With all the talk of late of how renewable energy will combat our large industrial hunger for energy in the future its important to realise that renewable energy has another very important promise. Bringing energy to those that have none.
Renewable energy offers energy to people who live in places with no power grid, places that have no lights, that have to burn scarce wood supplies to cook food. It offers the chance for developing nations to leap frog past the “dirty” stage of development.
The way nations normally develop causes massive damage to its own environment in order to get rich fast. For a good example see what China is doing to its environment right now, or what we did to our own. Once a nation is richer, the citizens usually start to demand that the place they live be cleaned up. This process ultimately leads to a damaged world full of regrets for what we “should have saved.”
But what if we didn’t blast off mountains for coal, and didn’t pollute the skies with burned oil, what if we had gone right to distributed renewable energy? Every roof would be an energy station, supplying solar energy and solar thermal power to each home. Large urban settings would be served by wind farms and large centralized solar thermal heat projects would provide community heat.
Its a little late for us to develop in this manner, at least not without spending a lot of money to retrofit existing structures. Buts its not too late for the developing world. It’s not too late for them to save themselves the trouble of ruining their own backyard, they can skip right to the renewable energy. People talk of the “problem” of what will happen when India and China start to develop in the rural areas, this “problem” could become a wonderful opportunity.
It would have to start with individual village level support for renewable energy, and I am not the only one who thinks so. Are you interested in helping to develop renewable energy for the developing world? What follows is a highlight reel of some interesting projects that are doing just that. These folks have worked hard to bring the positive benefits of renewable energy to the world.