Climate Change Made Personal

Posted Sep 17, 2009 | 0 | Filed under:

The UN Foundation has invites people to describe how climate change is affecting them and how "it's getting personal". For millions of Kenyans who are going through power rationing, water rationing and the risk of food shortage, it cannot get any more personal than this. 

While a lot of the hydro power crisis has been attributed to the destruction of the Mau Forest complex, there is also the aspect of climate change which is less documented and even less so discussed in Kenya. However, the effects are being felt in a very personal way. When one has to leave for work in the morning without breakfast because there is no water and no electricity to make breakfast, that is personal. When a small business owner has to shut down the business on Mondays and Wednesdays because there is no electricity, that is personal.

What can a developing country such as Kenya do to adapt to the changing climate. From our perspective, two main steps:

1. Ensuring national energy efficiency standards. By lowering the energy consumption in the country, there will be more electricity to go around. Put another way, lower energy consumption ensures that the waters in the hydro power dams are conserved and therefore able to generate the baseload needed for the country.

 

2. Renewable energy: Solar is a vast resource in the country. A few changes in the country's policy on solar energy would go a long way in encouraging the adoption of this technology. While feed in tariffs like those of Germany would be nice, they are not necessarily the best use of limited financial resources in a country such as Kenya. Rather, the use of net metering would incentivize those with the financial capacity to invest in solar generation for their own use. By having the opportunity to feed some of that electricity back into the grid, with or without a feed in tariff, the economics of a solar investment would be greatly improved. 

The challenges in implementing these two steps; energy efficiency and renewable energy, besides the obvious lack of supportive policy, has been the limited technical and financial expertise.

This is why we have taken it upon ourselves to address these two challenges in order to spead up the adoption of energy efficiency and renewable energy. The learn more about our current project pipeline, please visit here.