries such as Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia.
So, in light of the above, could Africa be the global epicenter of renewable energy by 2030?
Today, providing the essential electrical energy services, e.g. lighting, water, food, refrigeration, mobile communication, internet access, is getting more affordable with renewables compared to the use of other conventional fuels. For example, lighting systems based on kerosene cost $4-$15 per month compared to $2 per month for solar lighting system. Also, continued advances in renewable technologies, costs reductions, improvements in the experience curve, and the adoption of successful business and best practice regulatory models could certainly spur faster growth as renewables are deployed to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of people in Africa.
Unlike most industrialized countries and other emerging markets, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a unique opportunity to leverage leapfrog technologies as well as state-of-the art regulatory models when making decisions about the development of their energy sector. For example, providing universal access to hundreds of millions of people in rural communities using off-grid renewable solutions including mini- and micro-grids will create investment opportunities which drive the penetration of renewables. Advances in sensors and other metering technologies are proving to be viable solutions for ensuring revenue adequacy and financial solvency of utilities. For example, sensors and controls can be embedded in the distributed renewable energy solutions like solar PV. This will allow the energy service providers to collect revenue, but also help consumers manage their energy usage.
By 2030, the majority of the remaining 60% of Africa’s population in urban communities will expect to get their electricity services from grid-connected power stations. Even in this scenario, renewable energy could play an important role. In several African countries, e.g. Ghana, Ethiopia, South Africa, large utility scale wind and solar plants are already being connected to the grid. Renewable Energy Integration deals with many of the salient issues and provides practical case studies from other utilities about managing variability, uncertainty, and flexibility associated with renewables. In Chapter 31, “Managing Operational Uncertainty through Improved Visualization Tools in Control Centers,” Richard Candy presents a case study from South Africa.
Africa’s large renewable potential such as the Grand Inga Hydro, and other large wind and solar plants will be better harnessed by making the different regional energy market work. Experiences from functioning electricity markets in other parts of world where renewables have been integrated between countries and across multiple regions can help Africa regional power pools design efficient markets. Regional integration also requires investments in power grid infrastructures, i.e. smart grid technologies, High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC), and Flexible Alternating Current Transmission Systems (FACTS).
An important aspect of successful markets is unbundling of generation, transmission, and distribution. As African countries like Nigeria, Ghana move to unbundle and privatize their power generation and distribution sectors, they should consider the use of service- or performance-based regulatory models instead of traditional cost recovery mechanism based on volumetric sale of energy. Such models in which a myriad of energy-related services can be appropriately monetized have the potential to provide for a more flexible business environment that will benefit both the utility (large or small energy entrepreneur) and the consumer (grid or off-grid).
Indeed, Africa does have the potential to become the global epicenter for renewable energy by 2030 in ways that are financially and environmentally sustainable. The need to provide 800 million people access to electricity is gargantuan, and the market opportunities tremendous. However, this will largely depend on the decisions made by African governments, who must take the long-term view as they prepare and execute their energy roadmap to 2030 and beyond.
Last and perhaps most important, African governments must accelerate the development of human capital, including tapping into the vast amount of expertise in the diaspora, in order to properly leverage the flood of investments to build and maintain its energy infrastructure. Africa must then begin to use that energy to produce more value-added products and services for domestic, regional, and international markets.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Twenty Things YOU Can Do To Address the Climate Crisis!
Getting your mind around climate
change is hard. Confronting it requires us to deal with the ways that
coal, oil, and gas have shaped nearly every aspect of our world, from
our built environments to our economic systems — even our ideologies and
patterns of thought. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t concrete
actions each of us can take, right now. Here are 20 examples of things
YOU can do (some details are US-specific).
1. Reorganize the mode of production so that surplus and capital is distributed equally throughout society, and workers have decision-making power over their labor.
2. Find out about fossil fuel projects
being built or proposed in your neighborhood (most of which can be found
in the records of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or the Environmental Protection Agency) and mobilize your community against them. Read these excellent resources on how to start organizing your community and spread them far and wide.
3. Understand that while climate change
affects us all, there are specific populations who are more vulnerable
than others — these are low-income communities, communities of color,
coastal communities and communities on the frontlines of fossil fuel
extraction. Find a frontline organization near you and offer to support
their work. Ask them what kind of help they need and take direction from
them.
4. Lay off the policeman, the commodities trader, the real estate agent and the speculator in your head.
5. Read about what the crisis could potentially look like — go HERE or HERE or HERE or HERE or HERE — and think about what this could mean for you personally, or for people and places you love.
6. After you’ve read about the crisis,
let yourself feel grief. Don’t ignore your feelings, either through
resignation or through forced optimism. Feel what you feel.
7. Talk about your feelings with your
family and friends. Talk about what matters to you, about what the
climate crisis threatens in your life. And when they are ready, talk
with them about taking action. You will learn things that you didn’t
know about your loved ones, and you will discover allies in unexpected
places.
8. Find out if your local politicians
have ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Call out
any politician that participates in or is a member of groups designed to
give corporations the power to write the law.
9. Become an active voice in your
community, writing letters to the editor in local papers and building an
internet presence to spread information.
10. Do not fall into the trap of feeling
contempt for your fellow human. These feelings are guaranteed to
undercut your work. If you encounter resistance, consider carefully
where that resistance comes from. Radical empathy is not only good for
the soul, it will actually make you a more effective activist.
11. Look in the mirror. Do you see
someone with job security? Someone who is in a position of privilege
within your society? Think about how you can use this privilege to
destroy the systems that created it — for instance, you may have less to
lose than others by getting arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience.
12. Stay awake — there are all kinds of
great resources for staying up-to-date about the climate crisis, and
the more you know, the better you will be able to understand this
moment.
13. Build resilience —
support spaces that are growing food, going off-the-grid, or
supplanting the capitalist state in providing for our basic human needs.
If you are able to do so, consider building these spaces yourself.
14. Don’t blame the poor — don’t blame
the worker whose industry job is the only job he could get, don’t blame
the woman who buys carbon-intensive food for her family because that’s
all that her budget and her neighborhood has to offer, don’t blame the
big family in the developing world that doesn’t have access to family
planning. The poor are not the problem. If you need to blame anyone,
blame the ruling class that controls the options available to poor
people in the US and around the world, and whose policies, consumption
habits and ideology are far, far more responsible for the crisis.
15. Again — don’t blame the poor. Seriously.
16. Walk by yourself at night under the
dark sky. Recognize that you only have one life, that you have more
power than you realize, and that there is a grace and a joy that comes
from using that power for something bigger than yourself.
17. Recognize that the climate crisis is
complicated — no one person is going to solve it by themselves, and any
“list” that suggests as much is probably lying, or at the very least
advancing an individual-based value system that sounds suspiciously like
advertising.
18. Go ahead and make changes to your
consumption habits. But also remember that no slave was ever freed by
individuals choosing to purchase products that are free from slave
labor.
19. Truly addressing the crisis will require building people power on a scale that the world has never seen before.
20. Build that power. I wish you so much more than luck.
Patrick Robbins is a writer, researcher and activist based in Brooklyn. He is currently working with Sane Energy Project toward the goal of an entirely renewable New York, and was an active member of Occupy The Pipeline from 2012 to 2014.Climate Change Causing CA Drought?
California has officially entered its fourth consecutive year of drought, and is trapped in its worst water shortage situation ever.
Because we know that human-caused climate change can trigger and exacerbate drought conditions,
media, public officials, California residents and scientists have all
been wondering for years if rising global temperatures likely caused or
contributed to the current drought in California.
The short answer: Yes, they did.
Weather won’t cooperate
Scientists have suspected for some time now
that a certain meteorological condition lies behind the long-lasting
California drought. The persistence of a stubborn high-pressure system
off the coast has been preventing storm systems from reaching California
and instead deflecting them to Alaska and elsewhere.
While weather events are almost always
multi-causal, the California drought is largely a result of this
atmospheric weather pattern. The question is whether climate change has
influenced the development, or sustenance, of this system.
Stanford scientists connected the dots
When destructive event happen, people want to
know right then and there what’s going on— whether it’s an epidemic,
riot or weather disaster.
But evaluating an extreme weather event for
climate change influences is a scientific process that takes several
months of computer simulations and statistical techniques. It can
frustrate some who demand an answer right away.
Well, the results from several, month-long studies are finally in. Scientists from Stanford have
found that the meteorological conditions that have caused the
California drought are far more likely to occur in today’s warming world
than in one without human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases.
It shows us – ironically and tragically – that the state that leads the nation in curbing greenhouse gas emissions is right now suffering more than any other from climate change.
California is not alone
The California drought attribution studies are a subset of alarger collection of recently published studies that explain 16 extreme weather and climate events of 2013.
Twenty research teams explored the causes of
events such as heat waves in Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan,
China, and Europe; torrential downpours in Colorado and India, a
blizzard in South Dakota, and a cold spell in the United Kingdom.
The studies overwhelmingly indicated that all heat waves were largely attributable to human-caused climate change. One study even suggested that the heat wave in Korea has been made 10 times more likely due to human influence.
The extreme rainfall events in India were
concluded to have been more likely in a human-influenced world, but data
for assessing precipitation events is rather limited as compared to
heat haves. Further, studies concluded that the extreme rainfall event
in Colorado, the blizzard in South Dakota, and the cold spell in the
U.K. were unlikely to have been influenced by climate change.
Climate change is happening. Now.
So for anyone who may still think that the
consequences of climate change are in the distant future, this
collection of studies suggest that human-caused climate change is right
now causing a crisis in America’s most populous state and the world’s
eighth largest economy.
California reminds us that climate change is a
major concern for societies everywhere, and that all nations are
vulnerable to extreme weather events. It’s time we roll up our sleeves
and stop this, once and for all.
Ilissa Ocko helps EDF and the Office of
Chief Scientist with anything concerning climate change. Ilissa’s main
focus is helping EDF prioritize black carbon mitigation efforts based on
the best available science. This article is republished with permission from EDF.
Read more: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2014/10/07/climate-change-causing-ca-draught/#ixzz3FZFwnxC6
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