For the people impacted, energy poverty is much more serious issue than Climate Change. Counter-intuitively, it is also the most important issue for those who want to avoid the most serious impacts of Climate Change.
Energy poverty means that each family spends hours each day collecting wood and other burnable substances just to cook food. Mostly this burden is carried by women. This often prevents women from earning an income doing other work and from other responsibilities at home.
Energy poverty means that the precious resources needed to create energy often cannot be used to create light to enable students to study a night. This helps to defeat the worthy aim of increasing the education level of young people.
Yet in places that do not have energy poverty, through either centralised provision of electricity, or self-sufficiency in electricity, its members have much more freedom to carry out productive and creative tasks. Surely we would want that to be the case everywhere!
Energy poverty and pollution
Burning wood and other burnable substances in the home, rather than cooking with electricity or natural gas, generally creates more air pollution than with electricity or natural gas. An obvious result of this is the deleterious impact on the health of the family members and in the wider society. It results in the premature deaths of millions.
Electrification of all cooking would eliminate this home-based generation of air pollution. This would have immediate impact of the health of ordinary people who suffer from energy poverty.
Electrification of rural communities
It is possible to provide electricity to rural communities who do not presently have access to electricity.
- Electricity can be provided at the village level, provided there is available a person or persons who can manage the wind turbine and/or solar PV installations with battery backup. There will also need for government support for the initial capital cost. There will need to be tolerance for periodic failure of electricity supply, which will mean retaining access to the current inefficient means of energy provision.
- Electricity can be provided at a state level and redistributed to village via poles and wires. The available means of generating electricity centrally are:
- Coal
- Gas
- Hydro-electric
- Nuclear
- Wind
- Solar PV
Only coal is universally viable. Wind and Solar PV are still experimental for consistent 100% supply. Their advocates generally ignore the cost of storage and backup electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Nuclear is definitely experimental, as the issue of hundred years of storage of spent fuel is not yet fully resolved. Hydro-electric and pumped-hydro (as storage) is viable, but still needs backup if the rivers run dry. Gas is proving to be quite expensive. So coal, as a primary or backup electricity source, will probably remain as the first choice of nations who are classified as “developing”. It is rational for them to do so.
Climate activists are not helping
The demonisation of coal is not helping. India appears to have a number of coal-fired generators that are unnecessarily creating more air pollution. Coal-fired generators are a major source of local air pollution. They are the major source of the soot that is causing ice to melt at the poles and on glaciers. This can be fixed, but the demonisation of coal could be holding back the necessary changes. Why would companies running coal-fired generators, who expect them to close in the next few years spend the money on refitting them with pollution control equipment? Coal will be with us for the next 25 years at least. China has recognised this, why can’t Indian companies do the same?
Is the unexpected melting of the ice shelf in Western Antarctica due to the failure of coal-fired generators in South Africa? Are activists deliberately causing the generators to fail? I can only suspect, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling. Prior to 2000 it had been relatively stable, but since the troubles in South Africa the mass has been regularly falling.
Add to this, western nations have convinced China not to fund any more coal-fired generators in other nations. This seems to be self-defeating, especially considering the serious energy poverty of many of those nations.
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