Financing sustainable energy for all: pay-as-you-go vs. traditional solar finance approaches in Kenya

This paper focuses on finance for Solar Home Systems (SHSs) in Kenya and asks to what extent emerging new finance approaches are likely to address the shortcomings of past approaches. Drawing on the STEPS Pathways Approach we adopt a framing that understands finance within a broader socio-technical context as a necessary but not sufficient component of achieving alternative pathways to sustainable energy access. The paper contributes in four ways. Firstly, it presents a comprehensive overview of past and new emerging approaches to financing SHSs in Kenya and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, it represents one of the first attempts in the literature to analyse the potential of new, real time monitoring technologies and pay as you go finance models to overcome the barriers faced by conventional consumer finance models for off-grid renewable energy technologies (RETs). Thirdly, by applying for the first time we are aware of a socio-technical approach, via the application of Strategic Niche Management (SNM) theory, to analyse the finance of RETs in developing countries, the analysis considers finance in the context of the social practices poor people seek to fulfil via access to the energy services that off-grid RETs provide, and the ways in which people previously paid for these services (e.g. via kerosene for lighting). This also situates the analysis within the understanding of SHSs as a niche that has to compete with the established regime of energy service provision and its attendant social and political institutional support. The paper therefore also contributes to the small but expanding body of literature that seeks to operationalise socio-technical transitions thinking and SNM within a developing country context

Speaking Truth To Power: Why Energy Distribution, More Than Generation, Is Africa's Poverty Reduction Challenge

This paper revisits the roles that energy plays in poverty reduction. First, while energy does not reduce poverty itself, it delivers energy services. These services can improve poor people's welfare both directly by enhancing their own productivity, education and health, and indirectly by changing the economy around them. The paper provides a simplified framework for thinking about these energy services, and then reviews the literature on their importance to poverty reduction. From this framework, we draw a series of three important conclusions about energy priorities and their implications for poverty reduction and development.Tackling energy poverty will have less to do with ambitious expansion of electricity capacity, and more to do with ambitious distribution of energy services to poor people.Expansion in centralized power generation serves industry, the services sector and already-connected households, before it serves the poor.Distributed, clean energy interventions are best suited to tackling energy poverty -- and poverty more generally

Lighting and Electricity Services for Off-Grid Populations in sub-Sahara Africa

The current scale of investment of US$15–19 billion per year will still leave 350–600 million people without access to electricity by 2030, who live mainly in rural sub-Sahara Africa. The attention of efforts to achieve the universal access to energy target, therefore, focus on technologies that go beyond the centralised system approach. Evidence from literature shows that grid-based electrification is only an attractive option in densely populated areas, with an expected high demand for electricity, and/or within reasonable distance of existing high voltage power lines. Large parts of sub-Sahara Africa do not satisfy these criteria, with large, sparsely populated rural areas in which many households have a very low income. Thus, the literature shows that population density and electricity demand are important factors for decision-making on the cost-efficiency of off-grid technologies

Government policies and grid extension as solutions for availing energy services for the urban poor

Analyzing the impact of government policies and available technologies to improve the percentage of poor households using electricity in the urban areas of Uganda.Urban poor households face challenges of meeting energy needs within their economic resources and established infrastructure. Previous Government efforts to meet this need by subsidizing modern energy supply were poorly designed and ill targeted. Despite those initiatives, the eventual energy sold was not used for income generation activities. This study analyses the impact of government policies and available technologies to improve the percentage of poor households using electricity in the urban areas of Uganda.Urban poor households face challenges of meeting energy needs within their economic resources and established infrastructure. Previous Government efforts to meet this need by subsidizing modern energy supply were poorly designed and ill targeted. Despite those initiatives, the eventual energy sold was not used for income generation activities. This study analyses the impact of government policies and available technologies to improve the percentage of poor households using electricity in the urban areas of Uganda