22-09-04
Solar panels perched on the roof of Tanghin Dassouri's medical clinic have lit two decades of births and deaths for the 60,000 people in this cluster of villages just outside of Ouagadougou.
"It's feeble but it's better than nothing," said Sister Georgette
Ilboudo, one of the nurses who tends to patients in the mud-walled clinic with
the faint buzz of the solar current in the background.
Weak or not, energy experts believe that with better investment in the
informal private sector that engages the majority of Africans, panels like these
could breed a revolution in renewable energy for the world's poorest -- and many
believe sunniest -- continent. Mindful of rising prices for fossil fuels and
Africa's shrinking forests, as well as the growing population of unemployed,
African heads of state have begun to take a closer look at the feasibility of
developing the alternative energy sector.
Creating jobs in renewable resource management was among key recommendations
earlier at an anti-poverty summit of some 20 heads of state who gathered in
Ouagadougou under the aegis of the African Union.
"If the states take concrete action to support evolving activity in the sector there will come a time that we can use local materials and artisanal labour to harness the sun," said Issa Bikienga of the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS).
"Here we are with this ample resource and we are not using it to our
advantage," for pumping water, lighting and refrigeration, he added.
"In the Sahel, 40 % of people do not have access to drinking water; we can
use solar to help."
Advances in technology have helped bring the price of photovoltaic panels substantially lower, helping to light villages across the continent where grid electricity is a distant promise for one-tenth of their 1980s-era cost.
Still, at $ 600 for a pair of 40-Watt panels, they remain beyond the reach of
rural Africans, most of whom survive on less than $ 1 a day. Add in the cost of
import tariffs and pages of pedantic regulations, "and you are looking at a
perfect way to squander something that could be of such benefit," said
Malakilo Diasso, who in 1979 was the first solar panel dealer in landlocked
sunspot Burkina Faso.
"If you have a centralized, high-powered system you can light up a village
of 20,000 people. What is needed is the courage from government to say that this
is feasible."
The UN Environment Program (UNEP) champions micro-credits to develop the
sector as a way for rural landholders to pay for their solar energy in
instalments.
"Right now it means that Africans have to finance 20 years of electricity
up front," noted Eric Usher, a UNEP renewable energy expert. "Why
should a poor farmer in Mali have to do that while someone in California does
not?"
Cutting tariffs, which in the nine CILSS countries average more than 100 %, is the easiest ways to boost the sector, says Lincoln Dahl, whose US-based African Energy company distributes panels wholesale to small and medium-sized companies around the continent.
"Solar materials are duty-free in Kenya, the market is competitive, the
margins are thin and it is working well," he told from the extremely sunny
US state of Arizona. "Renewables are good energy for countries -- if they
make it easy and let it roll."
Such enthusiasm for solar energy may be lost on Tanghin Dassouri, where electricity poles were knocked into the ground two months ago.
"It might be two years until the cables are installed, so for now we will
be happy with the panels," said Pastor Etienne Kabre. "But as soon as
we get electricity, well, I think the panels will have to go."
Source: PetroEnergy Information Network