The United Nations thinks that universal access to “sustainable” energy can be achieved in less than 20 years. That would mean everyone on earth getting plugged in to clean-ish electricity sources by 2030. Seeing as how there are some 1.3 billion people currently without good access to any power at all, this is a seriously ambitious, even borderline fantastical claim. It’s also a grim reminder; while we’re smashing the iPhone 5, there are a billion plus people — four times as many as live in the entire U.S. — that can’t even charge one up.
Nonetheless, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been pushing the initiative, called Sustainable Energy for All, for over a year now. In fact, he dubbed 2012 the Year of Sustainable Energy for All, and expounded upon the idea in an adress in Abu Dhabi earlier this year. He vowed to end energy poverty and to end it with clean power.
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“We are nearing the point of no return” on climate change, he said then. Now the platform is getting another boost at the general assembly in New York this week. The Guardian reported that Ban had similar words for delegates:
“Sustainable energy for all is the answer to some of the key challenges of our time – poverty, inequality, economic growth, and environmental risks,” he said on Monday.
UN officials say the campaign aims to pump between $40bn and $50bn a year into sustainable energy, up from the current figure of roughly $9bn. But governments are reluctant to put up that kind of extra money, Yumkella said, so the UN is looking to the private sector to plug the gap.
Philips, the multinational electronics company, has announced it is to install 100 “light centres” across rural Africa to bring electricity to communities in the evenings. The French oil and gas firm Total has promised to provide five million low-income people with solar lamps and portable solar kits by 2015. Dozens of other companies have made similar commitments.
Piecemeal philanthropy is unlikely to plug the gap, however. Cheap little solar gadgets are nice, but they often break and leave their owners right where they were. To truly to provide power to the billions still in the dark, it’s going to take either a) investing in expensive centralized power plants and accompanying transmission networks, or b) good distributed power projects like high-quality solar arrays for smaller communities.
And the UN is definitely right about one thing: It’s imperative that either route be done sustainably. Adding enough coal power to run a billion homes would be disastrous for the climate, which is on the brink as it is. And there are indeed solutions; distributed solar again leaps to the fore. It’s proven popular in places like India, where innovative payment plans — one solar ‘provider’ uses a cellphone service-like payment plan — are helping low-income residents get clean, reliable energy. Because if India, Africa, and Southeast Asia end up with a power mix that looks like ours in twenty years, that’s an exploding carbon bomb (obviously, we’ve got to get our dirty ass in clean-powered gear, too).
But we know there’s a clean way forward. Scientists say we can indeed power this world with the renewable goods. But governments of wealthy nations have got to make doing so a priority. We can’t rely on nice little corporate social responsibility projects, that’s for sure. We need carbon pricing or taxes, clear renewable investment goals for the developing world, clean energy standards, and beyond. We need a will for action.
