 You are listening to the Make Change Happen podcast from IIED. Access to electricity in the poorest countries has begun to accelerate and renewable energy is making gains in the electricity sector. Despite this progress, around a billion people remain without access to electricity while some three billion are without access to clean cooking fuels and technologies. Off-grid and mini-grid solutions can be designed to provide affordable electricity to poor communities in hard-to-reach areas, but governments hoping to harness these technologies to achieve universal access to energy by 2030 need to find new ways to attract more finance. To discuss these and other related issues, in this podcast, our Director of Communications, Liz Carlisle, talks with three expert colleagues from our energy team. Hi and welcome to IIED's podcast Make Change Happen. I'm your host today and my name is Liz Carlisle and I'm Director of the Communications Group here at IIED. We're really excited to have this new podcast underway. We've done one episode. Any listeners out there who've heard that episode, thank you for taking the time to listen and we'd very much welcome feedback. But today, let me welcome my colleagues from IIED who are in the energy team. So I'm joined today by Ben Garside, who is the Principal Researcher and Energy Team Lead here at IIED. Welcome, Ben. And I know that you've worked for a number of years in international development, but I think before that it's good for listeners to know that you do have a kind of engineering background and you've worked in telecoms and ICTs. So you have that very nice mix between technical experience and latterly a big focus on kind of people-centered approaches to development. Thanks, Liz. I'm also joined by Nipunika Pereira. Welcome, Nipunika. You're a researcher here at IIED in the energy team and my understanding is that you were an engineer. You qualified as an engineer and that you have previously been an energy consultant and also worked a practical action. So you've looked very particularly at energy access and links between gender and also with climate resilience and adaptation. That's right. And last but definitely not least, Kevin Johnstone, who's also a researcher here at IIED and looking at your bio, Kevin, you talk about yourself as a kind of energy access specialist and understand you've been looking particularly in fragile and transitional economies and really understanding the relationship between sort of grids, mini grids, home systems and kind of finance and delivery models. Correct. All sounds pretty technical, but I know you're going to make it really interesting. Absolutely. That's good. Thank you. So let's kick off. Ben, why is energy important? Actually, energy for a lot of people, I have people approaching me saying, is energy really important given all of the other priorities if you're looking at, for example, communities in Africa? And I mean, first of all, at a global level, there has been a new recognition. So we have the Sustainable Development Goals now. Energy wasn't recognized in the previous Millennium Development Goals, but we see now the Sustainable Development Goals 7 is an energy goal which has three different components and one of them is around energy access, which is the predominant focus that we have here at IIED. And I think there's also increasing recognition within the SDG system that energy is an enabler for a lot of the other goals. But then equally, when you go down to the community level and ask people, what are your priorities? Often energy doesn't come up as the top or even in the top 3, 4, 5. And then you say to them, well, you're holding a phone in your hand. Where did the power come from that? So there's a more in-depth conversation, a more informed conversation that when that takes place at the community level, people really identify then with energy within health, within education, within livelihoods, jobs and income and how there is potential there to improve lives. So energy is obviously a critical issue. But I guess also energy means different things to different people. I mean, energy is quite a generic term. It's often used interchangeably with electricity, but it's not the same. Of course, energy can be for transport, where we have more increasingly we have electric transport, but a lot of it isn't. We have energy for cooking. And actually, when you look at the statistics out there, there are 3 billion people without access to modern cooking services and 1 billion without access to electricity. So we really have to be quite specific about what we mean and, more importantly, what the energy is to be used for to make changes. Well, we can think about it another way. I guess when we look at these big global statistics, they're big numbers that are thrown out, but they mean different things. And my understanding is for that 1 billion, it's that these are people who don't easily get access to the big grid system. And for many people, energy means connection to a big grid. Kevin, you know about access. How does that sit with this 1 billion? Yeah, so I think with the 1 billion, a large portion of those people don't have access, for example, to the grid and, in fact, live far from grid areas. Usually the grid, as we call it, is kind of more urban areas. It's more centralized. It's more expensive in a lot of ways. But kind of with energy, and if you're talking specifically about electricity, we have this kind of spectrum of access. So we measure it through different tiers of access, as we call it. So tier one is very low-powered, probably a solar lantern, for example. And we go up through steps all the way up to what they call tier five, which is kind of the grid quality 24-7 electricity access. And usually we kind of call the technologies that are kind of tier one, tier two, and up to even tier three kind of off-grid technologies. Whereas the main grid, as I mentioned, is kind of in urban settings. These off-grid technologies can reach people away from the grid. And they also provide different levels of service from basic lighting, phone charging, all the way up to kind of what they call mini-grid systems, which connects entire villages and provides more substantial power generation for income, for livelihoods. Nipunika, any thoughts for you? What would this connectivity, the potential to be connected? Yeah, from the experience I've had, particularly having done work in countries like Nepal, is that a lot of the people who are not connected, who are left behind, for instance, are those who live in the most remote areas, or those who are sort of the poorest communities who live under the grid, where the grid goes over them. And connecting both what Kevin and Ben have been discussing, connectivity doesn't necessarily always translate into impacts. There's a lot of different things that needs to happen to maximize the impact of connection that people have. So particularly, I've just returned from Nepal and I've been discussing with quite a few people who work on providing energy services on a daily basis to these rural communities. And a lot of the challenges they face is around ensuring that people are actually using energy for something impactful, for something that they can actually benefit from. So for instance, understanding where should the lighting go in the house? Is it in the kitchen where the cooking happens? Or is it in an area where they play card games? Or how do you really ensure that people are benefiting from that and also maximizing that impact? So particularly different types of models that they use to deliver energy services needs to start considering these social cultural aspects. And we've been engaging very closely with the health sector and a specific nurse we've been talking to called Jefferson who's working in a dispensary in a rural health centre. According to him, often health facilities are built without considering the reality of the energy needs for them to deliver energy services, health services. So for instance, when it comes to providing maternity health services, vaccinations, clinics or even specific testing for blood testing or other testing facilities that they're meant to do as a rural health clinic, they struggle to deliver it because energy is not often thought through at the very start of it. So there's a lot of different things that needs to come together to actually maximize impacts from energy. So it sounds really complex. So we've got the complexity of people needing to connect in different ways and from different places and then we've got the complexity of trying to understand very particular needs and the kind of capacity to make the most of that energy. Absolutely, absolutely. And the need to integrate the way you do the planning. I mean, Punika has just talked about health. Of course you have education, you have various different sectors where energy has a strong potential to be improving the way that the services are being delivered work. And that's not even to begin to talk about livelihoods, agriculture, livestock. A lot of the potential there where energy can enable. So what we've been finding and sort of getting practical within Kenya we've been doing some work with CAFOT and Caritas Katooy in partnership with the Kenyan government. And what we're doing there is mapping out these needs at the community level. So not just asking people what are your needs, having a more informed process. It takes a little bit more time. You spend a bit more time on planning. But the idea is, as Nipunika was saying, you try to get deeper inside the gaps there to do with energy, the gaps there to do with non-energy so that the solutions really have impact. And doing that in a way that can scale as well. Of course doing an in-depth process in every single village can be time consuming. So the question is how do you bring out some of those needs and benefit from economies of scale so that you can cluster them together? So it also seems interesting to me that's also about getting people out of their kind of sector boxes and talking together. Yes. Very challenging within government I have to say. Absolutely. But of course from the community perspective what's a sector and why is that relevant to them? So I assume you're bringing different stakeholders into the conversation wherever you can. Yes. And I know that that's something we think dealing with difficult challenges today is going to be more and more important that change can only take place where we have different stakeholders. Yes. Thinking about need, thinking about the relationship between their service and how something is used. And I'm an engineer. So of course there's a little bit of a bias there from the history side. But there's a real need to, you look at energy sector planning and often it is the engineers and they are thinking, as Kevin was talking about earlier, about the rollout of the big grid, how many megawatts or gigawatts can be generated for that grid. Important things, but it's not really bringing in the end needs and the planning across from energy into the other sectors that needs to go in part and parcel with that if you're going to really deliver the impacts. So one of the things that when I've heard you speak before, Ben, that I find really interesting is this point about sort of productive uses of energy. So I'm imagining that when you're thinking about planning and you're thinking about who's using what, you're thinking about different kinds of use. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Well actually Kevin's been leading that work within the Tanzania Energy Change Lab program that we have so maybe he can talk a little bit about the activities we've been doing on the ground. Sure, so in the Energy Change Lab program, which is a program we run with our partner, Heavos, we look at a number of different energy streams but in particular I've been working on the productive uses of energy work stream which is looking at how electricity as an input can be used to increase productivity and income in remote communities. So basically increasing economic activity in these communities which also helps pay for the electricity itself. So we've been working with two different mini-grid developers in Tanzania implementing what we call prototypes and experimenting around some of the challenges that mini-grid developers are facing. So what we've seen and learned is that the mini-grid infrastructure once installed doesn't kind of generate demand on its own. There's a lot of supporting activities that need to be applied in communities to help stimulate demand for these electricity services so that they can pay for themselves. So like that point I think that you made Ben the other day where you put a poll in and you're considered connected even if you're sort of 80 meters away. Yeah, it's a really good point and that talks about kind of government definitions of what makes access and a lot of the discussions around the poll issue is usually around grid extensions and also all these issues around getting access to that poll for example. So a lot of the work in the Energy Change Lab program we've been looking at prototyping ideas and experimenting around some of these issues of how to get access to that poll. So we've been working with two mini-grid developers in Tanzania to look at the kind of a more holistic approach in terms of stimulating demand. So if we have an entrepreneur for example who wants to buy a milling machine that entrepreneur needs access to finance and whether the finance is a savings of his own or her own or it's access to some kind of microfinance that appliance needs to be or equipment needs to be financed. Then we have the technical skills to actually run that appliance so the entrepreneur needs to understand how the appliance works how it operates, how to maintain it efficiently these kinds of skills. Then there's the skills around operating a business itself in terms of keeping books, the accounting and all these kind of business operations skills that need to be in place. And then of course you have the access to appliances themselves so in a lot of these kind of remote communities there are some appliances but they're quite old very inefficient if they're available and this also kind of links to the issue around market access supply chains bringing appliances hundreds of kilometers from usually the capital into these remote communities over very difficult terrain usually not paved roads and then how do you get technicians to service these kinds of equipment. The technology is quite proven in the field it works very well but there's a lot of ideas on the mini-grid itself not being able to run some machinery which can be true for a lot of the smaller mini-grids which can be an issue in terms of if you're promoting productive uses of energy so there's a question of whether or not these smaller grids are actually a viable business model to be pursued. Then you have questions around the tariff. Many of these mini-grids have much higher tariffs due to the technology they don't have the scale that a large grid has as well and many in fact most of the grids around the world are quite subsidized as a public service so many of these mini-grids are private developers so not necessarily subsidized through government schemes so you have a lot of customers who will see my aunt in the capital city their tariff is quite low and I'm paying two, three, four, five times more than they are so there's issues around these kinds of perceptions of equality in terms of the technology. I mean I really like the sound of the energy change lab can you tell people a little bit about how that works I think it's a really nice way of bringing different people together It's quite dynamic when we say lab it's not a technical lab it's a social innovation lab so we do work with technical partners like the mini-grid companies but at a sort of national level we have a dialogue platform and the purpose of that is to be bringing it's a demand driven around key issues within the sector so this sort of so-called productive uses of energy for income that's one of the main themes within the lab and we bring together people from inside the sector and outside the sector so again it's that sort of cross sector building of understanding but to avoid it just being a talk shop we have these ground level prototypes so what can we learn quickly how can we work with communities to understand some of the issues Kevin was talking about and it's not just building the demand for the productive uses it's helping manage the demand so for example you don't want a very small village to have 20 barber shops one entrepreneur sees another one there's a tendency to be a copycat culture so how do you engage with the community to manage that how do you understand some of those social issues or culturally embedded issues and it can be just contextual from seeing other things Kevin mentioned that people think mini-grids are inferior even household solar panels so just a panel on the roof with batteries providing lighting there are some good systems out there there are a lot of bad systems out there informal products coming in from China and so people have the perception that solar doesn't really work so you're actually starting from beneath a level playing field so how do you gather all those lessons and that's what we're doing with the lab through these prototyping processes and bring them up to a dialogue platform making sure that those voices and the experience from the ground are really embedded so that you can change the way the design of systems work and the way that policy and regulation happens Nipunika have you anything to add on this have you seen similar approaches in Nepal you were talking about the trip you've just come back from Yeah I think one of the main things I was wanting to add to the discussion was around the importance of understanding the different end users as well and often for instance often men and women think differently so their needs could be quite different as well looking at the same example of where do you need the lighting the woman might want it in a different place to a man so how do you understand those dynamics and actually make sure that it's leading to the impact that they're expecting at the household so managing expectations is quite important when you're engaging with communities to provide energy services and in the PUE examples we also work with female entrepreneurs because sometimes the needs for training needs might be slightly different or maybe more mentoring is needed and there might be social barriers that actually prevent women from engaging more at the entrepreneur level so this is also again something that the Energy Change Lab has been looking at lots of things are happening lots of things have been piloted also in Nepal again some of the work we are trying to do now is to sort of understand all these dynamics and try to fit into the changing aspects in these countries we are working in so countries like Nepal are going through massive changes in terms of their policies and their governance structures so we are sort of trying to see how can learnings from the ground actually can influence the decision making happening at the moment so I'm also thinking about this question that 3 billion people still don't have access to clean safe cooking that's right, yeah it's still quite an astonishing statistic and I guess that has huge energy implications presumably huge gender implications what have we got to do to understand how energy or how the right kind of affordable clean energy if you are thinking about SDG7 how do we get that in the kind of cooking space so in terms of a climate perspective we have issues around what fuels are being used the infrastructure that is being developed around those fuels so if you are talking about gas for example you have to invest a large amount in the infrastructure around getting that gas into the various communities into urban centers etc but you also for example wood can be a huge element to deforestation so as we have seen in Tanzania this is affecting communities that are dependent on wood for example but that doesn't necessarily mean wood is bad because there is also sustainably harvested wood which takes a lot of investment as well a lot of resources and time and these kinds of issues you've got briquettes made from agricultural waste which can help farmers with building extra value from their harvest but feeding into the greenhouse gas emissions forests are large carbon sinks and a lot of them are being cut down for wood for timber for fuel all these other kind of cross cutting issues I think cooking has been a very tough nut to crack and there does tend to be for a variety of reasons including this big sector focus that we mentioned earlier more of a focus on electricity when as you say there's 3 billion rather than 1 billion in the cooking space I mean at the local level you really have to be understanding the way people cook and how they cook and who makes the decisions at the household level we know generally men have more power on those decisions particularly around spending but then there's also sort of general cultural attitudes if you live in a rural area and you gather firewood your perception is that firewood is a right it's free so getting people to then be willing to pay for a cooking service even if it's subsidized is quite challenging so there's a lot of sort of behavior understanding that really needs to go on there and I think within the cooking sector there's been quite a lot of focus on the technical or the technology side what we need to do is deploy for example gas and there have been good success stories on that but without really thinking about even if you do have gas even if you're willing to pay for gas you might be actually using the gas because it helps speed up your cooking so your priority is speed efficiency rather than health now one of the main reasons that money is going into that sector is from a health perspective and women and children breathing in fumes but what you'll see often when you go and we've been to many many small houses where people are cooking day to day you'll see that the wood traditional three stone fire is being used right next to the more modern appliance you get both to different preferences for different tastes more speed, more efficiency so really getting behind those things in terms of really understanding so that the solution is then designed in a more holistic way so big challenges I was reading that of all the kind of and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong but the kind of global energy funding about is it 98.7% goes to the grid and something like 1.3% to off grid and I'm assuming that both in terms of the kind of productive uses of energy and energy for cooking and this one billion that is not of people who aren't connected I mean I'm assuming that this kind of off grid funding is critical and that's perhaps what you were talking about in terms of kind of finance models so if we wanted to really make a big change here what is it that's got to happen? So I think there's a number of different finance models that will work for different contexts and maybe step one is looking at what has worked and what has not worked well in these different contexts identifying those characteristics and then using those lessons and applying them to other places so to take a step back and look at the large picture if we're aiming for universal access everyone has at least tier one basic lighting access by 2030 the research shows that we need over 50 billion dollars a year which includes grid and off grid but if you're looking purely at off grid we'll need about 20 billion or so per year and currently we're nowhere near that in any way it's a couple hundred million per year and in fact corporate level investments especially into some of these solar home system kind of lighting, phone charging systems has risen to two billion but it's taken ten years to reach there so we still have a really long way to go but a promising path forward in terms of bringing in more money into the sector so to fill this huge billions and billions you know, financing gap in order to reach by 2030 for SDG7 one promising method is through blended finance so that's kind of using public money to try and kind of attract more private investor money through what they call structured funds that have different levels of risk for different levels of investors appetite for risk so one promising way of doing that is SunFunder which is a financial intermediary has written a paper that said basically they've been able to use grant money to multiply their investments by 11 into their funds so blended finance has a promising future for off-grid access there's also the idea that more public money needs to go into off-grid so a lot of off-grids on-grid, sorry, systems are subsidized so there's much discussion around subsidizing off-grid technologies and especially in terms of what some people call smart subsidies or maybe targeted subsidies especially for remote communities that may not be able to afford or cannot have the support services needed to support as we're talking about productive uses of energy in order to reach these people there needs to be some kind of targeted subsidy which requires probably alignment with government policy and in that light we also have to look at coordinating planning between grid and off-grid so the grid in many countries will not be extended in time, it's too costly so if we can get better planning between either public kind of sponsored mini-grids private mini-grids whatever it will take in the different contexts there needs to be better coordination and planning in order to ensure that the money is used effectively and efficiently we've just done a big piece of research on this called moving more money but this sort of aggregation idea so as Kevin was saying it's important to have more money but it's also I mean to be fair you can see why it's easier to have money to go into the large-scale infrastructure it's one big transaction you have big power stations built with the off-grid you have many, many millions of different small-scale energy initiatives that need to be start adept in order to to solve this one billion people gap Back to this challenge that we think about a lot in IAD which is how to get money to where it matters and it's not only the money these aggregators and what we've been finding each of the ones we looked at is working in a different way but the aggregation of things like capacity-building, technical assistance information sharing even logistics these types of things matter as well and that sort of economy of scale you can get across aggregation for those types of functions has really helped but a lot, lot more needs to be done both in terms of the funding but also the way that the policy instruments work together with the finance to help get that the money down and the right sort of implementation models we call energy delivery models the planning around that that I was talking about earlier so that we can really see impacts on some of the poorest people two things I think have come out of today's conversation and this is the importance of planning really trying to understand what it is people need energy for and making sure the right conversations happen, the right capacity and the right understanding of need drives that then I think I'm hearing this question of finance not only is not enough yet in the right places but there is a deal of complexity in understanding the different kind of models and mechanisms that we can use to do that thank you for that I wondered if we could finish with perhaps a comment on thinking I sort of threatened you with a change question earlier but I'm also thinking that people might like to be thinking about energy in relation to climate change you know we know that to support climate change we know that energy is I suppose global greenhouse gas emissions is kind of over 60% is energy so we need to build up renewables and we're only at around is it 17% I think so where in your thinking in your energy discussions how does this sit and align with the climate emergency the off grid technologies that sort of being pushed are renewable focused so in order to reach the 1 billion whose currently don't have access to electricity grid extensions are happening but yet you need more resilient systems to reach those communities who are out of reach and in most of the countries they are in very remote areas there are a lot of issues around access I think from a climate mitigation perspective off grid technologies really contribute to these countries who need to now break this gap of energy access by pushing for more and more renewables and off grid is a main part of it and in terms of climate adaptation where communities are very poor rural communities are currently facing and other issues so there is the opportunity for using off grid renewable energy technologies and it needs to be looked at more to see how it really contributes to climate change adaptation and building resilience of these communities but from a mitigation perspective again you have countries where like Bangladesh where the emissions are significantly low compared to countries more developed countries but there is a huge community still wanting access or still left behind without access there is a huge need for actually promoting more renewable energy systems and there is a lot going on for instance through programs done by it call who is the infrastructure development company limited in Bangladesh who is promoting solar mini grids and some of these mini grids are also used to furling electric vehicles electric taxis and all that so there is a huge potential and it is something that countries have started thinking through I don't know if there is any experience from Africa I think as you are saying the important thing really is some level of inclusion so at the local level we have to think about how people get access a lot of that is already starting to be delivered through renewable energy and then we need to build in that resilience component so that we are planning and those sort of local planning tools that we mentioned that we have been working on that helps because if you are thinking about solutions more holistically you have to be thinking about what is happening with the climate whilst we are planning our water pump for that solution but then if you go back to the big infrastructure and the main grid and that is the biggest opportunity of climate emissions there is a lot of pressure out there and there needs to be more increasing pressure on the diverse invest agenda so really putting pressure on for UK government for the African Development Bank the World Bank to be not investing in coal to be not investing unless there is sort of good reason in some of the still carbon emitting so there is a lot of that but then we need to be ensuring that it is happening within if we are talking about green economies that it is inclusive green economies so we are not just saying that the greening should happen without the access and the impacts for some of the poorest who of course generally didn't create the climate properly. So what I am hearing though which is good news is that the approaches that we are thinking about the ways in which we are thinking about this very closely aligned to the way we need to respond to climate challenges and that by doing that in a holistic way we have got an opportunity to build benefits all around. Well I think I am going to say thank you to you all for a really interesting conversation I hope our listeners have enjoyed it I certainly have and I think actually what it has made me realise productive uses of energy and the whole cooking dimension is that I personally need to go home and understand a lot better where my energy needs are what am I contributing or what am I overusing or how am I going to respond to this and I realise that I just make assumptions because I turn on the light but I need to understand this a lot better and I have really enjoyed our discussion. Find out more about Nepunika, Ben and Kevin's work and the issues discussed today Visit www.iied.org slash energy You will also find recent briefings and papers on our publications library website at pubs.iied.org slash energy You have been listening to the Make Change Happen podcast from IID the International Institute for Environment and Development The podcast is produced by our in-house communications team For more information about IID and our work please visit our website at www.iied.org