GETTING ENERGY WHERE IT IS NEEDED

What we have to ask ourselves today, as we read this story lauding efforts to fund renewable energy projects for people without electricity, is: How would Jesus like the way we do this?

Loans fund renewables for poor
Kristyn Ecochard, April 3, 2007 (UPI)

WHO
The Development Bank of Uganda and the Shell Foundation, Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Distributed Energy Systems in Vermont, Unitus and FIS Empresa Social, and other banks and financial institutions

WHAT
Renewable energies such as solar and wind are made available in rural areas of developing countries by money interests anxious to finance clean energy installations where no other economic form of electricity is available. Loans are made to individuals (the matriarch is favored) and small businesses, providing an opportunity to use the electricity to work off the debt and out of poverty.

WHEN
Programs have been in operation since 2005 and are being developed.

WHERE
100,000 photovoltaic systems, wind and biogas projects in Bangladesh; four or six-light BP Solar panel home systems in Phobjikha Valley, Bhutan; wind-diesel hybrid systems with battery backups in Brazil; 300 solar panel home systems with battery backup in Boqueros, Argentina;

WHY
When the rural poor repay the loans, the result is a huge win-win for the parties as well as a win for the world. The direct loans allow the rural poor to bypass potentially inefficicient or corrupt government or local institutions. Funding for large-scale projects is not available in sparsely populated regions but small projects can build a network capable of sustaining bigger things.

QUOTES
"There's a myth that's out there that says that the poor can't pay back their loans or that there's no incentive for them to pay back their loans, but really we see that the poor do pay back their loans at an amazingly high rate," [Howard Brady, solutions manager at Unitus ] said…"[A 60 percent interest rate is]not high when the next best thing is from a loan shark who charges you 10 times more than that; it becomes a real saving…"