SAMSET Releases a New Guide to Clean Energy Transitions for Sub Saharan Municipalities

Simon Batchelor from Gamos writes on the recently-released Guidelines to Clean Energy document for SAMSET.

As a part of our ongoing work with Sub Saharan Municipalities in Uganda and Ghana, the research team have brought together some basic information on clean energy transitions.  “GUIDELINES TO CLEAN ENERGY:- A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR SUB SAHARAN AFRICAN MUNICIPALITIES (2017)”. The Guide is intended to help decision makers in Municipalities in Sub Saharan Africa to consider ways in which they could make their city utilize cleaner energy. Its foreword states “This manual has been designed for use by city officials and planners working in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a practical handbook, which identifies easy to achieve energy interventions that will save money (for cities, businesses and households), promote local economic development, and enhance the sustainable profile of a city. This manual is specifically aimed as a support tool to achieve the implementation of key interventions within municipalities across sub-Saharan Africa.”

The 200 page document starts with a call for cleaner energy. Its opening chapter draws on various sources to show how our ongoing use of fossil fuels is linked to climate change. The historical contribution of Sub Saharan Africa to global climate change is small compared to the developed countries, however over the next 30 years it will increase its contribution particularly if ‘Business as Usual’ is continued. The opening chapters discuss how this global problem is the responsibility of all, and how municipalities could take a decision to move towards clean energy that might contribute to climate change mitigation in the long term.

The guide, however, is titled ‘A Practical Guide’ and we felt it important to move quickly on from the macro picture of global challenges to the specifics of what a municipality might do. Each of the chapters has the same format –

• An overview, which includes some basic description of technology and social change options;
• The Case; which discusses how simple changes can make considerable differences
• Potential for Rollout; discussing the realities of Sub Saharan African life and whether the technology could be introduced
• Barriers to implementation (and effort to resolve); an attempt to anticipate barriers, and suggestions of what might be done
• How to go about implementation; some suggestions for action
• Case Studies; some Sub Saharan African case studies to illustrate the relevance and possibilities of the chapters subject.

Chapter 5 starts with Energy efficient lighting a technology that is relatively easy to implement. LED bulbs have become common and simple action ensuring they are available in the market and ‘encouraged’ among consumers can save significant amount of electricity (compared to older lamps). Chapter 6 broadens the picture to include energy efficient buildings.Ideally these need some design at the very start, but the chapter also makes suggestion for retrofitting that can lower energy consumption. Chapter 7 considers public transport. Vehicles can not only consume considerable amounts of fossil fuel, but create localized pollution. The chapter focuses on the possibilities of public transport as an alternative to everyone getting their own car. Chapter 8 considers cooking. While it may seem that municipalities have little to say about the choice of domestic cooking fuels, the ongoing use of biomass (charcoal) in urban areas contributes to local pollution, kitchen pollution and global pollution. Municipalities can undertake various strategies to assist consumers to move toward genuinely clean cooking.

Waste to energy in Chapter 9 is very much a municipality concern. Collection of waste is a challenge to many SSA municipalities, and the possibility of converting it to useful energy is worth consideration. Chapter 10 talks about Solar Photovoltaics. Solar PV has come down in price considerably over the last few years and this chapter discusses the possibilities – from solar farms contributing to the national grid, to mini and micro grids, to solar home systems.

Renewable purchase agreements are a policy tool that can encourage clean energy. Chapter 11 discusses these, pointing the municipality players to consider the policy instruments available in their country. Chapter 11 touches on carbon trading – this again is effectively a policy instrument that municipalities might consider using. And finally , a last chapter summaries but does not deal in depth, some ideas on Concentrated Solar Power, Wind Power and Solar Water Heaters.

The guide ends with a call to action, to share ideas with colleagues, and to take small steps that help us tread lightly on the earth. “We may have discussed many ideas, technologies, approaches, regulations, policies, feed in tariffs, low energy light bulbs, and energy efficient buildings among others, but ultimately consumption and sustainability come down to you. Humanity has a large footprint on this world and currently we are not treading lightly. We consume; we consume fossil fuel, we create so much impact that our climate is changing, we build cities that can be seen from space; we are heavy on the earth.”

Energy and Sustainable Urban Development CPD Course – Day 3

This blog is part of a series on the Energy and Sustainable Urban Development in Africa workshop, 17 – 21 November, 2014, University of Cape Town. For more details on the purpose of the workshop, see this blog.

Charcoal briquette production and use. Image: GVEP International

Day three of the CPD course concentrated on the household energy poverty challenge in African cities, focusing again on Uganda, Ghana and South Africa for case studies. Energy is a cross-cutting issue in the household services sector, affecting areas such as health and life expectancy, food service and nutrition, water supply, and other basic life experience factors.

Currently 43% of South African households are living in energy poverty, defined by the government as having a greater than 10% expenditure of total monthly income on energy services. Informal households make up approximately 70% of the 3.6 million households in the country without electricity access currently. A number of factors lie behind this: from a policy perspective, the inclining block tariff and free basic electricity policies in the South African electricity sector only apply to electrified households, meaning households without electricity services, often the poorest, do not benefit from these initiatives.

A lack of access to appropriate, clean, safe, sustainable energy sources also forces households across the three countries to use expensive, unsafe but accessible fuel choices, such as paraffin or traditional wood fuels.

Following presentations on the current situation, City of Cape Town municipal energy & climate change department’s representative Andrew Janisch gave details on the City’s low-income energy services strategy. 265,000-360,000 households are currently part of the backlog for electrification by the city, and 500,000 households in the city live on less than R3,600 per month. In the face of this challenge, the city has embarked on a wide array of initiatives to improve urban energy services for the poorest, from Solar Water Heater dissemination on social housing projects to improving coordination and innovation in service delivery models and approaches. Key opportunities and lessons from the strategy include the necessity of coordination between municipal departments on energy, from tertiary education to housing to labour. “Radical” approaches and risk-taking, including the need for agility and flexibility institutionally, were also highlighted as useful approaches and factors. Finally, the critical nature of making the financial and business case for sustainable energy and energy efficiency was once again highlighted, as a route to improving acceptance and buy-in from municipal departments.

South African informal settlement. Image: Melusile Ndlovu

Professor Trevor Gaunt from the University of Cape Town led the afternoon session on informal settlement electrification. Challenges to the common perception of the goal of electrification were a key theme of this presentation, and Prof. Gaunt proposed considering electrification on a socioeconomic and social basis, as well as the purely economic case for development. In addition, in challenging the common perception and approach, arguments were made for grid electrification in peri-urban areas, given the fact that dense populations can benefit most from grid economies of scale, rather than using off-grid solutions in these circumstances.

The latter half of the afternoon was dedicated to two field trips for the workshop participants, to the Blackriver Parkway office complex, and the iShack project in Enkanini, an informal section of Kayamandi, Stellenbosch,, a sustainability and off-grid electrification organisation.

Part of the Blackriver Parkway office park’s 1.2MW photovoltaic installation. Image: Daniel Kerr

Blackriver Parkway is leading the way in embedded generation in South Africa commercial institutions, and currently has 1.2MW of installed photovoltaic capacity over three buildings. This mitigates the vast majority of the complex’s grid electricity demand, and great care has been taken to optimise the installations to closely match the demand curve of the complex. This has been achieved partly on the supply-side, through panel positioning to provide constant peak outputs over the course of the day, as well as on the demand-side, through the managing company investing in user education and buy-in for the complex’s client organisations. As legislation in South Africa is preventing organisations being net electricity contributors to the national grid, the complex generates the vast majority of its needs across the day from this solar installation. This project has become the first to legally transmit electricity back into the City of Cape Town’s electrical distribution network.

The iShack project in Enkanini is designed to provide the gamut of sustainability options to informal settlement dwellers, acting as a demonstration on how informal settlements can be more energy efficient. This covers insulation, biogas, wastewater treatment and water collection/saving, as well as off-grid electricity solutions through solar home systems. More details on the iShack project can be found in the following blog.