Problem: ACCESS TO ENERGY

Energy is a foundation Stone for development. Without affordable and clean energy, a family
cannot live a normal life. Without light kids cannot study, without electricity appliances dont
work and even a such small task as charging your cell phone is a big problem.

In Africa, population without access to energy exceeds 600 million (SOURCE: IEA, World Energy Outlook
2016, http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energydevelopment/energyaccessdatabase/).

Creating an optimized technical solution for off-grid access to energy, grouping communities to
create a sizeable project and developing the legal framework to attract investors could help
greatly solve this problem without environment impact and without governments need to invest
resources.

Target audience

Official aid providers, that need to kick-off governments to create the needed legal framework.
Local governments to prepare the census and help with the measurement and control of the
applied solutions. Construction companies, investors, engineering companies, developers to
participate in the implementation of the solution.

But the most important, citizens to use the energy but also to create the small companies that
can participate in the construction, operation and maintenance of the power stations.

Why someone would like to participate:

Private companies are willing to participate in all different phases of the energy cycle:
Generation, transport, distribution, administration, billing, operation, maintenance. It is a good
business and more and more BOTs (build, operate and transfer), concessions, or other solutions
that bring private financing are a success in different regions of the world.

For the government of a country to provide access to energy to their citizens is as important as
the access to health, education or basic infrastructures. In addition, for the official aid
providers, access to affordable and clean energy is so important that there is a single SDG
(sustainable development goal) for this. Moreover, access to energy is going to influence greatly
in various or even all the rest of SDGs.

Obstacles

Isolated communities with lack of infrastructure for accessing to them.

Small communities. They do not represent a sizeable number of clients for energy
providers.
Sometimes they live in environmental protected areas. Typical infrastructures (roads,
power lines) are difficult to construct without a considerable environmental impact.
Solution

New technologies: Renewable energy, off-grid solutions.

It is possible to construct small power plants (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal or others), and nowadays
there are storage energy solutions to avoid the need of the grid (big power lines crossing entire countries,
natural reserves, mountains and lakes).

Grouping communities to create a client.

A small community does not make a project profitable. To develop the technical solution, find the
financing, the constructor or supplier just for a family or a group of families is not a business.

However, working on standardized solutions that can be applied to hundreds of thousands of communities
its a huge opportunity.

Education, training and creation of small companies to manage all the local content of the
projects.

Suppliers or constructors find a tremendous difficulty in installing the equipment because the remote areas,
isolated communities, lack of infrastructure.

However, if small local companies are created (after some training), there will be capable local professionals
of installing the equipment. No need of foreign workers or big construction companies involved.

Technology to facilitate the user-pays approaches.

Even if the power comes from the sun, or wind, whatever, the user needs to understand and accept that the
equipment, maintenance and operation has a cost and electricity meters and billing systems need to be
installed.

Development finance principles

Using ODA for catalysing private finance
User-pays approaches
SDGs

Convincing facts
Links between energy and development factors
conference of the UN Global Conference on Rural Energy Access: A Nexus Approach to
Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication,
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&nr=489&type=13&menu=1634

Off-grid solutions, proven and in strong deployment

Off-grid Energy Butan Seminar on Supporting Sustainable Development Goal 7, Target 7.1
By 2030 ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services
Organized by UNDESA, UNESCAP and UNOSD in cooperation with UN-Energy and SE4ALL
Bangkok, Thailand
21-23 June 2016

Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA)

www.gogla.org

Message that inspires action or motivation

Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs