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Assessing the Successes and Failures of Decentralized Energy Solutions and Implications for the Water-Energy-Food Security Nexus: Case Studies from Developing Countries
By Dawit Diriba Guta Dawit Diriba Guta Scilit Preprints.org Google Scholar 1, Jose Jara Jose Jara Scilit Preprints.org Google Scholar 2, Narayan Prasad Adhikari Narayan Prasad Adhikari Scilit Preprints.org Google Scholar 3, Qiu Chen Qiu Chen Scilit Google Preprints. Scholar 2, Varun Gaur Varun Gaur Scilit Preprints.org Google Scholar 2 and Alisher Mirzabaev Alisher Mirzabaev Scilit Preprints.org Google Scholar 2, *
Received: March 30, 2017 / Revised: June 15, 2017 / Accepted: June 20, 2017 / Published: June 30, 2017
Access to reliable and affordable energy is essential for sustainable development. In the off-grid areas of developing countries, decentralized energy solutions have gained more and more attention due to their contributions to reducing poverty. However, most of the rural population in many developing countries still have little or no access to modern energy technologies. This paper assesses the factors that determine the successes and failures of decentralized energy solutions based on local harmonized case studies from heterogeneous contexts from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and South America. The case studies were analyzed through the linked lenses of energy transition and the Water-Energy-Food Security (WEF) Nexus. The findings indicate that access to modern decentralized energy solutions did not result in full energy transitions due to various trade-offs with the other domains of the WEF Nexus. On the other hand, the case studies point to the potential for improvements in food security, income, health, the empowerment of women, and conservation of resources if synergies between decentralized energy solutions and other components of the WEF Nexus are present.
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Access to modern, affordable energy services, which include access to electricity and clean cooking technologies, is one of the necessary inputs for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Today, more than 1.3 billion people still do not have access to electricity, and 2.6 billion people are without clean cooking technologies [1]. A lack of clean, affordable and renewable energy is linked to household and community well-being in multiple ways [2]. For example, many low-income and off-grid households in developing countries rely on traditional biomass for their energy needs [3]. Several studies find that this is often associated with women's busy work, the withdrawal of children from school, health risks from indoor air pollution, deforestation, soil erosion, and a loss of biodiversity and related negative impacts on ecology and food security (for example, a trade-off between food production and firewood collection in terms of family labor allocation) [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].
Despite recent improvements in electrification, and expanded access to more efficient cooking fuels in developing regions, energy access still remains a pressing problem [10], especially in the rural areas of developing countries [1]. In this context, decentralized energy solutions (DES) can significantly contribute to universal access to modern energy services. However, the adoption of modern DES by rural households and communities in developing countries is mostly limited due to upfront costs, a lack of financing opportunities, and a lack of technical capabilities [ 11 ]. DES are local transformations of renewable sources (wind, solar radiation, biomass, and small hydropower) into electricity or thermal energy. Although DES can vary in scale, the focus of this paper is on small-scale DES used at the level of households and communities.
Achieving SDGs requires the availability of adequate energy beyond residential energy use, including for the needs of community institutions such as health centers, schools, and for operating water services, and telephone and Internet communications. However, a lack of modern energy services is only part of the problem for achieving SDGs, as rural households and communities also face water and food security challenges. This, combined with exponential population growth and increasing pressure on natural resources, requires policy actions that promote a more efficient use of these scarce resources [ 4 , 12 , 13 ]. Consequently, an improved understanding of DES in the framework of the Water-Energy-Food Security (WEF) Nexus can provide an innovative and more comprehensive insight into the role of modern energy services, and can lead to new solutions for sustainable development [ 5 , 12 , 13, 14].
Although many studies have evaluated the successes and failures of DES, most have focused on isolated aspects and missed important interlinkages along the dimensions of the WEF Nexus. Many studies have tried to evaluate the performance of DES by focusing on a certain community (geography), on one energy technology, and only on "socio-economic", "socio-technological", or "ecological technology" aspects [11, 15]. Therefore, in the face of complex challenges, in order to achieve positive effects such as poverty reduction, the empowerment of women, improved food security, human and environmental health, and to meet long-term sustainability, DES should be perceived as an integral part of the WEF Nexus [5, 14, 16]. However, both previous research, as well as policy and development interventions, have overlooked the critical links of DES in the WEF Nexus framework. These links must be adequately integrated into energy policy designs to support rural development.
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There are two gaps in the literature that served as motivation for this study. First, to date there have been only a small number of cross-country studies on the failures and successes of DES in developing countries. Second, DES is an important component of the WEF Nexus, but little is known about the barriers and incentives for DES in relation to the other components of the WEF Nexus.
Therefore, this paper attempts to answer two research questions. The first is: what are the water and food restrictions of (selected) DES? The second is: what are the incentives and obstacles to the successful adoption of DES under the WEF Nexus?
It is widely recognized that the water, energy and food sectors have strong linkages and interdependencies [12]. To illustrate, energy is used in agricultural production for irrigation, water pumping, mechanized agriculture, and post-harvest processing and transportation [ 17 ]. The water and energy footprints of food production were found to be significant at all scales (local, national and global) [18]. Besides, poor agricultural practices (leading to soil erosion or deforestation) were found to negatively affect the availability and quality of water resources [6, 17]. Energy and food production activities also compete for land and water resources, which, as a result, can lead to food-fuel tradeoffs. At the same time, DES plays an important role in water purification and addressing problems with clean water availability in the remote communities of developing countries. However, there are a number of challenges related to the use of modern DES, such as limited local capacity (e.g., a lack of skilled labor), a lack of spare parts, high upfront costs, inappropriate designs, and other socioeconomic factors [19 ]. Policy actions are needed to jointly address the challenges of climate change, sustainable management of natural resources, access to energy, and improving agricultural productivity [20], and to support investments in technologies to improve water productivity and agricultural efficiency energy use [19]. Therefore, a joint solution for exploiting the synergies and reducing the risks of trade-offs of DES within the WEF Nexus is necessary, as ignoring the interconnectedness of DES and the overall WEF Nexus can lead to suboptimal outcomes [21 ].
To understand the problem of the low diffusion of modern DES and its connections with the WEF Nexus in developing countries, it is important to understand the demand for energy in rural areas. In low-income countries, most of the household energy consumption is thermal energy, with very little electricity consumption [22]. Thermal energy is needed to meet very basic human needs (food, heat),
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New sources of energy, sources of electric power generation, sources of power generation, decentralized power generation, microgrids and distributed generation, sources of energy generation, renewable sources of energy, the sources of energy, sources of energy for electricity generation, power generation sources, natural sources of energy, decentralized energy generation