Policy perspectives on expanding cogeneration from bagasse in Malawi

Agro-industries have the potential to make a substantial contribution to sustainable energy supply in Africa, including energy access in rural areas. This paper focuses on the drivers and barriers to wider use of cogeneration from sugarcane bagasse in Malawi as there is a potential for the technology to enable access to electricity in rural areas. The paper gives an overview of the policy landscape for the energy sector and the sugar industry in Malawi. The research involved site visits, focus group discussions, and individual semi-structured interviews with participants from key government departments, businesses, research institutes and international agencies. It was found that energy sector reform, the proposed feed-in tariff for renewable energy, and risk are the key issues for investment in this area

Enhancing community resilience using renewable energy in Nepal: Preliminary results

These slides describe the methods and early results from a project on 'Enhancing community resilience using renewable energy in Nepal' after the 2015 earthquake. The presentation was made at Smart Villages and LCEDN webinar on 22 November 2016 (video available at https://youtu.be/PRFAMtVPi_g).<br

A research agenda for a people-centred approach to energy access in the urbanising global south

Energy access is typically viewed as a problem for rural areas, but people living in urban settings also face energy challenges that have not received sufficient attention. A revised agenda in research and practice that puts the user and local planning complexities centre stage is needed to change the way we look at energy access in urban areas, to understand the implications of the concentration of vulnerable people in slums and to identify opportunities for planned management and innovation that can deliver urban energy transitions while leaving no one behind. Here, we propose a research agenda focused on three key issues: understanding the needs of urban energy users; enabling the use of context-specific, disaggregated data; and engaging with effective modes of energy and urban governance. This agenda requires interdisciplinary scholarship across the social and physical sciences to support local action and deliver large-scale, inclusive transformations. Most people without access to electricity and clean fuels live in rural areas1. Nevertheless, the challenges of energy access in urban areas are also considerable and attract policy attention. Over 880 million people live in slums in developing regions, in households that suffer multiple deprivations in urban services, space and security of tenure2. Such households routinely lack access to a reliable and affordable supply of electricity and clean fuels. About 105 million people lack electricity in urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa alone3. In countries such as Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda or Tanzania, less than half of the urban households have access to an electricity connection2. People living in urban areas face specific energy challenges, including unreliability of energy services, lack of affordability, lack of access to microfinance and insecurities related to tenure issues and the erroneous perceptions of slums4. Progress towards global objectives for universal energy access has been disappointing since the UN Secretary-General launched them in 2011. According to the Global Tracking Framework3, 1.05 billion people worldwide did not have access to electricity in 2014, down from 1.06 billion in 2012. The access rate increased by 0.27% per year, which is not sufficient to achieve the goal of universal electrification by 2030. The figures for access to clean cooking are even more discouraging: over 3 billion people still lacked access to clean fuels and technologies in 2014. With a rate of improvement of 0.46% a year, the goal of universal access to clean fuels and technologies by 2030 seems unachievable. The challenge of achieving universal access to modern energy services in urban areas highlights the strong linkages between two Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), SDG7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) and SDG11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Both SDGs can be advanced simultaneously through forms of inclusive urban planning that promote energy sustainability and resilience. This requires two changes in policy approaches. First, policies need to address the lack of installed capacity for energy access and limited availability of clean fuels, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa5. Addressing this persistent challenge will require a substantial amount of public finance while recognizing a diversity of feasible provision models6,7. Progress has concentrated in Asia, where multi-actor efforts in the context of industrialization have improved the rates of energy access in urban areas. For example, in Indonesia, a national-level programme including governmental institutions, businesses and consumers led to a large shift from kerosene to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and contributed directly to the alleviation of extreme poverty8,9. In sub-Saharan Africa, in contrast, energy access rates remain stagnant. Energy access rates have even worsened in countries such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Second, there is a need to challenge dominant paradigms of energy provision. Unfortunately, the assumption that urbanization is akin to an extension of the electricity grid has long dominated debates of energy access in urban areas. This assumption puts a disproportionate emphasis on electrification at the expense of understanding the need for fuels and technologies for clean cooking10,11. Moreover, this assumption obscures the complex ways in which energy access barriers manifest in urban areas and, in particular, the specific limitations that emerge in inadequately serviced, informal or peri-urban areas12,13,14,15,16. Delivering sustainable energy access in urban areas requires a multidimensional understanding of users’ needs within diverse urban contexts. These two policy changes call for a renewed research agenda on universal access to sustainable energy in urban areas. In this Perspective, we outline such an agenda. We frame progress towards sustainable energy as a complex, multifaceted challenge in the next section. Delving deeper into why the global energy challenge continues to haunt contemporary societies in the age of urbanization, we then analyse barriers to energy access in urban areas. Finally, alongside a discussion of policy implications, we outline the contours of an interdisciplinary research agenda that considers users’ needs, explores data gaps and prioritizes systems of governance that can deliver urban energy services in a sustainable and equitable manner

Delivering an off-grid transition to sustainable energy in Ethiopia and Mozambique

Background: Off-grid and decentralized energy systems have emerged as an alternative to facilitate energy access and resilience in a flexible, adaptable way, particularly for communities that do not have reliable access to centralized energy networks both in rural and urban areas. Much research to date on community energy systems has focused on their deployment in Europe and North America. This paper advances these debates by looking at how community energy systems can support energy transitions in Africa. Specifically, it asks: what role can community energy systems play in the energy transition in East and Southern Africa? Results: This article investigates the potential for community energy to foster sustainable and just energy transitions in two countries in East and Southern Africa, namely Ethiopia and Mozambique. To do so, it explores transformations in Ethiopia and Mozambique’s energy systems through the lens of energy landscapes. This concept enables us to situate energy transitions within recent developments in energy governance and to understand current and future possibilities for change through the involvement of communities that currently lack access to reliable and clean energy. Our results show that when countries face the prospects of lucrative energy investments in natural gas or large hydropower, renewables are often deprioritized. Their suitability to address energy challenges and access gaps is de-emphasized, even though there is little evidence that investment in large-scale generation can handle the energy needs of the most disadvantaged groups. Initiatives and policies supporting community-focused renewable energy have remained limited in both countries. They tend to be designed from the top-down and focused on rural areas when they exist. Conclusions: Energy transitions in Ethiopia and Mozambique, and many other countries with significant gaps in access to centralized energy systems, require putting inclusivity at the forefront to ensure that energy policies and infrastructure support the well-being of society as a whole. As long as investments in off-grid energy continue to depend on international organizations’ goodwill or development aid programs outside the ambit of national energy plans, energy access gaps will remain unaddressed, and there will not be a genuine and just transition to sustainable energy

Addressing challenges in long-term strategic energy planning in LMICs: learning pathways in an energy planning ecosystem

This paper presents an innovative approach to addressing critical global challenges in long-term energy planning for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The paper proposes and tests an international enabling environment, a delivery ecosystem, and a community of practice. These components are integrated into workflows that yield four self-sustaining capacity-development outcomes. Planning long-term energy strategies in LMICs is particularly challenging due to limited national agency and poor international coordination. While outsourcing energy planning to foreign experts may appear to be a viable solution, it can lead to a reduction in government agency (the ability of a government to make its own informed analysis and decisions). Additionally, studies commissioned by external experts may have conflicting terms of reference, and a lack of familiarity with local conditions can result in misrepresentations of on-the-ground realities. It is argued here that enhancing national agency and analytical capacity can improve coordination and lead to more robust planning across line ministries and technical assistance (TA) providers. Moreover, the prevailing consulting model hampers the release and accessibility of underlying analytics, making it difficult to retrieve, reuse, and reconstruct consultant outputs. The absence of interoperability among outputs from various consultants hinders the ability to combine and audit the insights they provide. To overcome these challenges, five strategic principles for energy planning in LMICs have been introduced and developed in collaboration with 21 international and research organizations, including the AfDB, IEA, IRENA, IAEA, UNDP, UNECA, the World Bank, and WRI. These principles prioritize national ownership, coherence and inclusivity, capacity, robustness, transparency and accessibility. In this enabling environment, a unique delivery ecosystem consisting of knowledge products and activities is established. The paper focuses on two key knowledge products as examples of this ecosystem: the open-source energy modeling system (OSeMOSYS) and the power system flexibility tool (IRENA FlexTool). These ecosystem elements are designed to meet user-friendliness, retrievability, reusability, reconstructability, repeatability, interoperability, and audibility (U4RIA) goals. To ensure the sustainability of this ecosystem, OpTIMUS is introduced—a community of practice dedicated to maintaining, supporting, expanding, and nurturing the elements within the ecosystem. Among other ecosystem elements, training and research initiatives are introduced, namely the Energy Modelling Platform for Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific as well as the ICTP Joint Summer School on Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development. Once deployed via workflows, the preliminary outcomes of these capacity-development learning pathways show promise. Further investigation is necessary to evaluate their long-term impacts, scalability, replication, and deployment costs.</p