SDG 7 and SE4All: The role of Sub-Saharan Local Governments in Supporting Sustainable Energy Goals

This blog explores the role of Sub-Saharan African local governments can play in supporting the SDG energy-related goals and SE4All goals.  It suggests that they play a key role in this area given that they are often at the forefront of service delivery and end-user interaction. Yet overall the capacity and resource needs of local governments on the sub-continent remain under-prioritised by national governments, international development aid agendas, and the global research community.

The goals of SDG7 and SE4All are closely aligned, but there are also other SDG goals that are relevant to sustainable urban energy.  The SDG7 targets are:

• By 2030, ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services
• By 2030, increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix
• By 2030, double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency
• By 2030, enhance international cooperation to facilitate access to clean energy research and technology
• By 2030, expand infrastructure and upgrade technology for supplying modern and sustainable energy services for all

In addition, relevant goals from SDG11 (sustainable cities) include access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems, enhancing the capacity for integrated and sustainable human settlement planning, and addressing the impact of poor air quality and municipal waste. All of these are closely linked to sustainable energy futures.

Many Sub-Saharan African countries have, or intend to develop, plans whereby the SDG7 and SE4All goals can be pursued.  For example both Ghana and Uganda have such plans (Ghana SE4All Action Plan 2012, Uganda SE4All Action Agenda 2015), although it is notable that such key energy planning documents do not mention the transport sector – a major and fast growing energy consumer and emissions contributor. South Africa does not appear to have specific SE4All planning documents, although many initiatives exist in the country which are in pursuit of these objectives.

Numerous important sustainable energy initiatives are substantially linked to, or dependent on, national processes and mandates, or are best handled at a centralized national level (e.g. national power grid capacity upgrading, or changing regulatory frameworks around local generation).  Nevertheless, much lies within the mandate or direct influence of local governments, and globally there is an increasing emphasis on local players taking a stronger role in sustainable energy issues, as has been reflected at the recent COP gatherings in Paris and Marakesh.  In this regard, the work of the SAMSET project (Supporting sub-Saharan African Municipalities with Sustainable Energy Transitions) indicates that local governments on the sub-continent, and local research organisations, can play an important role in the following areas.

Local facilitation of household energy programmes which are driven by national or other players, such as cookstove, efficient appliance and electrification programmes: this includes collecting and providing information and data on needs and opportunities in local area; participating in implementation planning, community awareness raising and communication, and monitoring once implemented (all of these are best done at a local level); conducting research on impact and methodology improvements (Has it improved welfare? How could it have been better implemented? Costs vs benefits? Subsidy needs and justification? etc), and conducting research on impact on local small businesses (e.g. charcoal producers and retailers, appliance shops, cookstove manufacturers etc).

Promotion or facilitation of renewable energy programmes which need to be at least partially locally based (which may be driven locally or by national or other players), such as biogas, rooftop grid-connected solar PV, and solar water heating initiatives: this includes identification of local biogas opportunities (e.g. abattoir) and facilitating feasibility studies; engaging with power utility around local grid-connected solar PV pilot projects; engaging with local businesses (e.g. solar water heater, solar PV suppliers) regarding how to facilitate rollout and improve affordability; awareness raising and community engagement, and monitoring of implementation; research on impact and methodology improvements to maximize benefits; promotion and advocacy around fast-emerging options such as rooftop grid-connected solar PV; direct procurement of solar PV streetlights, and undertaking landfill gas feasibility studies and subsequent implementation pursuit.

Building energy efficiency promotion (local government often has direct mandates here): this includes developing local bylaws for commercial building energy efficiency; awareness raising around residential building energy efficiency (appropriate window use, shading etc), and organising training of building sector to improve ability for energy efficient construction.

Industrial energy efficiency promotion: including encouraging/incentivising audits (e.g. link with donor EE programmes), and facilitating training and awareness programmes locally.

Bringing sustainable energy concerns into spatial planning and transport planning: this includes introducing densification, corridor development, mixed use and other approaches into spatial plans; bringing tribal authorities (land owners) and municipal officials together in developing a shared vision around spatial futures, and researching and modeling the impact of different spatial and transport interventions on future energy, cost, social welfare, and economic activity – and engage with regional and national transport planning processes to introduce more optimal approaches.

Developing a more conducive enabling environment for implementation: this includes linking with support/donor programmes around supporting sustainable energy, and identifying how collaboration could work; researching and providing local data on energy status, problems, and opportunities; researching and communicating updates on implementation status as programmes are implemented, and evaluate their impact; capacity building of local government staff; programmatic partnerships between local government and local research institutions; developing networks amongst local governments for lessons exchange and mutual support, and developing links between local, regional and national players to facilitate integrated planning and coordinated approaches

Helping clarify the role of local government in sustainable energy, and identify effective methodologies to support them in fulfilling this potential: this includes researching the process of local government involvement and role in sustainable energy, and assess their challenges in this regard, researching approaches to supporting local government to engage effectively with sustainable energy promotion, and disseminate experience in this regard and potential for local government in promoting sustainable energy at workshops, conferences, meetings etc.

The role of local governments and local research organisations in moving to a more sustainable energy future as envisioned by the SDGs is clearly substantial. This has implications for development aid resource allocation and research funding channels.  Importantly, it is not enough to just fund research – a dual approach of partnerships with researchers who align directly with the needs of local governments, as well as a strong focus on real capacity building of local governments is important (note that information dissemination is not capacity building).  Programmes such as SAMSET are working in this area, but the needs are currently far greater than the enabling resources, by an order of magnitude at least.

Will Solar Photovoltaics Increase Their Efficiency Soon? / Will Solar Photovoltaics Continue to Decrease their Cost?

Simon Batchelor from Gamos writes below on the potential implications of the rapidly-decreasing price of solar photovoltaic panels, and electricity costs per unit from solar energy. With prices rapidly approaching parity for global average retail electricity, the potential for solar energy to move from an expensive, plant-based energy solution, or a small, household-scale system, to a more integrated and commonplace technology for varied energy services, is increasing greatly. Simon presents two sections below, focusing on the improvements in photovoltaic cell efficiency, and if the decreasing cost trend is to continue and its implications.

Source: renewableenergyhub.co.uk

Will Solar Photovoltaics Increase their Efficiency Soon?

In the past few years solar cells have undergone rapid changes in efficiency and cost. Currently the research being conducted by competing companies is improving the efficiencies and reducing the production cost. The industry itself is growing quickly and due to large scale manufacture prices are decreasing.

One of the ways to reduce the cost of solar cell production is to improve the efficiency of the cells as this enables them to convert more energy from the sun. New efficiency records are constantly being set by the leading companies in solar cell research; these are from the most up to date articles available. The latest breakthrough in solar panel efficiency was in December 2014, a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany announced that 46% efficiency had been reached with a concentrator (multijunction) photovoltaic system. MiaSolé (January 2014) produces flexible solar panels with an efficiency of 17%, these could have a range of uses that other, more efficient panels could not fulfil. Sharp has been trying to develop cells which can make use of the electrons released on impact with the panel surface, as of June 2014 this project was still getting started but predictions of 60% efficiency have been made if this project is successful. Researchers at Stanford University have been using a layer of perovskite on top of standard silicon as both materials absorb different sections of the solar spectrum, potentially increasing efficiency by 25%. The Economist (Feb 2014) reported that John Roberts of the University of Illinois has also been working on layers within solar cells which could improve the efficiency to a potential 50% by absorbing different parts of the solar spectrum. In August 2014 First Solar improved the efficiency of the CdTe Thin Film cell to 21.4%, 3% higher than their record in February 2013, while this cell has lower efficiency than multijunction ones it has the lowest production cost.

Will Solar Photovoltaics Continue to Decrease their Cost?

Source: europe-solar.de

A study by MIT in 2013 showed that China is currently the world leader at producing low cost solar panels; in 2011 63% of solar panels production took place there. However this study provided hope for the American market that the lead the Chinese manufactures had was based on large scale production rather than a bigger workforce, American manufactures may be able to catch up. Due to over production in China it has been estimated 88 companies have had to close factories particularly in North America and Europe; companies in China have had to merge (Forbes, 2012). Q cells, a leading German research and manufacture company, which went bankrupt and was taken over by Korean company Hanwha (Economist, 2014). Hanwha announced in December 2014 that it was going to merge three companies (Hanwha Q CELLS, Hanwha SolarOne and Hanwha Solar Holdings) to become the global leader of solar cell production with a manufacture capacity of 3.28 GW. Companies in the US and Europe are unhappy with the over-manufacturing approach China has taken, anti-dumping duties are being applied on Chinese imports of solar panels to the US and EU (Economist, 2014). This has angered consumers as it pushes the cost of solar panels beyond an affordable price range. SunPower, the second largest US solar company, is doing well however and in April 2014 beat market predictions.

As with any product the value of solar energy varies due to the demand and production rate; there have been several fluctuations in both of these but currently they are increasing. Early in 2014 the Wall St Journal showed there was evidence for investors displaying renewed interest in the solar industry indicating a possible resurgence after the decline in 2008. This decline was due to over-manufacture in China and subsidy removal in Germany (previously purchasing half of the PV panels produced) resulting in an unsustainable stock price for solar (Wall St Journal, 2014).

Members of the Fraunhofer Institute in 2013 said that at the time the production of solar cells was greater than the demand for them but in the future the demand would outstrip manufacture capacity. Their aim was to start a large scale factory in Europe which could produce high volumes of solar cells in order to make a profit even when the prices dip below 50c/W. In the same article it was predicted that in 2050 the cost of solar energy may be 2 or 3c/kWh and could be the cheapest source of electricity; to provide 10% of the global energy demand there would need to be a capacity of 10,000GW. The International Energy Agency found that early in 2014 the total solar production globally was over 150 GW. There are predicted increases of solar production in many countries in the coming years due to the 2014 UN Climate Summit in New York. India is expected to reach 100 GW in 2022 and the US solar production is expected in double in 2015/ 2016 taking it to 40 GW.

The cost of solar cells will decrease but the decline may be slow as there is a surplus of solar panels and already low prices (Breakthrough, 2013). Between 2008 and 2013 there was an annual growth rate for solar power of 63.2%. Calculations in this article suggest that with a growth of 50% per year (accounting for an increase in global energy use of 3.4%) by 2020 there will be 2,400 GW of solar energy which will make up 8.1% of global energy. The International Energy Agency has predicted that by 2020 16% of global energy production will be solar and supplied by around 6250 GW.

Price projections of solar energy are necessary to forecast the industry growth however in such a dynamic sector these projections are difficult to make. Renew Economy (2013) found that there are differences in the predictions being made about the price of solar power; Citigroup has predicted prices of 25c/W in 2020. The US Department for Energy predicted a cost of $60/MWh by 2020 (at $1/W) whereas the Australian counterpart (The Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics) expected costs of around $140/MWh in the same year. If the targets from the UN Climate Summit in 2014 are met it would have an impact on the solar economy which may not yet have been included in available predictions. There are many price projections and some of them have in the past proved to have been too low. There were predictions that solar PV production might reach 42c/W in 2015 however the most efficient panels available according to ENF (09/01/2015) are Nice Sun PV at a cost of 45c/W. On 7^th Jan 2015. the lowest price available per cell was $0.319. The lowest cost panels available are Sun Electronics at 34 c/Watt (09/01/2015).

Energy and Sustainable Urban Development CPD Course – Day 1

SAMSET team members were among 40 participants from municipal governments and research institutions across South Africa, Ghana and Uganda at a continuing professional development course held at the University of Cape Town Graduate Business School, beginning on the 17^th November 2014. The course was entitled “Energy and Sustainable Urban Development in Africa”, and ran for five days. This blog will present a series of snapshots of the key themes from each day of the course, discussing critical ideas and points to consider for municipal, district and national governments in Sub-Saharan Africa considering the issue of sustainable urban energy transitions.

Day one of the course sought to provide an introduction and overview to sustainable urban development in the global context, drilling down into issues specific to the African, Sub-Saharan African and local contexts. With current projections forecasting a 4 degree Celsius average rise in global temperatures under a business as usual scenario, immense challenges exist globally on how to mitigate the effects of climate change, and adapt where mitigation is impossible.

Urban development is set to dominate human population growth in the coming decades, and with energy intensities of urban areas growing rapidly in the developing world (for example, South African urban areas occupy 4% of the country’s surface area but consume an estimated 50% of the country’s primary energy supply currently, a global challenge exists in making urban development more sustainable. High-carbon development pathways predicated on fossil fuel use, as used from the Industrial Revolution to today, have proven to be costly, both financially and in terms of environmental and social effects, and the need exists to develop and mainstream alternative solutions to urban development.

David Kyasanku from Jinja Municipality, Uganda, presents at the Energy and Sustainable Urban Development CPD course

Municipal governments in Sub-Saharan Africa have a critical role to play in this urban development. Municipal mandates cover a vast array of urban services and roles, from disaster management to provision of sanitation and waste management to spatial planning and transportation. Intimate knowledge of their local contexts, challenges and opportunities also place municipal governments in a strong position to create effective solutions to the urbanisation challenge.

However, there are still issues surrounding the municipal government role in urban energy transitions (a contested terrain). Shifting priorities at both a local and national level for energy create pressures on timeframes for solutions, and a lack of long-term planning was consistently cited as a key challenge at the local level. Stresses, both financially and in terms of capacity through personnel changes, can also contribute to stalling of project implementation. Tailored solutions can also be a challenge to implement, and a key theme of the discussion on day one was the need for community consultation in project design and management, moving to a participatory planning process with local communities to deliver effective solutions in their micro-contexts rather than a centralised planning process.

This blog will provide further insight into the discussions at the CPD course throughout the week, from household energy poverty alleviation to municipal electricity distribution, as well as details from fieldwork and discussions through all sessions.

The Rise of Afro-Smart Cities Should be Viewed with Caution

Johnathan Silver from Durham University writes on the potential challenges to African “Smart Cities”, and why the public discourse on the matter may not live up to the hype.

The recent announcement by IBM establishing its twelfth global laboratory in Nairobi has followed a rise in news about Smart cities across urban Africa. These include IBM’s inclusion of Durban and Abuja in its Smarter Cities Challenge, a plethora of summits and conferences, together with planning for a series of new smart urban extensions on the periphery of major conurbations such as Accra and Kinshasa. Together these developments are generating an ever growing clamour concerning the potential of smart urbanism to transform urban Africa through the integration of digital technologies across networked infrastructures, offering resource efficiencies, global competitiveness, safer cities and ultimately much greater control over the built environment and everyday life.

Such coverage is often predicated on these techno-futures enabling ways to leapfrog other global regions through next generation infrastructure and technology. The images and narratives of smart futures in cities like Rio, portrayed in endless representations through its control room, and major Northern cities such as London and New York are ubiquitous and firmly entrenched in the imaginary of policymakers and the wider public. Yet the notion of smart in urban Africa has been less visible (at least on a global level) up till now. But as things change, the rise of Afro-Smart cities is going to require much more attention from those interested in rapid urbanisation and associated challenges of poverty and development faced by these diverse cities. For behind the widely circulated images of slum dwellers using mobile technologies to improve daily lives, the dominance of large ICT companies, a splintered urban landscape, land dispossession and the securitisation of urban space reveal a more complicated potential smart urban future.

Hip high tech start-ups, globally-connected young entrepreneurs and newly configured broadband infrastructures form a key ingredient of the Afro-Smart city or “digital revolution” narrative. In cities such as Kigali new techno-cultures are emerging and seeking to bring the Smart city to a much larger proportion of the population through cheap and accessible smart-phones, successful place-based apps and growing public interest in smart technologies being developed by African-based developers and users themselves. This new generation of Smart city innovators is increasingly connected through tech hubs and incubators for new businesses with spaces such as BantaLabs, Saint-Louis, Senegal through to Hive CoLab, Kampala offering spaces for collaboration and addressing both the specific ICT challenges and opportunities being faced across urban Africa.

Adding to this smart wave, rising interest from ICT companies,consultancies such as Deloitte and private equity is generating increased investment and policy focus around Smart cities. Yet the presence of global ICT companies across African cities, including IBM’s relationship with Nairobi poses similar questions to those being asked across urban areas in other parts of the world about who actually benefits from the implementation of smart technologies, growing flows of big data and the affordability of being smart. As Adam Greenfield, in his excellent book ‘ Against the SMART city’ cautions, such futures may well be nothing more than a (techno) utopian fantasy that, once unravelled, reveals little more than the opening of markets and opportunities for profit for large corporations. Nowhere are these powerful narratives of Smart city futures better articulated than in the range of urban development projects being pursued across the continent.

New infrastructure and city extensions are being planned and constructed across the length and breadth of the continent with promises of Smart city living that target that emerging but most unsteady of terms, the African middle class. These include projects in existing cities such as Johannesburg, which has entered into partnership with BWired to establish new broadband networks across the city. Yet, as commentators such as Nancy Oderdaal have long noticed, the splintered nature of ICT infrastructures across urban Africa shows a clear spatial division between the poor and rich that may be further cemented by shifts towards smart networks.

As well as reconfiguring existing urban space for the smart city, a plethora of new city extensions promising potential residents a technologised, data drive future, away from the seemingly chaotic (and unconnected) streets of other parts of the city are emerging and mirroring those well-known global hubsof Smart city hubris. Such Smart city developments are thus often designed beyond existing cities and their slum areas. Konza Techno City, 60km away from Nairobi in the newly named “Silicon Savannah” andHope City, Ghana both promise high tech jobs, global corporate interest, advanced building design and high speed connectivity.

Yet problems in delivering these urban development projects are myriad and likely to entrench inequalities across already divided and contested cities. For example, La Cite du Fleuve, in DR Congo, brilliantly deconstructed by Filip De Boek, is creating a series of overlapping sources of tension in Kinshasa including struggles around land ownership and issues of dispossession that begin to lay bare the rhetoric of these urban developments. Such urban extensions may well offer smart living for urban dwellers but echoing the gated communities of the past few decades also have to be understood as new frontiers for capital accumulation and a clear demonstration of business sectors and parts of society withdrawing from the wider city and society into enclaves or archipelagos of high technology. Scholars are documenting such processes across the global South, most prominently Ayona Datta in India. This emerging knowledge suggests that the stark urban inequalities present in cities is unlikely to be addressed in these Smart city developments. Instead, dynamics of land dispossession, that are beginning to mirror the wider and ongoing land grabbing across the continent threaten, as Vanessa Watson has eloquently written, to turn these urban dreams into nightmares.

The final area of caution around smart urbanism across Africa needs to be centred around the securitisation of urban space through new technologies, infrastructures and data flows. The control of internet usage and social media is common across many cities including Addis Adaba and of course Cairo, where bloggers critical of the government or organisers of social mobilisations are being imprisoned on despairingly long terms. Being aware of how new smart technologies and infrastructures may also be deployed to curtail human rights and civic participation across urban Africa is critical to how we understand the rise of Afro-Smart cities. We only have to look back at the recent past in South Africa to see how IBM-designed, proto-smart technologies were used by the apartheid regime to control urban populations, restrict access to the cities and securitise a racialised, segregated urban space.

Further current examples are not too hard to find. For instance the development of the Skunk: Riot Drone by the South African company Desert Wolf , to deploy against miners in the country’s restive Platinum Belt and armed with surveillance systems and weapons (including pepper spray), provides a frankly terrifying vision of where Smart technologies may take us. After the Marikana massacre in 2012 by the South African police force and a highly-charged five-month strike by thousands of miners those urging caution in thinking that such technologies could not be used may need to think again. And with the first orders for 25 of these drones, it does not take much of an imaginative leap to see them being deployed across the simmering townships of the country as tensions and inequality continue to mount. Such developments provide a menacing retort to boosterish, utopian narratives of smart being used by large tech companies, consultants and increasingly government actors and policymakers.

Afro-Smart cities are becoming increasingly central in narratives about urban futures on the continent. Policies, reports and public discourse tend to paint a remorselessly upbeat vision of smart technologies that big data and advanced ICT infrastructure, connectivity and new urban (tech) space can help to transform landscapes of poverty and contribute to the oft-discussed “rise of Africa”. Some caution and perspective is certainly needed around Afro-Smart cities that interrogates these narratives and better understands the socio-spatial implications of these new forms of data-driven urbanism.

Johnathan would like to acknowledge the support of Alan Wiig in reading an earlier draft of this text.

This blog is also available on the London School of Economics website.

 

Compare the Carbon

Simon Batchelor from Gamos writes on carbon dioxide emissions and the “feel” for equivalence in emissions.

I came across a cool tool/website that tries to help us ordinary humans understand what kilograms of Carbon ‘feels’ like. www.carbon.to

I randomly met the creator who told me that it is the result of a ‘hackathon’, a new type of workshop where people (often technically competent students – geeks) come together, think about a problem, and try to come up with a solution to a small part of that problem straight away, within a one or two day workshop.  The problem they discussed was that most people have no ‘feel’ for what generates a kilo of carbon and how many kilos of carbon each action (such as air travel) or device (such as televisions) generates.

For instance, when we travel one kilometre by car, how much carbon dioxide does that generate?  And perhaps more interestingly how does that compare with say watching television – how many hours of watching television is the equivalent of a travelling a km by car?

Of course the answer depends on how the electricity is generated and whether the car is efficient, or even a hybrid.  However, this little tool found here at www.carbon.to helps us understand in general terms.  Given that it was made by students it has some interesting options – comparing cars with beer, or air travel with tomatoes.

So to end, let me just say I am writing this the day after having travelled for 8 hours on a plane.  How much CO2 did I use?  About 790 kilograms.  I have no ‘feel’ for what 790 kg is, whether it is a lot or little.  However, the app says that 8 hours flying is the equivalent 4,560 miles in a car – about the same as my annual usage.  It is 52,659 km if I used the train – I confess I probably only travel about 400 km a year on trains.  I think for me one of the surprising equivalents is beef.  It actually takes a lot of carbon to grow a kilogram of beef, particularly in Europe where cows are fed crops grown with fertiliser and managed by machinery.  My 8 hours flying is only 134kg of beef – that seems small compared to the 52,000 km of travel I could have had by train.  I could have watched 82,135 hours of television!  And I could have drunk 334,698 cups of tea!

Ghana’s US$498m Power Compact Deal with the United States

Dr Simon Bawakyillenuo of the University of Ghana ISSER recently blogged about the signing of the second Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact (MCC), the Ghana Power Compact, worth US$498 million, for the Institution of Development Studies Globalisation and Development Blog. The full article can be found at: http://www.globalisationanddevelopment.com/2014/08/will-ghanas-498-power-compact-deal-with.html

 

Engineering Knowledge and Research Program Revisited

Simon Batchelor from Gamos on the potential changes in citizen behaviour over the last decade from some previous research, and how the SAMSET project will help to investigate this.

One of the things that excites me about the SAMSET research project is that we potentially get to revisit earlier research and consider the changes in citizen behaviour over a decade or more.  Back in 2005 we researched the Khayelitsha township in Cape Town, as part of the Engineering Knowledge and Research (EngKaR) Programme of the UK Department for International Development (DFID).  A sample of 226 households was drawn from four neighbourhoods, representing informal settlement without services (at that time), informal settlement with basic services, RDP[1] houses with services and a community of ‘core houses’[2].  Unusually for that time the electricity supply in the township was operated by an intermediary energy supply company, PN Energy.  PN Energy was set up in 1994, had expanded its customer base from 6,000 to 60,000 households, and reduced non-technical losses from around 80% to nearer 5%. They used prepayment technology exclusively, and the connection fee for a household wa 150 R.  Nearly 10 years after, I took another look at the PN Energy website and I have to admit that I found the current website fairly uninformative, and I am not sure whether PN Energy has retained its autonomy from Eskom?

For us at that time it was fascinating to see how people managed energy use in the home.  The study divided the sample into two groups according to whether household income was above or below R1,500 per month.  Energy costs were relatively high for both groups, and amongst the poorer group energy was actually the second highest item of household expenditure.  Obviously the exact data is out of date now, and updates are required, but to us it was fascinating that in 2005, electricity appeared to be the preferred means of cooking, at least where people had access to electricity (either formally through a prepayment meter, or informally).

Main cooking appliances

	Type of electricity supply
Main cooking appliance	Pre-payment meter	Extension cord	No electricity
Electric stove / oven	68%	53%
Gas stove	8%		8%
Paraffin stove	24%	47%	92%
N (households per group):	151	36	37

‘Extension cord’ means just that.  For example, one side of the road which had electricity would run a ‘frayed wire’ across the road to give other households electricity – not sanctioned officially but practical and expedient.  Such wiring of course can dangerously overheat if too much power is drawn through it.  Households with extension cords had a more negative experience of electricity supply than those with metered connections – marginally more households with extension cords experience power cuts, voltage drop that prohibits use of appliances, and damage to appliances.  Theft of cables was, naturally, more of a problem amongst households using extension cords. Although more households using extension cords experienced electric shocks, perhaps surprisingly there was no difference in the reported incidence of fires caused by electricity.

However I remember that life was more of a challenge to those who did not have electricity.  21% of the overall sample said they did not use space heating appliances and a further 23% did not respond (indicating they have no appliance).  At that time energy poverty was contributing to high rates of pulmonary / respiratory disease in the Western Cape.  Also most households without electricity used paraffin, which also presented health hazards.  26% of non-electrified households use an imbhawula which can also be dangerous when used in enclosed spaces.

I hope we get a chance to find out how life has changed over the ten years?

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[1] Reconstruction and Development Programme

[2] Formal houses built when people first started moving into the area, these houses have basic servces, but are much bigger than RDP homes.