Introduction:
A web of interconnectedness increasingly ensnares the world—a world that would seemingly have no space for the millions of people who lack access to the most fundamental precondition for the web: electricity. For these uncounted multitudes, energy poverty (with its attendant effects on socio-political development, education, and health care) is very much a fact of life—a life lived mostly in the dark. To paraphrase a TED Talk I watched a couple years ago, “development is an organic process, and sunlight is necessary for both.”
The Challenge of Energy Poverty in Remote Areas
Access to electricity is a real challenge for people living in remote communities. They are, most of the time, located a long way from the power britches, and that makes the cost of their basic electricity service, when they have it, very high. Some materials say that remote communities are those where the cost of basic electricity service is two or three times higher than in any urban area, and when the access is so broken, you can imagine how much money can be required to wire each house in all those left-behind locations. The quality of the electricity service is insufficient, and the broken access harms the political relationship between citizens and the central government and worsens the far-reaching poverty challenge.
Eco-Friendly Electric Generators: A Sustainable Solution
Sustainable and decentralized energy poverty in remote areas can be solved with what are, in my view, eco-friendly electricity generators. They are a straightforward solution, and there are several reasons for their superiority. First, these generators can be made to use any of the several types of renewable energy that are often rich and abundant in remote, poor areas: solar, wind, and hydro power. Second, they can serve tiny, single destinations with just a few plugins or be integrated over a local area—this is sometimes called “microgridding.”
Key Benefits of Eco-Friendly Electric Generators in Remote Areas
Renewable Energy: These generators derive their power from natural forces and elements, which count for far less of a chance for disasters to befall the machinery, as well as infinite potential for fuel. They are almost entirely emission-free and are a far greener choice than a generator powered by diesel, which would have been the traditional choice for what we would use in this sphere of our operation. The diesel engine is our next best choice. It is reliable, colorless, and odorless when it operates. It is as close to being a harmless generator as one could imagine. The best of health facilities do not offer effective remedies when they run out of power.
Real-World Examples
- Schools across sun-soaked Africa are going solar. Over the last few years, the falling costs of photovoltaic technology have allowed many not-for-profit and for-profit enterprises to bring solar power to some of the world’s most remote schools. Most of these are located in African countries. As a result, schools that used to have no power at all now have some. In many cases, the power trickling into these schools from the sun sometimes serves as these schools’ first introduction to regular, reliable power.
- Source: The Green Future: Solar Power for Schools in Africa
Challenges and Opportunities
- Electric generators that operate without harming the environment could bring a great revolution. Yet going “generator green” means dealing with a couple of challenges.
- The first challenge is getting the up-front capital at an affordable rate. In 2009, a set of renewable energy projects in the California desert likely to produce 1,700 megawatts of electricity would have cost $6.8 billion. And those were 2009 dollars. A U.S. Department of Energy report from that year says that over a generation—more than 20 years—wind power might be cheaper than coal-fired power plants but that the original investment would be considerably larger.
Conclusion:
Electric generators offer more than power to communities; they offer the potential to transform lives and shake up the structures of society. This is perhaps most visible in remote areas, where the inhabitants of the next town over are not always visible and where daily living may require a two- or three-hour journey to the next community for the most basic of services. For the millions of people who live in places like these, a generator may be one of the few places to turn for a reliable source of electric power without making use of a grid that starts in a faraway power plant and leads to some perilous journey on a transmission line way out in the woods. As islanded power systems, electric generators in communities at some remove from the nearest electric grid have been breaking down a small part of the energy poverty problem and have been working wonders for the sustainable development of many communities at once.
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