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48 MICROPOWER: THE NEXT ELECTRICAL ERA and island regions. The off-grid systems also offer a viable alter- native for a range of critical village tasks, such as ice making; water desalination, purification, and pumping; and the opera- tion of rural schools, police stations, and health clinics. They can, in addition, be used individually in homes or serve tens or hundreds of users through village “minigrids.”106 The sustainable small-scale power options include retrofitting diesel generators to use biomass and other fuels, using diesel/wind hybrids, or using biomass in Stirling engines. Village-scale microturbines burning gasified bio- mass can reduce the unhealthful use of biomass for cooking, on which 2 billion people remain dependent. Excess corn stalks can be “trigenerated” by gasifying the corn to generate heat for district heating, cooking gas, and electricity, and the excess power can be sold to the utility grid and delivered to other villages. These options are particularly attractive in remote regions or small islands where imports are expensive. Microhydro systems can provide timely and reliable rural power, provided the water is stored in upper reservoirs. China alone has about 60,000 small hydropower stations, totaling roughly 17,000 megawatts or one fifth of overall rural electricity use.107 Existing small-scale applications provide a glimpse of their potential. (See Table 9.) Solar home systems now serve more than half a million households in China, the Dominican Republic, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Wind power has begun to spread in China’s Inner Mongolia region and in several Indian provinces.108 These rapid advances suggest that rural and urban regions of the developing world may “leapfrog” to the new downsized power technologies, much as some have moved directly to cell phones and beepers, bypassing the stationary systems and their expensive distribution networks. Where power lines are unlikely, so are phone lines; small-scale sys- tems are thus well suited to powering radios, televisions, and computers. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are working to promote solar-powered telecenters in west central India and Uganda. The Solar Electric Light Fund is attempt- ELECTRIFYING THE POWERLESS 49 TABLE 9 Small-Scale Power Applications, Selected Developing Countries China Dominican Republic India Indonesia Kenya Mexico South Africa Zimbabwe Over 150,000 small-scale wind turbines operating; more than 500,000 people served. More than 200,000 solar home systems installed. Over 9,000 solar home systems installed. An estimated 1,095 megawatts of wind power capacity installed. More than 70,000 solar home systems installed. Over 20,000 solar home systems installed. More than 100,000 solar PV systems installed (over 200,000 people served). Over 40,000 solar home systems installed. An estimated 50,000 solar PV systems in place, including in 1,300 rural schools, 400 rural health clinics, and 2,000–4,000 water-pumping systems; more than 84,000 PV modules ordered for wireless rural phone systems. 13,000 solar systems installed in rural homes, schools, and clinics; 70 local design and installation companies in business. Source: See endnote 108. ing to link solar-powered computers in South African schools via satellite to the Internet.109 South Africa has big small-scale plans of its own. Since 1994, the national utility Eskom has electrified 1.8 million rural homes through a grid extension campaign. Electricity costs, however, have been high, forcing many to revert to biomass during the winter. Meanwhile, 1 to 2 million house- holds are too far from existing grids to be reached by the pro- gram. While PV systems have been widely installed inPDF Image | Micropower: The Next Electrical Era
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