By Richard Duke

　

　

Richard Duke is a SYLFF fellow and doctoral student in science, technology, and environmental policy at Princeton University. He and his teammates―Johnston Summitt, of the University of Nairobi, and Jason Anderson, of the University of California at Berkeley―applied for and received a JREX award to implement a collaborative exchange project for the period of October 1999-May 2000. In the summer of 2000, the JREX Selection Committee selected this team as the recipient of the JREX Award of Excellence. The team's video documentary is viewable at www.princeton.edu/duke . The accompanying final paper has been published as No. 15 in the SYLFF Working Paper Series and is available from The Tokyo Foundation.

　

　In the mid-1990s, I worked in Honduras for an organization promoting rural electrification using solar energy. In 1999, as a graduate student at Princeton University, I drafted a proposal to lead a JREX project in collaboration with a former colleague, Jason Anderson. Our idea was to tackle, in the versatile form of a video documentary, some of the most interesting but academically intractable issues raised by solar-energy-based rural electrification.

　My dissertation focuses on stimulating markets for clean-energy technologies, including new models for supplying modern energy services to rural households in developing countries. Although the content of this work is not that of a Hollywood blockbuster film, my research has made me aware of the compelling stories of some of the two billion people who are struggling to make do without access to electricity service in places like Honduras, Kenya, and South Africa.

　Some of these people-members of a growing number of households that now total more than one million-have tired of waiting for a conventional electricity grid connection that never comes. Instead, they have opted to purchase their own private electricity generator in the elegant form of a solar photovoltaic panel that converts sunlight directly into electricity. They put the panel on the roof of their house, wire it to a battery so that electricity is available when the sun isn't shining, and then turn on the power.

　

　

　In this sense, solar energy unambiguously improves people's quality of life by displacing the alternative of dim, expensive, and smoky kerosene lamps of the sort that were phased out of industrialized-country households many decades ago. More controversial, but at least as important to most users, solar power helps even the most far-flung rural homes to tune in to the same soccer games and soap operas that everyone else around the planet is watching.

　It is not easy to precisely determine the social impact of solar electricity on remote rural households in developing countries, particularly for an energy specialist whose expertise lies primarily in technology policy and economics. My academic work necessarily focuses on questions that I can address more definitively, such as the relative strengths of different models for helping rural households to access cheaper, cleaner, and moreconvenient energy. But this still begs a fundamental question: what is the impact of these technologies on the affected lives and cultures? Thanks to a generous award from The Tokyo Foundation, my team set off to Kenya and South Africa to explore both the practical and philosophical aspects of solar-based rural electrification.

　

　

　We focused, in particular, on the human impact of television. To paraphrase a tribal leader and school teacher in the small rural town of Folovhodwe, South Africa, since the arrival of solar-powered television, there have been a lot of Van Dammes here. He was lamenting the tendency of teenage boys to style their dress and demeanor after that of violent characters, whom they see on television, played by film stars like Jean-Claude van Damme. The chief went on, though, to emphasize the benefits of solar lighting and access to media, concluding that for his community the overall impact definitely was positive.

　The social impact of solar-powered television seemed much the same in Kenya. After all, in both countries families often watch the same imported programming. One Kenyan who has solar power explained that her children love to watch violent movies and "Big Time Wrestling," a U.S. TV show in which hulking actors pretend to beat each other to a pulp in scripted matches. That said, the same woman also described how solar-powered television has brought a wide range of more-inspiring programming to her otherwise isolated rural family. Later, an interview with one expert highlighted the importance of giving rural families the dignity and freedom to choose how they spend their money and time. In his forceful words, "Entertainment is important to everyone, even poor people."

　The funding we received from The Tokyo Foundation was generous, but nonetheless our budget was tight, given that similar efforts by professionals typically cost more than 10 times as much. We were able to minimize expenses by apportioning some of our travel costs onto a separate research effort (socrates.berkeley.edu/〜rael/aSikenya.html). Jason started filming while traveling with the research team. He captured the researchers on film as they discovered that tens of thousands of uninformed rural Kenyans had wasted months of income on a particular brand of solar module that often fails-even while other Kenyans were benefiting from high-quality solar-power brands. Inasmuch as the cost of a solar panel accounts for a high portion of Kenyan household income, this is comparable to a family in an industrialized country buying a car only to have the engine explode on the way home from the showroom.

　

　

　The Kenyan model has the virtue of having provided electricity to about 150,000 rural households-without government subsidies or the involvement of the nation's bureaucracy. But the human cost of failed systems is high for the thousands of families unlucky enough to have bought low-grade equipment.

　In South Africa, the government is launching a series of solar-powered rural utilities run by large consortia, each with a mandate to provide highquality risk-free service to 50,000 homes for a flat monthly fee of about US$10 per month per household. In sharp contrast to Kenyan solar buyers, who are very much on their own, the South African solar-utility customer simply has to sign up and pay the bill, and the utility takes care of the rest.

　Our South Africa footage underscores the potential advantages of high-quality solar-based utilities over the "Wild West" of private solar home systems markets in Kenya. The emerging solar utilities in South Africa hope to use their sophisticated management structures to expand well beyond electricity. They hope also to offer clean bottled gas for cooking; rechargeable cell phones, so as to provide Internet access through rural retail outlets; and even water that has been pumped and purified (using UV light) by solar-power.

　

　

　

　Despite these advantages, South Africans often were angrily resistant to solar utility service. In marked contrast to Kenya, the South African utility has an extremely successful grid-based electrification program, and rural South Africans fear that accepting solar-powered service means that they might never get grid electricity.

　In fact, South Africa has concluded that it cannot afford to extend a physical electricity grid to all of the scattered rural households that remain without electricity service. The "virtual grid" from its emerging solar utility has the potential to finish the job of providing universal access to electricity, and this grid could even provide a revolutionary model for rural delivery of service―a model that could be replicated throughout the developing world.

　The documentary nonetheless ends with a question mark because political battles and bureaucracy have delayed full-scale funding of the program for well over one year. In the meantime, one in three people on the planet continue a daily scramble to use expensive, dirty, and inconvenient energy sources to light their homes, power their televisions, and cook their food.