Tensions in large-scale rollouts of clean energy
What can we learn from Ethiopia's experiences?
Ethiopia. Africa’s second most populous country and on a self-declared Renaissance path. Historical home to some of the earliest Christian communities, Black Jews, and the object of anti-colonial, millenarian 🎵 hope in the Caribbean islands.
But Ethiopia’s recent history has been complicated to say the least.
Decades of armed struggle against an authoritarian regime since the 1970s.
A developmentalist regime whose infrastructural projects have fuelled strong economic growth, but which has allowed few political freedoms since the 1990s.
War with Eritrea and the continued militarization of society.
Transfer of power in 2018, new civic freedoms and peace with Eritrea.
Last year though, it seems like the transfer of power was not a change in regime but merely a changing of the guard, as terrible violence has erupted last year in a conflict with the forces of the party that was ousted from power and the government is clamping down on civil liberties again, declaring a state of emergency, and cutting of communication networks.
I’ve been wanting to find out what all of this has meant for the country’s switch to renewable sources of energy. I can’t say much about how political rivalries and armed conflict impacted the switch, but it does seem like the strong centralist state creates not just political tension but also contradictions in the effort to bring access to clean, reliable and affordable power to the whole country.
Read on to learn more, but a first a message from yours truly.
Welcome back to the Social Life of Energy! Also a warm welcome to all those who were invited by your friends and colleagues this past fortnight. This newsletter hopes to help shift the debate about zero carbon energy away from “technological challenges” to social challenges (and opportunities!). If you like what you read, please continue to spread the message.
I do like to keep the letters somewhat geographically and topically diverse, because 1) we learn by comparison and contrast. Creativity and innovation is putting together two things that were hitherto separate (my task is the easy one here – I just have to show you different things; you’ll have to put them together. But you can do it!); and 2) in so far as global warming is, well, global, we better develop some global wisdom.
Speaking of which, this newsletter has sorely neglected East Asia, so if that’s your thing and you’d like to contribute a post, get in touch!
So far for my public service announcement, back to Ethiopia. Here are some things that I learned:
Global warming doesn’t mean everybody’s contributing equally or suffering from the consequence equally. It doesn’t even mean that every place is warming equally. Such is the case for the Horn of Africa as well.
These authors predict at least 0.5 °C higher temperatures in 1.5-2 °C warming scenarios, leading to more drought. Ethiopia, in other words, has an immediate and existential stake in making sure climate warming stays ‘under control’.
So, what’s happening in the country to get away from carbon emissions?
Rural households spend a lot on biomass (wood) to cook. It’s their main energy need. Now, as you probably know, Ethiopia is building the biggest damn dam that the African continent has seen: the Grand Renaissance Dam.
Problem solved, you say? Well, not so fast, because all that electricity needs to find its way to rural households and the infrastructure isn’t there yet. Moreover, electric cooking appliances are super expensive in rural areas, so most people wouldn’t even be able to take advantage of it.
So the dam is a bit too grand for the moment, but, I hear you object, Ethiopia’s also got a lot of sun. How about some small-scale (off-grid) solar? Well, yes, that can be put to use for things like lighting. For example, this study finds that on the whole, people are pretty happy with the PicoPV system, as it increases the things a family can do at night, without the deleterious effects of the kerosene lamp. However, again, in a rich man’s world, the market for the bottom of the pyramid is poorly developed – with a “lack of after-sales maintenance services, and limited access to credit financing sources.” (You can read about the dynamics of off-grid PV capitalism in this here newsletter too.)
That still leaves us with the problem that PV electricity can’t actually be put to use in the most crucial of cultural domains: transforming the raw into the cooked 🎶. To its credit, Ethiopia has a strong biogas promotion program (since 2009) to at least get people off that noxious firewood. It helped standardize the domestic biogas plants and coordinate the distribution (about 7000 of them in the first four years).
Such a program was necessary, because biogas technology suffers from a bad rep from subpar installations. Also, community digesters tend to fail because they don’t offer financial rewards for people bringing in dung. (Compare with small-scale, communal hydro in this early SLE edition.) Still, as with the PV: (government) credit and after-sales support (or “community-workshops”, depending on your creed) are crucial for further uptake.
But it’s never simple. Biomass for energy might compete with food crops. So we need some way to untangling these different interests and impacts. An approach that’s been making waves in the environmental policy literature recently (though mostly in the development space) is nexus thinking. It’s like intersectionality, but for things. In this case, we are talking about the food-energy-environment nexus. These authors are making nexus-type insights actionable, by combining data, scenario tools and participatory planning to generate Solomon’s wisdom.
Nexus workshops can’t erase power differences though: agricultural intensification in Ethiopia (and thus intensification of energy demand) relies on “smallholder commercialization”, on the one hand, and “large-scale corporate agriculture”, on the other. The first drives economic insecurity (farmers always draw the short end of the stick that is modernization) and the second dispossession of communal land. Neither is conducive to Solomonian equanimity.
One simple consequence of complexity is that before you can roll out a standardized policy or technology, you need a lot of tailoring. The tailoring makes the initial policy and the niche technology successful in specific places, slowly equalizing the institutional and social field. Only then, it’s possible to “scale up” massively. (You can speed up this process by institutionalizing cross-site learning.)
In the case of Ethiopia, that means electrification strategies should depend on things like existing infrastructure, economy, population density, and fuel costs in each locality. These authors suggest geospatial tools can help shape those tailored strategies.Lists of urging policymakers to consider issues holistically get very long very quickly. Thus, it’s easier to advance an SDG if you see it in conjunction (“synergy”) with other SDGs; the effect of private climate finance depends on how it interacts with other – state-led – financial instruments; the success of Community Forest management schemes depends on how much a community relies on the forest.
I did my share to #PlantMyPrint and leave a #GreenLegacyEthiopia 💪🏼🇪🇹 Such an exciting campaign that went beyond expected! Well done #Ethiopia on breaking the record of planting over 353 million trees in just a day!Speaking of forests, in the early 20th century, about one-third of Ethiopia was covered in forests, according to historical estimates, but that had dropped to just 4 percent by 2000 (NYT). Planting campaigns seek to redress that.
All of these examples show one more important nexus: the equality-climate nexus (I just made this up). Inequality is bad for the environment.
Let me circle back to where I started this overview: the grand dam. Daniel Mains, in his book Under Construction, argues that the Ethiopian state makes its claims to legitimacy though grand or spectacular infrastructure. (Such investments are also about the power of the central state in particular, and can thus also be linked the recent war in the north of country, where the former party-in-power is rallying around the flag of regional autonomy.) But it is also difficult for these big projects to deliver on their promises. The dam might generate enough power for the whole of Ethiopia, but how to get it there? The urban light rail is cool, but crowded and an (expensive) drop in the bucket. Many projects never finish. The unrest that brought the current President to power is testimony to the uneven effects of infrastructural development. And those uneven effects are inescapable.
So, small is beautiful? Well, yes. But. You can’t deny the civic enthusiasm that the grand evokes. In fact, the relative success of the Sunrise Movement’s Green New Deal type politics to mobilize people is premised on a similar promise: Invest Big and We’ll Get There. We need that kind of civic enthusiasm. (And who’s going to say they’re wrong? OK, maybe Degrowth advocates. For economically viable, wholesale infrastructural change there’s not a lot of options, though.)
But, but. Some caution about national states going all out: democracy and legitimacy are made locally – as is successful change. Striking the balance between sweeping change and local accountability is not going to be easy. In the Netherlands, for example, where privatization-by-decentralization has made a mess of things, I’m not entirely sure how one would recalibrate levels of governance, so they can extend each other’s work where possible and provide counterweight where necessary.
Messy it is going to be – but see here for my attempt to simulate a clear overview of what specific levels of government can do best.
For now, fare thee well. This week’s edition was a bit of an experiment to see if I could speed up the writing process in order to maintain the biweekly rhythm. If you didn’t like it, please file a complaint. If you think you could do better, please suggest a topic. If you did like it, please ♥ the letter.
Take care!
Marten