European Tribune - Solar in Zanzibar
Professor Lange is helping the village install more efficient stoves then certifying and selling the resulting carbon credits to buy small solar electric systems, a process already proven in Eritrea and Ghana.
This picture on wiki shows where the money is going so far:
There are big issues with the actual added reductions in countries like China, India and Brazil (and South Korea really should not be on there anymore).
Climex News Update
One in five carbon credits issued by the United Nations are going to support clean energy projects that may in fact have helped to increase greenhouse gas emissions, environmental group WWF said on Thursday. The United Nations runs a scheme under the Kyoto Protocol that allows rich nations to invest in clean energy projects in developing countries and in return receive certified emissions reduction credits (CERs) to offset their own emissions.But WWF said in a report that the credits are being delivered to projects that would have gone ahead anyway, even without the extra incentive provided by UN approval under the scheme, called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The report, prepared by Germany's Oeko Institute for Applied Ecology, said projects lacking this so-called 'additionality' help increase gases blamed for global warming by giving firms a spurious justification for continuing to pollute.
So what I'm talking about are more efficiency improvements on big industrial plants / power stations that would be made anyway, and deliberately inefficient initial construction of such to rake up credits.
Knowledge is important, certainly. What is important for the current exports of solar is for the people abroad to be able to service them and receive appropriate blueprints to be able to do so.
Your example of Africa developing its own solar technologies but not implementing them is a bit sorry. Can't say much more than that there is a big difference between developing technologies and putting them to good use.
Your example of Africa developing its own solar technologies but not implementing them is a bit sorry.
First, its a high tech industrial process developed in South Africa, not an appropriate technology developed in, say, the DRC.
There's nothing "sorry" about having them manufactured in China and having license income flowing to South Africa.
And indeed in general, for most of sub-Saharan Africa who would be importing them from abroad whether they were manufactured at the lowest possible cost in China or manufactured at a substantially higher cost in South Africa ... exporting commodities to buy solar PV produced at the lowest possible cost and using them to harvest more of Africa's renewable resources is a much better deal than the normal process of exporting commodities to buy food, suppressing domestic production, and fuel and Mercedes Benz's for the domestic elite. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
