Sustainable Energy Access for Sustainable Communities: Introduction by a Social Scientist

Abstract

Three pillars are essential to building a sustainable future for current and next generations: sustainable energy access, inclusive knowledge and equal opportunities in education, peacebuilding, and democratisation. These pillars interact like communicating vessels; they can neither be conceived nor achieved in isolation from one another. Sustainable energy access relies on access to broad and decentralised knowledge and to innovation in technologies, which is the pursuit of higher education. Community-based implementation of the sustainable energy principles is only possible if the stakeholders own these principles and thus create the basis for participatory, transparent, democratic, and above all, peaceful conditions for action. Peaceful contexts are necessary for communities to achieve the socio-ecological transformation that is necessary to mitigate climate change and to build models of a sustainable coexistence that preserves our common good, which is the environment.

Three pillars are essential to building a sustainable future for current and next generations: sustainable energy access, inclusive knowledge and equal opportunities in education, peacebuilding, and democratisation. These pillars interact like communicating vessels; they can neither be conceived nor achieved in isolation from one another. Sustainable energy access relies on access to broad and decentralised knowledge and to innovation in technologies, which is the pursuit of higher education. Community-based implementation of the sustainable energy principles is only possible if the stakeholders own these principles and thus create the basis for participatory, transparent, democratic, and above all, peaceful conditions for action. Peaceful contexts are necessary for communities to achieve the socio-ecological transformation that is necessary to mitigate climate change and to build models of a sustainable coexistence that preserves our common good, which is the environment.

APPEAR—the Austrian Partnership Programme in Higher Education and Research for Development—supports projects for sustainable energy access and efficiency in Kenya, Mozambique, Palestine, and Senegal. This book mainly focuses on the SEA4cities project that is being implemented in Senegal while also taking a comparative look at other countries of APPEAR’s intervention. APPEAR is the cooperation programme in higher education of the Austrian Development Cooperation (OeZA), which is implemented by the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD). The APPEAR’s contributions to higher education cover a broad spectrum, addressing all three essential pillars of a sustainable future across three continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe).

1 Unequal Distribution of Access to Energy Worldwide

Of the approximately 7.8 billion people in the world, about 10% have no access to electricity—four-fifths of these people live in rural areas of developing countries. In the future, the number of people without access to electricity could further increase in the rapidly growing cities of developing countries driven by urbanisation. Approximately 1.3 million barrels of oil, which is equivalent to 1.5% of the world's production, are spent every day on lighting in the poorest households (Energypedia, 2017)¹, often in the form of bottles with wicks, which represent a serious health concern. Two and a half (2.5) billion people continue to cook and heat using energy-intensive technologies such as the three-stone fire with raw biomass, i.e. wood, straw, corn stalks, animal dung, often collected by women and young girls. More than half of these people live in India (825 million) and China (515 million); they represent 83% of the 1.2 Sub-Saharan Africans (IEA, 2020)².

In 2019, 52% of the Sub-Saharan Africa’s population³ did not have access to electricity, and the global figures veil disparities between urban and rural areas, where access is about 29% (World Energy Outlook, 2020)⁴. Still, the challenge in cities also requires close attention. Sub-Saharan Africa recorded the highest rate of urbanisation over the last two decades; the United Nations (2018) expects that the number of cities with 500,000 inhabitants or more will grow by 57% between 2018 and 2030. The energy system of most African cities, today, is neither sized nor equipped for meeting the challenges of increasing access and transition to sustainability in the near future.

2 Energy Access for Improving Living Standards

Due to the large disparities in access to energy, especially to electricity, there is a concern that triggering the transition to sustainability may affect the energy access targets; challenges related to investment in infrastructure and intermittency of supply continue to raise concerns on the potential of renewable energy resources to meet the rapid increase of energy demand in sub-Saharan Africa. These concerns assume that the growth in energy demand will continue at the same pace and underestimate the potential of energy efficiency in per capita energy consumption while improving living standards and lifting millions of people out of poverty. In other words, a high standard of living can be achieved and, above all, maintained without following the path of industrialised countries over the last 244 years, since James Watt invented the steam engine. Over the last years, we observed that living standards had been correlated with better efficiency of appliances, and therefore decreasing per capita energy consumption. In the future, people will not be better fed, healthier, better educated, with more energy. This observation is confirmed by the Austrian energy expert and physicist Johannes Schmidl, who looked on the possible correlation between the primary energy consumption per capita and the Human Development Index (HDI) of 140 countries. Figure 1.1 plots this correlation. The HDI is frequently used for measuring the living standards of a country. The metric takes into account, among other parameters, the average life expectancy at birth, the adult literacy rate, the school enrolment rate, and the gross domestic product per capita of the population. All these parameters, generated from national statistics, are reliable parameters for measuring poverty and the status of development.

Fig. 1.1

HDI and per capita energy consumption. Source: Johannes Schmidl (2015): Energie und Utopie. Second Edition. Sonderzahl Publishing House, Vienna. Fig. 1.1 is based on data of the years 2016 to 2019, depending on availability, and 2018 for the HDI. Primary energy consumption per capita: World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator; BP Statistical review of World Energy, data on HDI from UNDP: http://hdr.undp.org/en/

About two-thirds of the countries in the sub-Saharan Africa region have a primary energy consumption per capita equivalent to less than 40 gigajoules (GJ)⁵ per year. These countries also have a relatively low HDI. Of the 47 poorest countries in the world—the so-called least developed countries⁶—33 are in the sub-Saharan Africa region (Fig. 1.1).

When the annual primary energy consumption per capita is between 40 and 110 Gigajoules (GJ), the HDI rises sharply at first, before curbing. The world’s average primary energy consumption per capita in 2019 was approximately 75 GJ, which is roughly equivalent to the consumption of Turkey, Ukraine, Argentina, and Bhutan. Above 110 GJ per capita, which is roughly equivalent to the energy consumption of Italy, the United Kingdom and Poland in 2019, there is no statistically discernible gain in quality of life as reflected by the HDI. This figure is the borderline above which additional energy consumption has no influence on the development index and, therefore, on the populations’ quality of life. The average energy per capita in the EU was 112 GJ; Austria is in the upper category with 165 GJ per capita. In the USA and Canada, the average energy per capita can be as high as 318 GJ. Countries such as Qatar and Kuwait have averages that exceed these figures by so much that they are outside the above chart. The concept of natural saturation of the primary energy demand, when related to living standards, is good news. It means the process that will lead to the world population peak at around 9.5 billion in 30 years’ time, at the latest, will not require energy demand and consumption to rise in proportions similar to those of the last 244 years, in order to improve life standards and lift millions of people out of poverty; this would have been unimaginable a 100 years ago.

Developing countries will continue to increase their primary energy consumption over the next decades in their efforts to align their living standards with the global average. However, the increasing penetration of renewables in electrical grids, from 23% in 2015 to 26.5% according to IEA shows that some net-zero carbon technologies are mature enough to supply this demand. Among the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goal number 7 (SDG 7) is the objective to reduce the unequal distribution of access to electricity—not through gigantomania, large-scale projects that require centralised structures vulnerable to many topical threats, but through smaller and decentralised systems that rely on knowledge- and evidence-based resource management in a participatory and community-based approach. This approach can contribute to achieve by 2030 the socio-ecological transformations needed towards energy sustainability in developing countries.

3 APPEAR Supports academia’s Research on Energy Sustainability

The 17 SDGs are the result of decades of scientific research and political negotiations. Fundamental research demonstrated the social and ecological vulnerability of our planet, and science developed practice-oriented solutions to address these “collective action problems.” SDG 7 formulates the ambitious goal to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” This goal’s attainment primarily requires to progressively phase-out the combustion of conventional energy resources—starting with coal, oil, and natural gas—which are responsible of about 78% of the anthropogenic component of greenhouse gas emissions.⁷ An alternative can be the use of locally available renewable energy resources that provides, in addition to climate change mitigation, an alleviation of the economic system’s dependency to energy imports. Local communities in rural and urban areas should be encouraged to become both energy producers and energy consumers with innovative and sustainable technologies.

In order to achieve this goal, which is also highly relevant in development strategies, not only cooperation across countries, institutions, and communities is necessary, but also the contribution of academia is critical. Cooperation with higher education institutions, non-university research institutions, local authorities and government agencies in the partner countries, NGOs and civil society is necessary to build innovative models of energy access and consumption with locally available resources. Innovation in access by means of sustainable energy resources such as solar photovoltaic for electricity generation or waste recycling for process heating is an opportunity to invent models of development that preserve the ecosystems. Especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is important that dedicated researchers work with decision-makers on the achievement of the ambitious energy objectives set by national governments and committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular the goal number 7.

This research-action approach perfectly tallies with the overarching principles of the APPEAR programme.⁸ APPEAR sees itself as a mechanism that supports the achievement of development objectives, of which is the objective to improve scientific capacities in the partner countries and to contribute with knowledge-sharing to improve the social and economic living conditions of the people in these countries. The basis of this ambitious commitment is research, teaching, and innovation that sustain a comprehensive socio-ecological transformation. It is also important that our action today does in no way restrict or even make impossible the life of future generations. It is not possible to think solutions for addressing the environmental problems, especially with regard to climate change, without solutions to address social problems, nor will it be possible to implement the former successfully without the latter. More than ever before, the world needs integrated concepts that approach social and ecological dimensions of topical problems together and develop solutions that simultaneously address them.

APPEAR, the Austrian Development Cooperation’s programme in higher education, abide by these guiding principles. We supported the implementation of 45 academic partnerships in 18 partner countries, where our fellow scholars demonstrated the relevance of research and science in bringing solutions to topical problems, which include access and transition to energy sustainability in developing countries. Therefore, we welcome the decision of the Austrian Development Cooperation to continue the APPEAR programme that would have expired at the end of 2020 for another cycle of 7 years. Long-term planning is essential to a solution-oriented cooperation in higher education for development. Time is a critical parameter in forging and sustaining cooperation in science, and to measuring impact on societies.

SEA4cities Promotes Research and Cooperation for Energy Sustainability

The APPEAR project SEA4citie addresses, beside technology, the social and socio-political dimensions of access to sustainable energy resources. The project is an institutional cooperation between the Ecole Polytechnique Thies in Senegal and the Vienna University of Technology and aims to create innovative models and tools for transition to energy sustainability in cities. SEA4cities collaborates with other academia and with non-academic partners in both private and public sectors in disseminating tools such as the Energy System Planning Model that contributes to democratise access to energy solutions. The SEA4cities, theoretical concepts, basic research, and field research are methodically linked and presented against the background of the increasing energy demand in sub-Saran Africa. Despite the very different social and economic situations in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, the challenges of overcoming the dramatic climate change and its consequences on sea-level rise and loss of biodiversity are similar. Thus, the SEA4cities project was able to adopt an integrated perspective from the beginning, building on the experience drawn from initiatives for energy sustainability in Senegal and in Austria. Community grids with renewable energy resources, for example recently gained attention in Europe, particularly in Germany and in Austria. In these countries, academia has largely contributed to defining the models that organise the systems and their operation. SEA4cities supports knowledge exchange between universities in Senegal and Austria to empower a new generation of scientists ready for this challenge.

The book Sustainable Energy Access for Sustainable Communities: Rethinking the Energy Agenda for Cities, which compiles findings of a 30-month research-action invites us to embark on a unique journey that explores the multi-faceted dimensions of energy sustainability through its nexus with technology, governance, and development. The book relays views about the meaning of energy sustainability from the perspectives of the project’s fellow researchers supported by the contributions of experienced professionals. The meeting of basic research and experience from field practice makes it a valuable contribution to contemporary debates on the topic of energy sustainability, and in doing so, on local participatory governance (Chaps. 2–4). Chapters 5–10 outline the importance of technology innovation and the role of research in building a sustainable energy future. Chapters 11–13 revisit the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” by applying it to the level of communities. Chapters 14–15 open perspectives on new pathways for simultaneously achieving the Sustainable Development Goal number 7, and goals on poverty eradication (SDG-1), and access to safe food (SDG-2). The gender dimension in energy sustainability that is addressed in Chap. 13 is of particular importance for APPEAR, because gender equality is a prerequisite for comprehensive participation and is a critical aspect of sustainability in communities.

I thank the convening author, Aminata Fall, for bringing together in this publication exciting contributions from some of the representatives of this new generation of scientists. The book is not only a résumé of interesting research cooperation but also a stimulus for shaping further the path towards a sustainable energy future.