Cities are engines of economic growth. They contributed 85% of global GDP in 2015. Energy is the key requirement, be it homes or livelihoods, lighting, cooking, heating, transport or water supply. Electricity consumption per capita is often correlated with a city’s per capita GDP. While electricity by itself does not result in economic growth, a city that cannot provide universal access to electricity may not support GDP growth.
Urban areas globally are responsible for the majority of global final energy use and the associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Though on an average, per capita GHG emissions in urban areas in the global South are still far lower than in the developed world, in terms of absolute emissions, the picture is changing rapidly. In 2010, China, developing Asia, India, Africa, and Latin America comprised about one quarter of total urban GHG emissions from the core sectors of buildings, transport, and waste disposal.
‘Energy poor’
Use of solid fuels in urban households is the major cause of ill-health and premature deaths in most cities in the global South. In the case of South Asia, cooking with solid fuels was responsible for 26% ambient PM2.5 pollution. The GHG emission contributes to climate change. It is in this context that access to cleaner, reliable, affordable and sustainable sources of energy becomes crucial for majority of people in these regions. While 97% households in South Asia and Latin America have access to electricity, the cleanest source of energy, unreliability and inefficiency due to ageing infrastructure subjects the customers to power outages and inconvenience. It is estimated that poor households in these nations spend as much as 14% to 22% of their income on energy. As per the international benchmark, those spending 10% or more of their income on fuel and electricity are considered ‘energy poor’.
Even if the current businesses keep the same pace, those regions of the South are projected to be responsible for about 56% of total urban emissions in 2050. A study on energy use in the cities of global South by the World Resources Institute suggests: 1 - Accelerate the shift to cleaner cooking; 2 - Scale up distributed renewable energy within cities, especially using solar photovoltaic (PV) system; and 3 - Increasing energy efficiency via measures that include building codes for new construction and energy-efficient standards.
Morbidity
The policy imperative emerging from the three-pronged strategy calls for replacing solid fuels with either electricity, biogas, LPG or ethanol. Indoor pollution caused by solid fuels (firewood, biomass, coal) was responsible for 3.5 million deaths (2010 figures). It is estimated that 550,000 of these deaths might have occurred in urban areas in that particular year, given the fact that 16% of all people use solid fuel for cooking. In 2012, over seven million premature deaths worldwide can be attributed to the joint effects of household and ambient (outdoor) air pollution.
Providing electricity access is not simply about connections. Even where people have access to electricity, unreliability and inefficiency can be acute problems. In 2012, more than 15% of electricity in South Asia (and low-income countries overall) was lost during transmission and distribution, including through pilferage. These losses strain utility companies’ ability to supply adequate power to meet demand, resulting in power outages.
Number of power outages
On average, the number of power outages experienced by firms in South Asia exceeded 25 per month in 2013. Even coal-fired power generation is a threat to climate and in the long run is unaffordable as most nations are dependant upon coal import.
Shifting to modern fuels would benefit the under-served by significantly reducing their exposure to indoor air pollution. People using traditional, unvented woodstoves and unvented coal stoves are estimated to inhale up to 150 and 110 times, respectively, more particulate matter (PM2.5) per stove per day than people using LPG stoves. Ethanol stoves can reduce indoor air pollution levels by 84% compared to traditional stoves using wood, charcoal, kerosene, or open fire. Electric stoves are the cleanest cooking solution, producing indoor PM2.5 concentrations that are similar to ambient levels.
In many countries kerosene is subsidised, which can impede the market penetration of cleaner fuels such as LPG. Fossil fuel-subsidy reform is also necessary to catalyse clean cooking.
Clean cooking agenda
The Report recommends putting urban clean cooking on the development agenda (as UNDP’s Sustainable Development Agenda goal no. 7) for the year 2025. It further recommends expanding funds and use of innovative financing, including consumer finance, carbon finance and results-based payments. Simultaneously, there should be R&D efforts to develop fuel efficient stoves and investment in port infrastructure for LPG storage and fuel distribution.
Government subsidies can create fiscal pressures that become counterproductive. It points out that India’s subsidies for LPG incurred budgetary and non-budgetary expenditures of about $7.6 billion in 2012-2013, while the bottom half of the population received only about 8% of the total subsidy transfer. However, the Indian government has sought to address this situation, including through a campaign to encourage wealthier consumers to voluntarily give up the subsidy, launched in 2015.
Solar PV energy
As for the greater reliability of energy sources, the Report stresses the role of solar photovoltaic energy which dispenses with the need to depend on the distributed energy or power grids. Solar PV is a viable option even where individuals do not have adequate rooftop space; community owned, community-shared solar systems are a promising model in such cases. Such systems can be constructed on community or municipality-owned land or buildings. Individuals are either connected to the grid or connected together via a microgrid. This will encourage individual or community ownership of energy sources and will mitigate the risks associated with dependence on regional or national grids.
The Report stresses the need to bring in Building Energy-efficiency Energy Codes (BEEC) for more comfortable, and safer buildings. It recommends that the process should begin with municipal buildings such as schools, hospitals and social housing colonies. This will result in lower cost per unit of energy delivered, reduced air pollution and improved respiratory health.
The report notes with satisfaction the progress of energy-efficiency standards with regards to appliances. But in the case of India, it feels that compliance with such codes is very resource-intensive and compliance is often limited by the availability of laboratories with the capacity or the equipment to conduct the required tests.
(The author can be reached at maqsiraj@gmail.com)
