This Issue’s “Innovate” Column: Energy for the Developing World

Photo by Nick Hobgood

If there’s one thing I learned from reporting this month’s Innovate column, it’s this: The biggest beneficiaries of renewable energy will be the poor, rural farmers of the Third World.  The billions of people who live off the grid in Africa, Asia and Latin America will use smaller and humbler technology than we will in the urban, modernized world. Yet its impact will be far greater.

In Europe, the U.S. and parts of Asia, the focus is on building massive solar installations and windfarms that are powerful enough to replace the carbon-spewing sources we already have, like coal-fired power plants, and that can feeds into the robust electricity grid we already own. Our power sources will change, but for the most part we’ll use those electrons for the same activities we do now. The developing world doesn’t resemble this equation at all. Entire regions have no money for projects this big, and no grid to speak of.

Traveling in rural Africa and Mexico, I’ve seen that the defining characteristic of the small backwater village is its lack of electricity. During the day a tinny radio powered by batteries plays at the grocery kiosk. At night the town shuts down, except in the orbit of the few businesses fortunate enough to have a kerosene lantern. A person is living a lifestyle of the rich and famous if he has a TV running off an old car battery. Though cellphones have become common, they’re difficult to charge and can’t provide nearly the connection to the world that an Internet-enabled laptop can.

For this month’s column, I looked at small yet cutting-edge technologies that could change this scenario. Some are novel ways of producing a few modest watts, enough to load a battery that can light a bulb in the hut at night so Mom or Dad can prepare for tomorrow’s harvest, and the kids can study.  Just these few hours of productive time could spark dramatic changes in health, prosperity and educational attainment. As we learn to make power generators that are small, powerful and cheap, it will be possible for even poor villagers to have access to computers and the Internet. And with that, the village might achieve just enough prosperity and convenience that its residents don’t have to flee to the urban slums to make a living.

In my next post, I’ll explore what these technologies might look like.