Access to Electricity for 1.2 Billion by 2030
Power For All is a company that plans to bring about universal energy where governments have failed, before the year 2030. Power For All believes that bottom-up distributed energy solutions assuring universal access to electricity because are faster, cleaner and cheaper than extending power grids to rural areas.
Figures released this week by the joint UN-World Bank energy access program Sustainable Energy for All add to this argument:
- From 2010 to 2012 some 222 million people — more than the population of Brazil — gained grid access for the first time. The growth outpaced global population growth almost 2 to 1, thus trimming the number not yet connected from 1.2 billion to 1.1 billion.
- Those figures make electrification a bright spot. Little progress was detected in access to cleaner cooking fuels. Some 2.9 billion people were still cooking with biomass fuels such as wood and dung in 2012.
- Grid access expanded mainly in urban areas, and fully one-quarter of the growth was in India. In Sub-Saharan Africa — the region with the highest energy access deficits — electrification just barely outpaced population growth; electrification trailed demographic growth in half of the world’s 20 least electrified countries.
To bring energy to 1.2 billion people that are energy impoverished by 2030, the International Energy Agency estimates it will cost $700 billion.
