Energy Access Practitioners Seek $500 Million from World Bank at Rio +20
20 of the world’s leading off-grid clean energy entrepreneurs sent a letter today to World Bank Group president Robert Zoellick requesting $500 million in financial commitments to help them deliver on the world’s energy access goals. The group’s letter was backed by a letter of support from the CEOS of more than 25 leading civil [...]
The World Bank, Rio+20, and Energy Access
The issue of energy access is going to be front and center at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20) in June. Delivering electricity is a key aspect of achieving this lofty goal. The problem is our current approach – investing in large scale centralized fossil fuel power plants and stringing power lines [...]
Helping Social Enterprises Scale Energy Access
Santosh, a local daycare worker, mother and wife living in a rural village needs a solar light that can replace her polluting kerosene lantern. She, like half the world’s population relies on cooking and lighting practices that kill over 2 million people annually. What Santosh needs is a product solution that can avoid these needless [...]
Sustainable Energy for All in 2012
Picture: Abbie Trayler-Smith / Panos Pictures / DFID At the outset of this new year, under the banner of the United Nation’s sustainable energy for all campaign, the voices clamoring for a revolutionary shift from centralized fossil power to decentralized clean energy are growing louder. What’s more, they are increasingly coming from traditionally conservative [...]
Human Stories of An Energy Revolution
Guest post by Grace Boyle, Greenpeace India Roughly one in six people in the world live in India. Approximately 40% of those people have no access to electricity – and the amount with access to a reliable, quality supply is even smaller. The centralised energy system currently favoured by policy makers is not delivering electricity [...]
Democratizing Energy: Mobile Phones Push Community Power
There are six billion mobile phone connections worldwide – 80% of which are in the developing world. A sizeable portion of this market, over 548 million people, own a cellphone but have no means of charging it. These un-electrified, mobile phone users mark the intersection between mobile phone and off-grid energy that is spawning a [...]
What Role for Coal? World Bank Energy Strategy and Energy Access
A little more than a year ago the World Bank’s highly controversial $3.75 Billion loan for one of the world’s largest coal plants – the 4,800 MW Medupi coal plant in South Africa – laid bare the tension surrounding coal and development. Now the World Bank’s draft Energy Strategy, a document that will guide energy [...]