Unreasonable Impact | Modern Energy Could Mean the Difference Between Peace and Unrest
by Jigar Shah
Originally posted on Unreasonable Impact, created with Barclays
When we think about the things we take for granted, one of the most common is access to basic energy. Turning on a lamp so you can teach your children how to read, watching the evening news, or working into the night on your computer are all basic acts that most of us don’t even consider to be a privilege. Over 500 million people have a mobile phone without a place to charge it at home – a basic convenience needed to conduct commerce.
For 1.2 billion people around the world, though, basic energy has been provided by subsidized kerosene or the deforestation of the world around them. Even though we still have a lot of work to do to reach this population, energy – especially renewables – continues to attract more attention and spark debate on the global political stage.
One of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals developed by the United Nations in 2015 is dedicated to ensuring “access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” by 2030; it also specifically aims to “increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.”
From the UN’s perspective, reaching a basic level of electricity is essential to meeting the other Sustainable Development Goals. In fact, the cost of providing a basic solar lantern has gotten so cheap that the global kerosene subsidy budget alone could provide every family basic electricity by 2020. Turns out that solar is the easiest and most affordable to provide. The good news is we have the technology we need to make a massive dent in this problem; we just have to bypass the kerosene subsidy proponents to reach scale.
