Rich nations are taking an increasing interest in electrifying the rest of the world. At the Africa Leaders Summit in Washington DC this month, US president Barack Obama announced an additional $12 billion in funding for his administration's Power Africa initiative, which aims to help bring power to at least 60 million households and businesses across the continent.
But 85 per cent of the 1.3 billion people lacking electricity worldwide live in rural areas. That means powering Africa won't be as simple as hooking up villages to a centralised power grid. Localised "micro-grids" are beginning to take off. They can generate anything from a few watts to a few megawatts and provide power for tens to thousands of households at a time.
An increasing amount of this power is coming from renewable sources, such as wind, solar and hydro. "It creates an opportunity," says Subhes Bhattacharyya at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. "You don't have to follow the old-fashioned way of doing things. You can jump the queue to new technologies."
For instance, international group Practical Action is building micro-hydro-power plants in Zimbabwe and Kenya, which harness falling water such as that in mountain rivers.
Another group, a Kenyan start-up called Access:energy, developed a model to teach Kenyans to make parts of wind turbines out of scrap metal and car parts, reducing the need for outside help should a part of the system break. A single turbine can generate about 2.5 kilowatt-hours per day, enough to power a micro-grid for 50 homes....
Solar panels in Malika, Dakar, shot by Fratelli dell'Uomo Onlus, Elena Pisano, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license
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