Abeeku Brew-Hammond

Pathways to achieve universal household access to modern energy by 2030

A lack of access to modern energy impacts health and welfare and impedes development for billions of people. Growing concern about these impacts has mobilized the international community to set new targets for universal modern energy access. However, analyses exploring pathways to achieve these targets and quantifying the potential costs and benefits are limited. Here, we use two modelling frameworks to analyse investments and consequences of achieving total rural electrification and universal access to clean-combusting cooking fuels and stoves by 2030. Our analysis indicates that these targets can be achieved with additional investment of US

Solar photovoltaic electrification and rural energy-poverty in Ghana

200565‐86 billion per year until 2030 combined with dedicated policies. Only a combination of policies that lowers costs for modern cooking fuels and stoves, along with more rapid electrification, can enable the realization of these goals. Our results demonstrate the critical importance of accounting for varying demands and affordability across heterogeneous household groups in both analysis and policy setting. While the investments required are significant, improved access to modern cooking fuels alone can avert between 0.6 and 1.8 million premature deaths annually in 2030 and enhance wellbeing substantially.

Energy: The Missing Millennium Development Goal

The relationship between solar photovoltaic (PV) rural electrification and energy-poverty was assessed using social, economic and environmental indicator-based questionnaires in 96 solar-electrified and 113 non-electrified households in rural Ghana. The purpose was to assess the energy-poverty status of households with and without solar PV systems, and to determine the factors that explain energy-poverty in off-grid rural households. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to construct energy-poverty index scores (EPISs). On the basis of the results of the EPISs, about 80% of the non-electrified households were assessed as relatively energy-poor compared with only 10% of the solar-electrified households. Three significant indicators increased linearly with increasing energy-poverty index score (EPIS) and therefore explained the variation in EPIS. They are monthly savings on lighting (r 2 = 0.214), number of children who can sit around lighting (r 2 = 0.388) and amount paid to obtain lighting/electricity system (r 2 = 0.261). On the contrary, EPIS decreased linearly with increasing monthly costs of kerosene, candles and dry-cell batteries. This indicates that increasing expenditure on kerosene, candles and dry-cell batteries is likely to affect household savings and investment in quality energy delivery systems that can increase EPIS. To improve EPIS, households should invest a bit more in reliable and quality energy delivery systems, which can help to improve their quality of life. The use of EPISs successfully demonstrated the difference in energy-poverty status between households with and without solar PV. This lays down a basis of understanding the relationship between solar PV rural electrification and energy-poverty improvement in off-grid communities.

Preserving and enhancing public benefits under power sector reform: the case of Ghana

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) include eradicating extreme poverty, improving the health of women and children, gender empowerment, environmental sustainability and global partnerships. There are no energy-related targets, such as access to energy, although there is increasing evidence of relationships between energy and the MDGs and development in general. The global community has to commit to eradicating energy poverty within the next few decades. This will require financial resources, knowledge and institutional resources, and stimulating national governments to lead the process of securing energy access for their peoples.

Energy access in Africa: Challenges ahead

The power sector in Ghana has been undergoing reforms. The main purposes of the reform are to improve the performance of companies in the industry, create an enabling environment that would attract private capital into the sector, and create a framework that would enable a competitive and unbundled industry structure to evolve. This paper explores whether and how public benefits have been catered for in the ongoing reform process in Ghana. The paper reveals that the reform process in the country has provided adequate safeguards against adverse social and environmental consequences of reform. In addition, opportunities for advancing public benefits have been exploited. The paper concludes that the biggest problem for the regulators is how to raise tariffs to economic levels and still provide affordable power to poor urban and rural consumers. Even at prevailing tariffs, adjudged to be low and uneconomic, both industrial and residential consumers complain that they are too high. The paper, however, recommends that tariffs should of necessity go up, otherwise the objectives of the reform process cannot be achieved.