Clean

Abstract

Even as people in the developed world worry about the impacts of climate change, many more in the developing world worry about getting access to the most basic ingredients for a decent life: electricity and water. About 1.3 billion people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, live without reliable electricity. The cost of their disconnection from basic utilities is huge. Life shuts down when the sun goes down; businesses close; reading stops; homework lies unfinished; doctors cannot see patients; people walk home along unlit roads. Electricity has become even more important in people’s lives with the spread of the digital economy. There is little point in having a WiFi connection if there is no electricity to power a computer. Almost the first priority for modern people, rich and poor alike, is to find a place to recharge their mobile phone and so maintain their connection to the wider world. Every aspect of life — cooking, work, socialising, learning, trading - becomes constrained without electricity to light the way. More than a century after electricity supply systems became commonplace in the large industrial cities of the US and Europe, there is little prospect that those systems will reach the poorest households in the world using current technologies. These industrial era systems are too costly and cumbersome: they rely on large power plants that serve large numbers of relatively affluent consumers or they depend on hefty government subsidies.