Solar power comes to poorest India – UN funding plan aims to replace kerosene
Mike Blanchfield, The Ottawa Citizen /April 30, 2007
Source: Canada.com
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=9bf3ac4c-2652-45e4-82b1-e64767f1f01f
Cheap, energy-efficient lightbulbs are brightening the lives of 100,000 rural poor in India in a United Nations project touted as an affordable energy solution for the under-developed world. In a report released yesterday, the UN Energy Program (UNEP) outlined the four-year, $1.5-million Cdn project in which small solar panels were made available to villagers in some of the poorest parts of India, weaning people off their dependency on potentially dangerous, inefficient and environmentally unfriendly kerosene lamps.
The project not only borrowed from last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but had something in common with Canada’s own environmental efforts of this past week: it relied exclusively on fluorescent lights, not the incandescent bulbs that will eventually be banned in Canada. UNEP helped underwrite loans with Indian banks and persuaded them to free up capital for loans so poor people could buy the 40-by-80-centimetre solar panels, which can be used to power two to four small lightbulbs as well as small radios or televisions.
The panels cost $500 U.S. each, but UNEP subsidies brought interest rates down and increased the repayment term. By bringing tens of thousands of customers to the banks, the program created competition among other banks that now find themselves competing for the business of the rural poor, said Eric Usher, an Ottawa native who heads UNEP’s renewable energy and finance unit.
UNEP targeted India’s rural regional banks, known as Grameens. Last year, Bangladesh’s Muhammad Yunis and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for their social development efforts in mircocredit — small-scale loans to the world’s poor to help them break out of poverty. “For us, the most important thing is: Are the banks continuing to lend after our support ends, and are other banks getting involved?” Mr. Usher says. “What we do is soften up the cost of the financing of the interest rate a little bit. Over time we pull that out. … We don’t want to create a subsidy culture.” Jyoti Painuly, a senior UNEP energy planner, said kerosene lamps are toxic to those who use them in poorly ventilated dwellings, are a fire hazard, and provide very poor light.
The solar panels power a handful of compact fluorescent lamps that provide five times the light of the traditional incandescent version. The result is a better quality of life for a poor family, whether it is more lighting in the evening so children can study or enabling a fruit stand to stay open longer for more potential sales, Mr. Painuly said.
And each kerosene lamp that it replaces reduces greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of 250 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year, Mr. Painuly said.