[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," we'll talk about how to power and empower billions of people in developing nations.

- I think we have to recognize the heterogeneity among poor countries, and the rates at which they're progressing towards becoming big emitters.

Africa isn't there yet.

And putting too much emphasis on climate as a priority in Africa is a mistake.

We need to focus on access.

- Look, the growth is going to come whether organically or by design.

The question is, how can you nudge it in directions that are gonna be really beneficial for people as well as for the planet and society as a whole.

We can't spend the next seven or eight years figuring out how we are going to do this.

We have to start doing this now.

[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," how can we power the developing world?

[Announcer] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

And by EarthX, an international nonprofit working towards a more sustainable future.

See more at earthx.org.

- I'm Scott Tinker and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn and illuminate and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Today, three quarters of the world's population, that's six billion people, don't have access to reliable, affordable energy.

One billion don't have any modern energy at all, and get all their energy from burning wood, straw or dung.

Lack of energy makes their lives difficult, unhealthy and short.

We'll talk about how they could get clean cooking fuels, electricity, and other basic energy services with my expert guests, Ashvin Dayal.

He's the senior vice president for power and climate, and the Global Energy Alliance for people in the planet at the Rockefeller Foundation.

He's joined by Dr.

Rob Stoner.

He's the deputy director for science and technology at the MIT Energy initiative.

Before that, as CEO of the Clinton Development Initiative, he lived in Africa and India working to increase energy access.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," How Do We Power the Developing World?

Let's talk about the state of energy as it exists today and some of the developing and emerging areas, India, Africa, Latin America.

What are the big areas that energy is needed in these emerging and developing economies?

- Well, the first thing you have to do is provide for people's actual needs in their daily lives.

We're talking about electricity for lighting and cell phone charging and so on.

But the big energy consumer is cooking.

And yet the vast majority of energy in Africa, certainly in much of India, is biomass.

People burning sticks and dung.

And then transportation.

And that the fuel for those cars in many cases is a big drag on the economy, because many of them don't-- although they may produce oil locally, they don't refine it locally.

And so this becomes a balance of trade issue.

- Sure.

- And is very significant.

So they need another path for transportation.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So electricity, cooking, transportation.

- I mean, it's hard to generalize about developing and emerging economies, but the entire residential sector is gonna be a big growth area because people inside their homes are trying to consume more.

Just take cooling as an example of that.

You've then got all of the industrial economy and manufacturing that is growing, again, differently in different economies, but it's a huge energy needs.

Let's not forget the agricultural sector as a massive consumer of energy.

And these are economies often that are still 70, 80% of their GDP is coming out of agriculture.

And then of course you've got transportation at a individual or household level, but you've got public transport, mass transit.

There's massive amounts of infrastructure investment that these economies are wanting to make over the next 10, 15, 20 years.

So you add all of that together and, yeah, demand, it is a huge- - Everything we take for granted.

- Exactly.

- Let's dive into these topics.

I mean, each one of them has issues and things but let's talk about electricity.

For those of us who came through last century, UK, Germany, us, China's doing that, India, but other people too.

A lot of Southeast Asia, that's been coal.

How do we do it?

- But the power the power system is more than generation.

Generation's important.

- Correct.

- But you've gotta move the power you generate to cities where the loads are and you've gotta distribute it within the city.

So there's this sort of generation-transmission- distribution sequence, and the whole thing has to work or nothing happens.

It's a distribution where the power system over there meets the guys who have to pay, and they're sensitive to price.

The power companies are usually asked to provide power to more of them than they can reasonably provide power to.

And that means that they're short on revenues and they can't maintain the lines and reliability suffers.

And then you get angry customers at the end of the line.

So they get into a spiral.

And that's a big problem in all of the electricity systems.

I would say it's common to electricity throughout the world.

- And it's a political subject, right?

In poor countries where people can't afford a lot of power, governments are reluctant to price electricity in a way that is both affordable on the one hand, but also allows the utility to recoup and operate on a profitable or at least on a sustainable basis.

So Rob's exactly right.

The generation challenge in several of these economies has been solved because governments are providing guarantees and PPAs, et cetera, and underwriting the off-taker.

But this question of the last mile utility distribution question is politically not being challenged.

In sub-Saharan Africa, there are only two profitable utilities.

So this tells you the story.

In India, in many distribution companies, every unit of electricity they sell, they're actually losing money on it.

So it's actually a disincentive to add a customer who's a low consuming customer.

- Right.

Right.

- So we need a massive wave of reform in the distribution sector in order to then have the positive benefits upstream into transmission and generation.

Until you have that, we won't be able to change the energy mix.

- We've talked about the challenges on the distribution end, the last mile and the economics of that and the realities that come upstream, making it.

Africa is building a lot of dams, hydro, and in Latin America and South America, does India have optionality there?

- Yeah.

And India has had a significant number of large hydro dams.

Look, they don't come without complications.

There's massive social dislocation issues around that.

- Yeah, sure.

- There's a lot of potential with smaller hydro actually.

Microhydro, there's some new turbine technology that's coming through that could be very exciting and actually quite applicable in some of the economies we are talking about.

And even places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, you're seeing run of the river, I mean, smaller scale hydro systems that could be very effective.

- Partnering with solar and wind to provide the reliability.

- Exactly.

The challenge with large hydro now comes back to the question of climate change.

And actually we're seeing now the water levels in dams, et cetera, being affected.

So there is that risk that has to be factored in.

So I think looking at smaller hydro is something that we should actually do a lot more of.

- It's a huge undeveloped resource in Africa especially.

And Africa, sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa is still majority hydro.

They've got other stuff.

They got effectively no coal.

So the forward trajectory, if the past is a guide, is that Africa will not be coal dependent or major coal consumer.

- But we need to talk about diesel as well though, because my big worry is that the alternative to inefficient electrification systems is that the world is relying heavily on diesel, highly inefficient small scale systems.

Take Nigeria, if I have my numbers correct, there is something like about 45 to 50 gigawatts of diesel operating in that country against a grid that is only evacuating about six.

I mean, that is probably one of the least efficient ways of powering your economy that I can possibly- - Well, the Middle East burns a lot of oil and natural gas to do a variety of things from power to desal and the whole-- What about geothermal?

Africa has geothermal potential.

We look in- - Kenya has- - Kenya has continued to develop its assets around Olkaria and they're important, but rather limited geographically.

Ethiopia has, for many years, developed geothermal resources and run into reliability problems over time because of poor maintenance.

Those things can clearly be fixed.

I think geothermal's great, but I don't think it's a panacea.

- If you have it.

- If you have it.

Exactly.

- Yeah, it's a piece.

- It's a really risky thing to develop because you've got to do a lot of drilling.

And drilling is expensive.

And your odds of coming up with a resource that's adequate are not high.

- Firm power, I mean, base load or dispatchable firm power, coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, geothermal.

You need some of that.

We can't do it all.

I mean, let's talk about solar and wind.

First, electricity is a panel on the roof usually, right?

What's the benefit of that?

- It's transformational, right?

You think about it.

You are in a market place in a small rural setting, it's six o'clock, it's dark.

If you don't have good quality lighting, the economy starts to sort of go to sleep for the day.

You have it, it stays open another two or three hours more of commerce taking place in that environment.

If I'm a carpenter, I'm using manual tools.

All of a sudden I'm able to bring in a mechanized tool into my workshop.

I'm hiring two or three other people.

And these are things that I've seen personally over the last 10, 15 years of working on these distributed renewable energy systems.

Not because they're renewable, but because they work for those people in those economies, in those places where the grid is actually absent or completely unreliable.

- And because it's local and it's fit for purpose, it lasts.

- It lasts and it will grow.

And people's aspirations change.

And so-- We are always talking about it as planners as sort of like, people can't afford or people-- there isn't the economy and you are absolutely right.

But you also have to light the spark somewhere.

And you have to sort of create a bit of that bottom-up opportunity.

- So let's just talk briefly about batteries.

They're getting better, the technology, they're getting more affordable.

- The issue that I think we must talk about with storage is also the need for these sort of system integrators in the markets that we are talking about, that can actually deploy these technologies.

The sort of applied innovation side of all of this is really, really important.

It's one thing to say, "The global price of lithium ion is this."

It's another to say, "Well, what does it cost to land it in rural Nigeria?"

And that's where we need more international support and more cooperation around things like pooled procurement, for example, how do you get these small systems to actually come together?

Because any one developer trying to put in a 200 kilowatt system in one village, I mean, for them the price is three or four x what we are seeing in global markets.

We need governments to not run microgrids and off-grid solutions that use storage, but to at least regulate and support it in a way that you need these systems to be integrated.

Not sort of fly-by-night operators building a microgrid here and then disappearing five years later.

We don't want that.

Nobody wants that.

But it needs to be a regulated sector.

- So we've talked a lot about electricity, all these systems.

How do we do all that and then still being mindful of environmental impacts?

There's tension sometimes between lower emissions things that consume a lot of land, or that challenge water systems.

- Including by the way, solar and wind.

They're very visible.

They're very visible now in some places where we're still at a very low level of penetration.

I find it a little bit worrisome to think that we're seriously talking about having an all solar-wind-battery kind of electrical system.

I mean, I'm afraid that by the time you get anywhere close to that, the public backlash makes nuclear look attractive.

- The environmental backlash.

- Yes, I mean, that's a lot of land you're consuming.

And no land is wasted land.

So we have to keep on innovating.

And I look at these as all stages along the path toward better and lower emitting and more energy dense technologies over time.

- These are massive challenges.

We are struggling to figure this out in the US and in Europe.

What do you expect Nigeria to do?

Think about just being an energy regulator in Africa and you are basically working on a 20th century model.

And now we are talking about getting to net zero.

All over countries right now they're being asked like, "Tell us your plan.

How you gonna do it?"

They don't know.

So there's just an enormous amount of support needed, because they need to know that the energy transition concept is one that is also about economic development.

And about meeting those aspirations around affordability, reliability, all of that.

If it's going to be sort of a dogmatic push towards only optimizing for decarbonization, it's not gonna work for those societies.

- Yeah, yeah, it's not simple, but it's solvable.

But it's only solvable if we recognize it's not simple.

- Well, we all have to be in the game, I think.

We have a lot to contribute as advanced economies to that discussion and activity, but really can't be top-down.

[Scott] It's a tough problem.

[Rob] It's very hard, yeah.

- Let's talk about cooking.

It's a giant challenge.

Kills two to three million people a year breathing indoor smoke.

How many people cook this way?

Why?

And let's start to think about and talk about what are the options for them?

- It's at hand, right?

If you can go out and you can cut down a tree or find a branch or collect dung as often happens, and burn it.

And that is a quick and very inexpensive way.

Usually free to provide energy for cooking in rural areas.

The same sort of biomass source of wood is often used in cities as well, but usually in the form of charcoal.

In fact, its cheapness and ubiquity mean that it persists.

So if you look at electricity access over the last 20 years, we've made tremendous progress globally.

Access to modern cooking fuels has basically just sat there for 20 years, hasn't gone anywhere.

And there has been a lot of initiative by governments to try to prevent that from happening by moving toward liquified petroleum gas, LPG.

- The other thing is that the collection burden for all of this and the time burden for all this, disproportionately falls on on women.

So there's a huge social inequity issue around dirty forms of cooking.

I think the LPG option that was very widely promoted in India has been a huge improvement.

That there are affordability challenges there, because replacing those gas cylinders, as they'll called, is expensive.

And they've been reducing subsidies on that because governments can't afford to keep bankrolling these things.

So there is that significant challenge.

I think we have to do-- There's a lot more we can do on electric cooking.

The technologies are so much improved now compared to the first generations that were being tried.

I feel like now we are getting to a point where the technology really is ready to be scaled up.

There's gonna be some other things needed.

These systems, even $30, $40, $50 systems, that's a lot of money for a poor family.

So how do we make the financing?

We have to turn it into a consumer product in order to actually make the product affordable for people to be able to make it an easy purchase, not something that they have to actually really think deeply about.

It also could become a real win-win synergy with trying to create the load that's needed to make electricity systems more viable.

- Because it just stabilizes the grid- - It creates demand.

It creates predictable demand.

So it allows a developer, whether it's an off grid, mini-grid developer or a utility to have that much more assured load on their system, which would help with the economics of the grid itself.

- Biogas, how's that looking?

It seems like a pretty reasonable solution particularly in rural areas.

- Biomass, you make it by taking biomass and letting it decompose, but, yeah, it's readily available everywhere, everywhere there's waste.

It gives you a locally produced source of gas that may require capital subsidy from the government to enable people to build a system that will do this and distribute the energy.

- Initial upfront investment.

- But from then on, it doesn't cost anything.

So very attractive.

I think Ashvin you'll know better, but this has been practiced in India for many, many years successfully.

- Yeah, yeah.

No, it has.

I think we are getting to a point where the technologies are getting much more efficient, and you're also seeing some sort of commercial players come into this space in terms of biogas, bio-CNG, et cetera.

And it has deal benefits.

If you think about it back to the conversation we were having about distributed renewable electrification and solar and the role of storage.

If you're running a mini-grid, you have some options for your base load and your evening load, et cetera.

And that's storage or diesel, and now increasingly, biogas.

I think there's a huge amount of potential there.

And it feels like we're on the cusp of something that could actually really be quite powerful.

- New topic.

Transportation.

How are these emerging and developing economies gonna move themselves around?

What are some of the options there?

- Look, the growth is going to come whether organically or by design.

The question is, how can you nudge it in directions that are gonna be really beneficial for people as well as for the planet and society as a whole?

I think the whole EV conversation is one that is taking off.

I think it has some challenges because there's all of the challenges with having an electric vehicle ecosystem that goes with it.

But it's quite interesting to see what's happening with sort of bottom-up.

Again, bottom-up innovation on things like two-wheeler and three-wheeler electric vehicle transport, startups in countries like Kenya and Uganda, et cetera, that are renting vehicle services, commercial transport services that are all electrified.

So it's exciting what's happening.

My concern though is that there may be some inefficiencies that are kind of coming into this because there isn't enough thinking about sort of integrated transport and mobility.

- Let's think about increasingly heavy transport, things that don't work as well on batteries 'cause you're basically hauling batteries.

How does that look?

- Well, it's all diesel right now, is the way it looks.

That's very hard to electrify.

But you can imagine the infrastructure you have to have on highways to move that much power around.

So they're not gonna electrify soon.

They're not gonna, I don't think, convert to hydrogen anytime soon.

I mean, having the fuel cell is one thing, but getting the hydrogen, making the hydrogen, moving it around is so expensive infrastructure-wise.

- And many of these countries though there's a certain amount of needing to walk before they can run.

We didn't talk about just basic electrified rail transportation for goods and freight, et cetera, which I think is something that there's been a massive underinvestment in.

If we want to talk about-- there's other parts of the transportation system that are just gonna be harder to decarbonize.

And so again, it's all about getting your overall mix sorted out, accepting that there's gonna be some trade offs there.

- Interesting.

Real quickly on heat, how do emerging and developing economies produce heat?

And not just for home, but I'm talking more industrial as they start to-- how does that happen?

- Coal and gas.

- That's one for Rob.

- Coal and gas.

Right.

Now it's coal and gas.

- Those are tough sectors.

- They're tough sectors, but again, I think we sort of get stuck in this mode of thinking that the world is gonna be all windmills and solar panels in the future.

And there's gonna be thermal generation.

And the question is, what's the fuel?

And how does it get cleaned up?

Hydrogen is a real option.

They're also interesting ideas like co-firing coal and gas with hydrogen carriers.

Ammonia being one where in addition to feeding natural gas into a turbine, you're feeding ammonia and the hydrogen is coming off the nitrogen.

You're capturing the NOx that also unfortunately is produced, so that it doesn't go out atmosphere as well.

- But you're not producing the CO2- - You're not producing as much CO2 because you're diluting it with a different fuel.

So those sorts of things are being seriously explored as options and could happen relatively quickly.

- Right.

Right.

- You have a chance to have somebody take away a couple things as they're listening to this.

What are the most important points to remember about empowering and powering the developing world?

What do I need to know?

- I have a very strong conviction that there's a lot of headroom for technology and that we have to really continue to act on the pressure to innovate, and that we can get a long, long way in creating economic opportunities to decarbonize and to expand access.

So definitely innovation.

I think the other thing to recognize is that we have an ethical responsibility to make funding available as well as that technology, to enable governments to develop policy that creates economic activity and development that benefits everyone.

Third, I think we have to recognize the heterogeneity among poor countries, and the rates at which they're progressing towards becoming big emitters and climate challenges.

Africa isn't there yet.

And putting too much emphasis on climate as a priority in Africa is a mistake.

We need to focus on access.

And we really need to eliminate electricity poverty within the coming decade.

It won't happen without a massive effort.

It won't happen without a rational approach to resource use.

And it won't happen without rational policy.

But all those things are very doable.

[Scott] Right.

Right.

Right.

- So I think for me, there is no future that is inclusive, that is jobs rich, that creates opportunities and upward mobility for close to a billion people without a serious global effort on ending energy poverty.

And the second thing is, the climate crisis that we face or will face in more acute forms in the future is real.

It also cannot be wished away by action only in rich countries.

That the challenge we have with a massively growing emerging world is that we have to find a way of enabling that growth, as well as enabling a transition and a level of decarbonization.

And that is a complex balancing act.

And I think the third is, we just need a massive, massive increase in a global commitment to action.

Sort of thing Rob is talking about from a moral imperative around this that requires rich countries, developing country governments, investors, philanthropies, development banks, the private sector to actually come together in a much, much more authentic and serious way and say, "We can actually create a pipeline of action."

Because ultimately it's action on the ground that is gonna change things.

And that's where we have a fairly narrow window.

We can't spend the next seven or eight years figuring out how we are going to do this.

We have to start doing this now.

- I appreciate your sharing your insights and being here with us today.

- Oh, thank you very much, Scott.

Yeah, pleasure.

- Thanks for having us.

[Scott] Today, electricity in the developing world comes mainly from coal and hydro.

They're getting more wind and particularly solar, which can provide transformational first electricity but are less good at powering commerce.

They can be backed up by batteries, though these are expensive and difficult to deploy.

In the end, we'll need to expand the grid.

But this is hard when end consumers can't pay, and utilities are often bankrupt.

Still, there has been progress in electricity while dirty cooking fuels remain entrenched.

Indoor smoke kills three million people per year, mostly women.

LPG, biogas and electricity are cleaner options, but they're making slow progress.

Liquid fuels for heavy transport and heat for industry will also be challenging.

Our work in this area shows that reducing energy poverty, especially increasing electricity access, while helping poor nations grow on a lower emission trajectory, is key to the health of our entire global society.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Announcer] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

And by EarthX, an international nonprofit working towards a more sustainable future.

See more at earthx.org.