POWER TO THE PEOPLE
While we can switch on the lights and turn up the heating without too much thought, there are millions of people who aren’t so lucky.
According to The World Bank, over a billion people live without electricity, and hundreds of millions more live with unreliable or expensive power. Lack of electricity is a huge barrier to progress for this sizeable proportion of the world’s population; and it has a big impact on health, education, food security and poverty reduction. There are many reasons for this lack of power, with inadequate infrastructure and financing being the main culprits.
But the absence of electricity is not the only problem. The energy sources that are used by those without access to power – such as kerosene and single-use batteries – are polluting and inefficient. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), each year close to four million people die prematurely from illnesses attributable to household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices using polluting stoves paired with solid fuels and kerosene. The WHO also states that the ingestion of kerosene is a leading cause of childhood poisonings, and a large number of the severe burns and injuries that occur in low- and middle-income countries are linked to household energy use for cooking, heating and/or lighting.
Many organisations, including the World Bank, have been active in helping developing countries access reliable and sustainable energy. For example, in Bangladesh, the World Bank helped deploy 1.4 million solar home systems – giving 18.5 million people access to solar-powered electricity. Private companies have also been focused on developing alternative energy solutions for communities without reliable electricity. Melbourne-based Hydra-Light International has released the HydraCell – a fuel cell that generates its own power when activated by being dipped in water. The unique HydraCell has great advantages over the traditional dry-cell alkaline batteries and kerosene – it is powered by water and air, can operate continuously for over 250 hours, and is fully recyclable with biodegradable capabilities.
There’s no doubt the Western world has benefited from fossil fuels for its industrialisation and development. However, Professor John A Mathews from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney explains in a 2016 paper that as the rest of the world also claims the right to industrialise, they confront severe barriers as they seek to do so using fossil fuel. So developing countries are turning to renewables as part of the industrialisation process.
Titled Developing Countries and the Renewable Energy Revolution, Professor Mathews’ paper says: “These countries are approaching renewables as part of the industrialisation process itself because they are products of manufacturing. Renewables are clean. They free a country from balance of payments burdens. They generate employment. They enhance energy security.”