More than $36 billion a year is needed to ensure that the world's population benefits from access to electricity and clean-burning cooking facilities by 2030, the International Energy Agency said on September 21.
In a report prepared for the U.N. Millennium Development Goals meeting in New York, the agency said the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 would be possible only if an additional 395 million people obtained access to electricity and one billion gained access to more modern cooking facilities that minimise harmful smoke in the next few years.
“Without electricity, social and economic development is much more difficult,” Fatih Birol, the energy agency's chief economist, said by telephone. “Addressing sanitation, clean water, hunger — these goals can't be met without providing access to energy.”
The problem of energy inequality mirrors the gap between rich and poor countries, Birol said.
“The amount of electricity consumed by sub-Saharan Africa, with 800 million people, is about the same as that used in New York state, with about 19 million people,” he said. The agency, which produced the report in conjunction with the U.N. Development Programme and the U.N. Industrial Development Organisation, looked at both the lack of access to electricity and the reliance on and use of traditional biomass like wood as cooking fuel. In sub-Saharan Africa, the report notes, the electrification rate is 31 per cent, and 80 per cent of people rely on biomass for cooking.
About 1.4 billion people lack electricity, and they are overwhelmingly in rural areas, the report said, while 2.7 billion rely on traditional biomass to cook. In addition to contributing to deforestation in poor nations, traditional cooking fuels degrade air quality, causing serious health problems and premature deaths, the energy agency report says.
Birol played down concerns that bringing more of the global population into the modern energy economy would be bad for the environment.
He predicted that meeting the development goal would raise global oil consumption just one per cent, while raising carbon emissions only 0.8 per cent.
Companies are reluctant to invest in many areas because the return is not guaranteed, he said, so seed money is needed from wealthier countries.
In Nigeria, a major oil exporter with a population of about 155 million people, 76 million do not have electricity, he said. “If only 0.4 per cent of their oil and gas revenues were invested in power production, they would solve the problem,” he said.
‘Clean Cookstoves' project
Separately, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that the United States would provide about $50 million in seed money over five years for a project known as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. More than a dozen other partners, including governments, multilateral organisations and corporate sponsors, are to contribute an additional $10 million or more. — © New York Times News Service
