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03 DISTRIBUTED RENEWABLE
ENERGY FOR ENERGY ACCESS
For well over 1 billion people around the world, obtaining access
to the energy required to meet very basic needs remains a daily
struggle. In many rural areas of developing countries as well as
some urban slums and peri-urban areas, connections to central
electric grids are economically prohibitive and may take decades
to materialise, if at all. 1 Moreover, grid connectivity does not fully
address the need for access to sustainable heating and cooking
options. 2
Distributed renewable energy (DRE) i systems – power, cooking,
heating and cooling systems that generate and distribute
services independently of any centralised system, in both
urban and rural areas of the developing world – already provide
energy services to millions of people, and numbers continue to
increase annually. DRE systems can serve as a complement to
centralised energy generation systems, or as a substitute. They
offer an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the transition
to modern energy services in remote and rural areas, while also
offering co-benefits. Such co-benefits include improved health
(through the displacement of indoor air pollution), a contributons
to climate change mitigation, as well as positive effects on
income growth, women’s empowerment and distributive equity. 3
They can provide affordable lighting, enhance communications
and facilitate greater quality and availability of education. 4 DRE
systems, as well as the hybridisation of existing mini-grids, may
also reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports.
Numbers and trends differ greatly by region. ( R See Reference
Tables R10 and R11.) In Africa, nearly 60% of people have no
access to reliable electricity. 6 To put this number in perspective,
the entire continent of Africa has about 150 GW of installed power
generating capacity, uses about 3% of the world’s electricity
(mostly within South Africa) and emits only about 1% of the world’s
carbon dioxide emissions. 7 With 45 GW of installed capacity, the
entire electricity supply of sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South
Africa) is less than that of Turkey. 8 The official electrification rate
for sub-Saharan Africa is 32%. 9
In Asia, China and many industrialised countries, such as Malaysia
and Singapore, have made great strides towards electrification.
However, in other countries in the region, comparatively high
percentages of national populations remain without access to
modern energy. India, for example, is home to more people without
reliable access to electricity networks (237 million, or 19% of the
population) than any other country worldwide. 10 Bangladesh has
approximately 60 million people without electricity access (39%
of the population), Pakistan has 50 million people without access
(27%) and Indonesia has 49 million people without access
(19%). 11 In addition, more than 840 million people in India rely
on firewood, dung cakes, charcoal or crop residue to meet their
household cooking needs, along with an estimated 450 million
people in China, 140 million in Bangladesh, 105 million in Pakistan
and 98 million in Indonesia. 12
This chapter provides a picture of the current status of DRE
markets in developing countries and presents an overview of the
major networks and programmes that were operational in 2015.
STATUS OF ENERGY ACCESS:
AN OVERVIEW
The two most common ways to measure energy access are
through 1) metrics related to electricity, and 2) metrics illustrating
the level of dependence on solid or traditional fuels, such as
biomass, for cooking. Approximately 1.2 billion people around
the world (17% of the global population) live without electricity
and 2.7 billion people are without clean cooking facilities (38%
of the global population), the vast majority of whom are in the
Asia-Pacific region and in sub-Saharan Africa. 5 (p See Figures
26 and 27.)
Although the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has
an electrification rate of almost 92%, in some individual countries,
high shares of the population still lack access to modern energy.
In Yemen, for example, 54% of the population (or 13 million
people) does not have access to electricity, and 8 million people
lack access to non-solid fuel for cooking. 13
Similarly, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, 95% of
inhabitants have access to grid electricity; the 22 million people
without access are concentrated largely in seven countries:
Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and
Peru. 14 About 35 million people in the region (14% of inhabitants)
do not have access to clean forms of cooking; in Haiti, 92% of
the population use conventional cooking fuels and devices, while
Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua have access rates of less
than 50%. 15
03
i See Sidebar 9 in GSR 2014 for more on the definition and conceptualisation of DRE.
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