Abstract
Official estimates in 2004 were that 15% of Cambodians had electricity access. This would not be surprising given that the population is still largely rural or lives in smaller towns. Eighty percent of the population lives below the district town level and 75% live at the commune (or village) level (Cam.NGO.Dom March 2006). Électricité du Cambodge is responsible for roughly 9% of the electrified population and the other 6% is from licensed generators and distributors, primarily at the district level. This low level of electrification by the official utility and licensed entities is a legacy of the poor development and long-term military conflicts that have plagued this country. However, at the same time, official surveys show nearly 50% of Cambodian households owning a television set (National Institute of Statistics undated). More recent estimates are that 24% of households have lighting provided by either publicly or privately generated electricity, another 38% use batteries and 36% use kerosene (National Institute of Statistics 2009). However, another estimate is that 90–95% of the population may have access to a basic level of electricity, enough for a lightbulb in the evening (Cam.NGO.Dom March 2006). How then to explain this difference? The rest of the population is being served primarily by battery charging services and village level networks developed and run by small entrepreneurs. These Rural Electricity Entrepreneurs (REEs), as they are known, may supply 75–85% of the population and are completely unlicensed, unregulated, and are not supported by the government or donors (making exact numbers difficult to determine). This pattern of electrification in Cambodia presents an excellent opportunity to study a distributed electrification model that is widespread but usually at the margins of electricity supply in most countries.
Information on Distributed Rural Electrification Models in Cambodia comes from a combination of secondary sources and primary interviews conducted in Cambodia (December 2005 and March 2006) and Washington, DC (2005 and 2006).
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Notes
- 1.
While the government socio-economic survey does not ask about lightbulb ownership (a clear indicator of access to either battery charging or a mini-grid), their statistics do show nearly 50% of the rural households owning a television. Thus, the estimate of 90% basic electrification is not unreasonable.
- 2.
The number of battery chargers appears to be more uncertain than that of rural electricity entrepreneurs that run micro-grids (with or without associated battery charging service). The micro-grid operators tend to be larger and more visible. The number of 1,000 for battery chargers is likely a low estimate.
- 3.
There is at least one other company in Cambodia supply solar systems, however its target customer is the government (e.g. for military installations).
- 4.
The three solar home system customers were: (a) a rice farmer with above-average landholdings; (b) an elderly couple that had lived with their children in the United States for many years and (c) a local entrepreneur who collected recyclables and ran a lottery system for which he needed electricity to run a transmission system to his lottery ticket sellers in the countryside stores.
- 5.
The cooperative leadership was also able to pass a rate hike when it was realized the initial rate was set too low. This can be compared to the dispute over the tariff in the Japanese PV/Hydro project discussed below.
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Zerriffi, H. (2011). Distributed Rural Electrification in Cambodia. In: Rural Electrification. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9594-7_4
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