Like many developing countries, much of South Africa smells of smoke. The open flame of indoor cooking adds the taste of fire to home-cooked meals for roughly three billion people around the world—as well as killing more than 2.5 million people prematurely via soot, also known as black carbon, inhalation, according to the World Health Organization. Others simply suffer from chronic lung ailments; the soot that escapes into the atmosphere from all these cooking fires is also helping to cook the planet.
The solution has been obvious for decades: cleaner cooking facilities—whether advanced cookstoves, biogas flowing from tanks where microbes digest sewage and trash, or other modern alternatives. But the mismatch between the care or skill needed to tend cookstoves or biodigesters and the daily lives of those who would use them have doomed most initiatives to establish such devices in homes. For example, the technology for solar cookstoves works but the stoves do not function after sunset, when the evening meal is prepared in many countries. Or the price of more advanced stoves, such as those that burn biofuel instead of wood or dung, rapidly outstrip such households' ability to pay.
That hasn't stopped ongoing efforts, such as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves from the U.S. State Department, which hopes to distribute cookstoves to 100 million households by 2020 (although the design has yet to be decided). Thirty households in KwaDukuza received Philips's stoves as part of the event with President Zuma, and 170 more households got them in the surrounding iLembe district.
The Dutch multinational may also build a factory in the nearby country of Lesotho to produce 300,000 such smokeless cookstoves a year, with funding help from UNIDO. Doing so may help to solve the cost problem for South Africa and other neighboring countries.
The new stoves also cut soot emissions by 90 percent, according to Philips, although it requires electricity to do so. A fan blows air into the combustion chamber, enabling more complete burning that eliminates smoke, but at the cost of requiring a rechargeable battery to power it—and thus the need for an electricity source.
Night light
A satellite photo of Earth during the nighttime reveals large swaths of black across much of the African continent whereas tendrils of light create glowing webs that connect cities and communities in North America or Europe. To light the night, countries such as South Africa need to generate electricity for modern lights to replace kerosene lamps and paraffin.
That is where LED solar lighting systems can play a key role. Such systems, which combine the efficiency of a light-emitting diode with electricity derived from sunlight and stored for the night in small batteries, can turn on the lights in rural households. In addition to avoiding the expense of running lines to conduct electricity to these homes across Africa, such solar-powered solutions would bring modern energy services to the poor without contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
The hurdle here is simple: cost. Every element of such a system—LEDs, solar panels and batteries—are too expensive for such households to afford on their own. Many people therefore pay (at higher costs per unit of energy) for small increments of kerosene for lamps or buy candles and recharge their now ubiquitous mobile phones from the grid where it is available. U.N. funding helped clear that financial hurdle for the 200 iLembe District households that received such systems.
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14 Comments
Add CommentNuclear power is a far cheaper, cleaner energy source for urban Africa than solar electricity or wind especially when enormous transmission and storage/backup costs are considered. Solar hot water/heat great idea.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSolar is an excellent alternative for backwood power gen until nuclear ammonia fuel cells can replace it.
In the isolated and small rural villages of Africa a smaller more personal touch should be taken. There's a young man right now in these villages obtaining used photovoltaic cells at a cost affective price and building solar panels by hand. He's also training others in these villages to make their own PV panels. Villages like these have very little infrastructure if any. Just supplying enough electricity to power a pump for the village water well and a few light bulbs at night will go a long way in helping these villages develop in the short term.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes. Solar Water Heaters,Solar Cookers,Solar Driers,Solar Disinfection of Water,Solar LED lights ... all can enrich the life in African Region.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
Coupled with cell towers and cheap laptops used for education, yes. They need to be taught how to fish - not be given a fish.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnlike a solar electric collector, a solar hot water heater can be built inexpensively. It should even be possible to use some of that hot water to power a refrigerator such as is used in some campers. Thus a family could have hot water and refrigeration at a relatively low cost without having electricity. Then you would build the solar stove.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know that one part of the camper refrigerator must have heat applied to it all the time for it to work. I don't know how to do that with the passive solar water heater on the roof. A pump would constantly bathe a point in the refrigerator with hot warted. Something else would be needed. Otherwise, it should be possible to provide a family with hot water, cooked food, and refrigeration for very little money.
Absolutely agree. The energy issues across Africa are so varied that multiple solutions are needed. Extending the grid & Mini-Grids (ideally renewables powered) are vital - as are smaller solar solutions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPico Solar lights/lanterns (5 watts or less) can also have an immediate impact by replacing candles and kerosene, powering radios and charging mobile phones in off grid households (110 million off grid households in Africa).
The market can meet much of the demand... but governments can always do more stimulate it and improve the operating environment for the renewables industry.
John Keane, Head of Programmes, SolarAid
johnkeane1.wordpress.com
Pyrolyse wood and you've got a clean energy source. See International Biochar Initiative.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost of the functions you mention only need solar arrays, but LED lights, to be of practical use, also need batteries, which don't usually last as long. I hope supercapacitors will soon be a viable replacement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt should be mentioned that solar (or any heat) disinfection can be accomplished much more efficiently that you might expect, using counter-current heating technology, recovering heat from outgoing water to heat incoming water. The trick is to have water flowing in opposite directions, for instance with copper tubing inside a larger pipe, and lots of insulation around the outside.
I'm thinking of a cheap parabolic reflector solar cooker that would come in pieces and be assembled on site. It wouldn't have to have perfect focus, only good enough that all reflected light hits the bottom of the pot or griddle. The outside of the parabola would be spherical and sit in a spherical depression in the ground, so that the angle could be adjusted with the position of the sun, while the pot, hanging from a chain on a central post, stays upright. At times near sunrise or sunset, it might need guy wires to keep it from falling over. When small areas of the reflector get damaged, fill it in with plaster if needed and glue on some aluminum foil. I think other details wouldn't be too hard to work out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSolar disinfection can be much more efficient than you might expect, using counter-current heat transfer from outgoing to incoming water. The trick is to have maybe copper tubing inside a bigger (preferably long and straight) pipe, with incoming and outgoing water flowing in opposite directions, and lots of insulation around the outside.
Oops, I thought I had accidentally deleted the previous message.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRight, let's go nuclear in Africa where only two nations at most (South Africa and Botswana) probably has the level of bureaucratic development to follow through the process to its end and then the security to ensure the nuclear elements are not stolen and used for malevolent purposes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile hypothetically nuclear is the answer to all our energy needs, to even think of using it, one must start with a nation/state that is fully secure in every way.
The expense of building nuclear plants is probably equal to some African nations annual budget, and aside from PR China no nation or private entity would even consider doing so.
As for China it wouldn't even consider it unless it somehow vastly improved their ability to utilize African resources on the SHORT term (as in a couple of years down the road, not the decade it usually takes to finish a Nuke plant properly).
The article is about realistic and easy to implement solutions to problems individuals face that are widespread and collectively have a massive negative impact on societies there, as well as solutions that can start producing results as soon as it starts.
Nuclear meets none of those requirements.
What an ironic sort of thing to say. LOL Yes I know you're being metaphorical, but the reality of the situation is were anyone to attempt to teach them how to fish, they'd find fishing rights off of the African coast has been sold to the highest bidder, and the same goes for most of the mineral wealth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes you do, you also cause massive deforestation in a region that is already suffering continent wide desertification due to over harvesting of wood in drier regions, and cutting the rainforest for lumber exports.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe point of the article is to come up with a solution that does NOT cause another problem that is even worse than the situation there already.
Also, at one time mangrove forests filled the African coasts. It might be possible to graft fruit trees onto mangrove roots or perhaps mangrove trunks. Red mangroves have glands in their trunks for getting rid of excess salt. Imagine branches from an orange tree grafted above that point.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA mangrove forest which went from a fish nursery to a denuded area worthless to both people and fish could again serve both.