SELF and The Quest to Bring Solar to The World

When Robert Freling gives speeches, he likes to invoke the moment in 1879 when Thomas Edison demonstrated the first incandescent light bulb in his lab in Menlo Park, N.J. Freling mentions the event, which he says, “literally transformed the planet,” because he wants to remind his audiences that we still haven’t introduced this 130-year-old technology in some corners of the globe. Too many people still lack electricity – a condition known as “energy poverty” – and the access to education, advanced agriculture and commerce that it brings, he says.

“You still have 1.6 billion people living in darkness,” Freling says.

Freling, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, Solar Electric Light Fund, or SELF, has been trying for decades to bring solar power to those off-the-grid places – illuminating the developing world, village by village, clinic by clinic. In 2010 alone, SELF had projects in Benin, Kenya, Burundi, Malawi, Lesotho and Haiti that variously used the sun’s power to provide lighting for schools, power for drip irrigation and electricity for medical centers.

The consequences of leaving these places in the dark are dire. Lack of access to energy limits educational and economic opportunities, particularly among women, children and minorities. Modern healthcare is also dependent on electricity for refrigeration and diagnostic equipment.

But if the billions who lack power were to electrify using the carbon-intensive power plants that fueled Western industrial growth, it would have “devastating consequences for the planet,” Freling says.

SELF, and other electrification projects that rely on renewable energy, want to help the developing world “leapfrog” carbon-based energy and go straight to cleaner fuels – an idea popularized by Brazilian energy expert José Goldemberg.

Still, Freling knows that averting climate change is not a concern for the people SELF serves. "It’s to do with their livelihood," he says. "It’s their health, it’s their education. You don’t need the environment and you don’t need climate change as a reason to go into these communities and justify solar.”

In conversation, Freling darts from explanations of programs in dozens of hard-to-find countries. But when he gets above the clouds of individual projects, a grander vision becomes clear.

“I’d like to light up Africa,” he says, though he is careful to note that it would be SELF in conjunction with dozens of other organizations and governments that collectively would flick the switch. Still, his optimism is palpable.

A Need for Partnerships

SELF was founded in 1990 by Neville Williams, a journalist who had promoted solar power as a staffer in the U.S. Department of Energy during the Carter administration. In the mid 1990s, Williams and his organization helped start the Solar Electric Light Co., or SELCO, an Indian organization that sells solar lighting systems, often on microcredit, to people in rural areas.

Freling joined SELF in 1994 and became executive director in 1997. He has since become one of foremost evangelists of solar in the developing world, convincing everyone from heads of powerful nongovernmental organizations to residents of remote areas that the sun can meet their energy needs.

Despite its appeal as a renewable resource, solar isn’t an obvious power source for developing nations. Its upfront cost is often high in rural areas, says Daniel Kammen, the chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency at the World Bank. (Freling estimates SELF’s installed cost per watt, a key measure of solar's cost, is $7 to $10, the low end of which is comparable to average installed costs throughout the United States).

Diesel fuel, on the other hand, has the advantage of large supply networks and low up-front capital requirements.

But diesel can also be difficult to transport to remote places and is subject to shortages, as the health care aid organization Partners in Health found after the January 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti.

Many of the organization’s remote clinics there still ran on diesel generators and the fuel became increasingly scarce in the aftermath of the disaster. The remote clinics need power for lab equipment, communications and lights.

It was a nightmare, says Ted Constan, Partners In Health’s chief program officer, “losing access to electricity at exactly the time when you need it.”

By the time of the earthquake, SELF had already partnered with the group to electrify several of its Haitian clinics to decrease their dependence on diesel. Freling says the collaboration was recognition that both were committed to social justice, but they needed partners to maximize their impact.

After the earthquake, SELF accelerated the electrification effort -- it also raised more than $1 million in cash and in-kind donations for the projects -- and now has provided or will provide solar power for roughly 20 Partners In Health clinics in Haiti, Rwanda, Burundi, Lesotho and Malawi.

Constan says one of SELF's main selling points was its desire to train local workers to maintain the panels. He has been to many African countries and witnessed cracked solar panels that used to be attached to radios, now lying disused.

"These are not interventions that you drop in and you walk away from," Constan said of the work by both his organization and SELF.

West Africa Projects

Even as the developed world has lurched through financial bubbles followed by devastating crises, the standard of living in developing nations has steadily improved. From 1981 to 2005, the number of people living below the global poverty line, defined as less than $1.25 a day, declined from 1.9 billion to 1.4 billion people, according to World Bank statistics. (Experts note that this was largely because of improved living standards in India and China.)

The drop has been advanced with a concerted effort by the international community to address the eight Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, adopted by United Nations member countries in 2000 – ending poverty and hunger; spreading universal education; building gender equality; improving children’s health; advancing maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS; promoting environmental sustainability and encouraging global partnership.

Until 2010, energy security was not discussed among these goals, though the United Nations has recently started to consider it. Energy’s exclusion both irks and motivates Freling, since, he argues, none of the MDGs can be accomplished without energy.

“People really don’t care about energy for it’s own sake," he says. "It’s the services that energy can provide.”

Proof of this point comes from SELF’s most ambitious project to date, an effort to improve crop yields in the West African nation of Benin.

The project began in 2006, after an American academic from Benin asked SELF to bring photovoltaic drip irrigation to two villages in the country’s Kalalè region. Malnutrition is widespread in the country, particularly during the six-month dry season. Drip irrigation, which delivers water and fertilizer to plant roots and improves soil conditions, has been rapidly expanding in this area. But traditional methods require that the water be fetched from a well, usually by women, and hauled by the bucket for hours each day just to irrigate a few vegetable beds.

In 2007, SELF installed photovoltaic solar arrays with about 1.2 kilowatts of power to generate electricity for a pump that moves water to a reservoir. Gravity then takes over, feeding the water to the drip irrigation system. The results of the project, studied and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were clear: the PV-powered system increased food yields, which brought a chain of prosperity.

The 100 families included in the study were better fed than before the solar project and could sell excess produce. They sent their children to school with the extra money they made and then invested in entrepreneurial activities, such as buying sewing machines, says Jennifer Burney, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment and one of the study’s authors.

“Women say things like, ‘Look, my baby is fat,’” she says.

Empirical data from the study backed these claims up. Vegetable intake increased by 150 grams (about one serving) per person per day for everyone in the villages involved in the study. For the people directly involved in the irrigation project, intake increased by 500-750 grams (three to five servings). These gains in food production and the quality of life came without increasing the use of diesel fuel or expanding the grid infrastructure.

“It’s obviously really nice if we can find ways to elevate communities out of poverty that aren’t fossil fuel dependent,” Burney says.

The Benin effort was proof of the solar irrigation concept and now SELF is raising funds to scale up the efforts to encompass 44 villages in the Kalalè region with about 100,000 people. It would be SELF's largest project to date, says Freling, and proof of something larger.

“I want to demonstrate to the world that solar energy represents a viable way forward a catalyst that will help fulfill all of the Millennium Development Goals.”

Top image: Children in Bessassi, Benin. Photo/Courtesy SELF Article originally posted at Txchnologist.