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Minigrids – the clean energy revolution across Africa and Asia

The little-known clean energy revolution    https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/the-little-known-clean-energy-revolution/77742430  

There are about 5,500 mini-grids in operation across 12 countries in Africa and Asia, according to The State of the Global Mini-grids Market Report 2020 published by the international non-governmental organization Sustainable Energy for All and BloombergNEF, Bloomberg, August 26, 2020,  
Over the last decade, the number of people in the world without access to electricity has fallen drastically — from 1.4 billion in 2010 to about 900 million in 2018, according to the United Nations. And yet, if current trends persist, the world won’t be able to meet the UN’s sustainable development goal of universal access to electricity by 2030, with as many as 600 million still lacking basic 21st century services.

It doesn’t have to be so. A new technology has matured and become affordable that could help achieve the laudable goal, and it’s called mini-grids.

As the name suggests, mini-grids are small, isolated versions of larger power grids. They increasingly use solar power as an energy source, with support from batteries or diesel generators. Because the cost of solar power has fallen drastically , mini-grids have become much cheaper than installing long-distance transmission lines from a central electricity grid.

There are about 5,500 mini-grids in operation across 12 countries in Africa and Asia, according to The State of the Global Mini-grids Market Report 2020, published by the international non-governmental organization Sustainable Energy for All and BloombergNEF earlier this year. The report’s authors found that mini-grids could meet the needs of half the people who still need access to electricity in those regions.

As the name suggests, mini-grids are small, isolated versions of larger power grids. They increasingly use solar power as an energy source, with support from batteries or diesel generators. Because the cost of solar power has fallen drastically , mini-grids have become much cheaper than installing long-distance transmission lines from a central electricity grid.

There are about 5,500 mini-grids in operation across 12 countries in Africa and Asia, according to The State of the Global Mini-grids Market Report 2020, published by the international non-governmental organization Sustainable Energy for All and BloombergNEF earlier this year. The report’s authors found that mini-grids could meet the needs of half the people who still need access to electricity in those regions.

Universal power access will require $128 billion of spending, the report found, but the world is on track to spend only about $63 billion on mini-grids over the next decade. Plugging the gap would cost less than $600 per target household reached.

The need goes beyond money. “Today the mini-grid market is nascent, despite being the least-cost option for electricity access in many areas,” the report concludes. The international Mini-Grids Partnership, which includes the World Bank and other development agencies from rich countries, has approved $2 billion in awards since 2012 but only disbursed 13% of the money, with many projects stuck because of policy uncertainties.

That’s no surprise. Countries where mini-grids will be most useful, such as in India, Uganda or the Philippines, suffer from corruption, bad policies, weak regulatory enforcement, red tape, or a combination of all four. “Fortunately, a small number of countries are setting up clear frameworks designed to expand the mini-grid market, and are attracting private sector interest,” the report says.
Nigeria is a prime example, says Amar Vasdev, an analyst with BNEF. “Nigeria learned lessons from what worked and what didn’t work in Tanzania and Rwanda.”

Africa’s most populous country struggles to provide electricity to its 200 million people. Only 55% of the country has access to electricity, and even there, people suffer from power cuts lasting between four and 15 hours every day. As a result, the country spends more than $16 billion annually to power diesel generators.

In 2017, the country passed a law to help mini-grid development, which streamlines the online application process, offers $350 in government subsidies per user once grids with more than 30 users are up and running, and provides for compensation if the main power grid eventually arrives in an area served by a mini-grid. Developers in Nigeria now have simpler processes and clearer guidelines to follow.

The upshot is that mini-grids have become a much more attractive investment. “Now you see a lot of companies flocking to Nigeria,” says Ruchi Soni, program manager at Sustainable Energy for All. “We hear from partners that they would like to replicate Nigeria’s success in their country.”

This offshoot of the clean energy revolution has three benefits: mini-grids can help provide access to electricity to those who lack it and do so in a cleaner and cheaper way. Few things in life are win-win-win.

August 31, 2020 Posted by | AFRICA, ASIA, decentralised | Leave a comment

Welcome to the ‘Pyrocene,’ an Epoch of Runaway Fire

Welcome to the ‘Pyrocene,’ an Epoch of Runaway Fire

Fire scholar Stephen J. Pyne proposes a pyrocentric view of the last 10,000 years — and warns that California’s wildfires herald a very combustible future. Bloomberg City Lab By Laura Bliss, August 27, 2020   It isn’t just California that’s burning. This summer, smoke from massive wildfires in Siberia choked skies as far as Alaska and set new pollution records, in a second consecutive year of unprecedented blazes in the Arctic Circle. Rising temperatures, a loss of precipitation, and parched vegetation are hallmarks of climate change, scientists say, as are the increasingly extreme wildfires that result, from the arid Western U.S. to some of coldest places on Earth.

Yet these infernos are but one dimension of a vast human geography of fire. That’s according to Stephen J. Pyne, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and former wildland firefighter with more than 30 books to his name, most of which, as he writes, “make fire a protagonist.” His forthcoming book proposes that the past 10,000-12,000 years — an epoch officially known as the Holocene, starting at the end of the last Ice Age — are coterminous with what he calls the “Pyrocene.” The book, built on a 2015 essay called “The Fire Age” published in Aeon, will summarize how the destiny of Homo sapiens is tied to its habit of burning things.  ……….
If the Pyrocene is our past and present, what does it mean for the future? CityLab spoke with Pyne over the phone on Monday.
Pyne.   ………..looking at things from a fire perspective helps us see how fire is manifesting and how fire, particularly the human use of it, is providing the power source for the Anthropocene.
 Earth is a uniquely fire planet, the only one that we know has had fire ever since it has had terrestrial vegetation.  The manipulation of fire is also unique to humans — no other animal does that. It’s our ecological signature. We underwent a major acceleration when we began burning fossil fuels. When you add up all of the changes that we’re producing, it looks like we’re entering an ice age for fire. From sea level rise, to mass extinctions, to huge shifts in biogeography, add it up and it looks like we’re replacing the ice ages of the Pleistocene with a fire age that I’m calling the Pyrocene.
The quest for fire was always to find things to burn and ways to burn it, and now we’ve got an unbounded amount of combustibles and ways to burn but no place for the effluent to go — it’s overloaded the atmosphere and oceans. So it doesn’t absolve us at all. It lays it right on us, because even climate history is now a subnarrative of a longer fire history, which sees us becoming a geologic force. ……….

We have always had what I call “living landscapes,” which are the ones we live in, with growing stuff and dead stuff on the surface. The fires burning in California right now are fires in living landscapes. Then I offer the term “lithic landscape,” which shows a continuity between us burning in one setting and then another. These are the fossil landscapes buried in the past that we’re now burning in the present, with all kinds of strange interactions that we don’t understand.

In the book, I show how that transition occurred and how it has affected all the landscapes we live in. One example is how fire shapes our ability to sprawl. It used to be that our communities were surrounded by worked agricultural landscapes, which involved  burning fields. That created an environment with buffers around towns [that protected them from wildfires]. Now most of that is gone, and we can go cheek-to-jowl right up against a wildland setting by bringing in food from elsewhere. These communities become landscapes for burning. ………..
We may be in a runaway fire age unless we can shut down our fossil-fuel burning enough to allow the climate to stabilize. As we do that, we also have to manage the landscape better. That doesn’t mean clear-cutting forests. It means thinning. It means the careful manipulation of our landscapes. That also means more controlled burning. Some places we’d do well to burn every year or every few years, others every five to ten. There are areas where we will still have to muster our firefighting capabilities. But right now we have too much of the wrong kind of fire, too little of the right kind of fire, and way too much fossil fuel combustion overall. The paradox is that we need to shut off the burning of fossil fuels, but accelerate the burning of living landscapes.

We can also certainly prevent cities from burning. There is no reason to see them burn like they are. We can shut down the nastier ignition sources like power lines by reinvesting in our grids. We can reimagine how we power our cities: If we had more solar or local power sources, then you would not need [a spread-out electrical grid].

I also think there needs to be a sense of recognition that fire is here to stay, and that we need to work with it in ways that don’t destroy us, or in ways that turn tame fires into feral fires, which is what we have done. Living with fire is an awkward phrase, but it’s true. Unlike Covid-19, there’s no vaccine possible.  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-27/as-wildfires-rage-the-pyrocene-age-is-upon-us?srnd=citylab

August 31, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

The corrosion of radioactive waste disposal canisters based on in situ tests 

The corrosion of radioactive waste disposal canisters based on in situ tests  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012823719900010X,  30 Aug 20, 

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https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-823719-9.00010-X

Abstract

The safe disposal of high-level waste and spent fuel requires the development of disposal canisters with lifetimes of several thousand years. Since iron and copper alloys are the primary canister materials under consideration, corrosion is the main time-dependent degradation mechanism leading to canister failure. In situ corrosion experiments conducted in various underground research laboratories during the past 30–40 years have highlighted the importance of the experimental design, as relatively small differences in design can lead to unexpected phenomena. For example, the importance of confinement in order to decrease microbial activity and achieve low corrosion rates has been shown repeatedly. Furthermore, in situ corrosion experiments have provided insight to repository design and optimization that would not have been possible if the tests were not done in the actual host rock. On the other hand, in order to maximize the usefulness of the obtained results, corrosion-specific experiments with well-defined exposure conditions are needed

August 31, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, safety | Leave a comment

Response plan for nuclear emergencies in Castilla-La Mancha

  • There is now a response plan for nuclear emergencies in Castilla-La Mancha, the Regional Government in this part of Spain wants to be proactive AUGUST 30, 2020 
  •  TZVETOZAR VINCENT IOLOV   Yesterday the official website of the Government of Castilla-La Mancha informed citizens that its representatives had signed an agreement with the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) of Spain giving the basics for an emergency response plan in the case of nuclear and radiation incidents. This agreement, which has already been published in the autonomous community’s official gazette, will have a validity of four years………… HTTPS://WWW.THEMAYOR.EU/EN/THERE-IS-NOW-A-RESPONSE-PLAN-FOR-NUCLEAR-EMERGENCIES-IN-CASTILLA-LA-MANCHA

August 31, 2020 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear plant operator appointed as director of schools facilities

Schools officials have named Christina Renaud, a licensed nuclear plant operator, to take over as director of facilities next month. 30 Aug 20 …….

Schools officials have named Christina Renaud, a licensed nuclear plant operator, to take over as director of facilities next month. Renaud, a Manomet resident, will succeed Arthur Montrond, who retires after 34 years of service to the district Sept. 25. …….https://plymouth.wickedlocal.com/news/20200830/nuclear-reactor-operator-named-to-take-over-as-plymouth-schools-facilities-director

August 31, 2020 Posted by | general | Leave a comment

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