Many
households in impoverished regions around the world are starting to shift away
from inefficient and polluting fuel-based lighting—such as candles, firewood, and kerosene lanterns—to solar-LED systems. While this trend has
tremendous environmental benefits, a new study by Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that it spurs economic development as well,
to the tune of 2 million potential new jobs.
Berkeley Lab researcher Evan Mills, who has been studying lighting in the developing world for more than two decades, has conducted the first global analysis of how the transition to solar-LED lighting will impact employment and job creation. His study was recently published in the journal Energy for Sustainable Development in a paper titled, "Job creation and energy savings through a transition to modern off-grid lighting."
Berkeley Lab researcher Evan Mills, who has been studying lighting in the developing world for more than two decades, has conducted the first global analysis of how the transition to solar-LED lighting will impact employment and job creation. His study was recently published in the journal Energy for Sustainable Development in a paper titled, "Job creation and energy savings through a transition to modern off-grid lighting."
"People like
to talk about making jobs with solar energy, but it's rare that the flip side
of the question is asked—how
many people will lose jobs who are selling the fuels that solar will
replace?," said Mills. "We set out to quantify the net job creation.
The good news is, we found that we will see many more jobs created than we
lose."
While there are
about 274 million households worldwide that lack access to electricity, Mills'
study focuses on the "poorest of the poor," or about 112 million
households, largely in Africa and Asia, that cannot afford even a mini solar
home system, which might power a fan, a few lights, a phone charger, and a
small TV. Instead this group can afford only entry-level solar lighting.
In countries such
as Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, India, Indonesia, and Kenya, fuel-based lighting
is not particularly "job-intensive." Individual entrepreneurs sell
lanterns, wicks, candles, fuel dippers, and kerosene in small quantities, often
in local markets or on the roadside, but few jobs are created and many are
part-time.
In all Mills found
that fuel-based lighting today provides 150,000 jobs worldwide. Because there
is very little data in this area, his analysis is based on estimating the
employment intensity of specific markets and applying it to the broader
non-electrified population. He also drew on field observations in several
countries to validate his estimates.
He did a similar
analysis for the emerging solar-LED industry and also collected data on
employment rates for larger manufacturers and distributors representing the
majority of global production of products quality assured by the World Bank's
Lighting Global initiative at the time. He found that every 1 million of these
lanterns provides an estimated 17,000 jobs.
These values
include employees of these companies based in developing countries but exclude
upstream jobs in primary manufacturing by third parties such as those in
factories in China. Assuming a three-year product life and a target of three
lanterns per household, this corresponded to about 2 million jobs globally,
more than compensating for the 150,000 jobs that would be lost in the
fuel-based lighting market.
Furthermore Mills'
research found that the quality of the jobs would be much improved. "With
fuel-based lighting a lot of these people are involved in the black market and
smuggling kerosene over international borders, and child labor is often
involved in selling the fuel," he said. "Also these can be very
unstable jobs due to acute shortages of kerosene and government subsidies going
up and down. It's a very poor quality of livelihood, and the commodity itself
is toxic. These new solar jobs will be much better jobs—they're legal, healthy, and more
stable and regular."
While there is some
overlap in terms of skillsets required for the new jobs, retraining and education would be
necessary. The new jobs span the gamut, from designing and
manufacturing products to marketing and distributing them. "The challenge
of re-employing some of these people is not trivial," Mills said. "A
lot of them aren't literate. So there are some real human considerations to
account for."
In fact, a
transition to modern lighting technologies could have immense benefits for the
health and education of these populations. Mills, an energy analyst
specializing in the energy efficiency of buildings and industry who also
founded the Lumina Project, published a separate paper in the same journal
recently that identified many of the risks of fuel-based lighting, such as
child poisoning, slum fires, indoor air pollution, and lantern explosions
leading to significant burn injuries.
Solar lanterns also
provide far more and better light, allowing children to study in the evening
and businesses to stay open later into the evening. "As long as people are
using kerosene lanterns, candles, and other fuels for light, it's actually reinforcing
poverty because they're spending so much on energy and getting so little in
return. So many are stuck in that vicious circle," he said.
Solar-LED lanterns
and flashlights are gaining in popularity in the developing world thanks to
being "a rugged, affordable, reliable, compact and very manufacturable
technology and one that is effectively wireless," Mills said.
In addition to job creation, the potential environmental
benefits are also enormous. A study Mills published in Science in 2005
estimated global off-grid lighting energy expenditure at $38 billion per year.
That corresponds to CO2 emissions of 190 million metric tons per year, or the
equivalent of those from about 30 million typical American cars.
"All of this
energy and pollution can potentially be saved with a conversion to solar-LED
systems," he said.
Mills notes that
some regions have actually become more impoverished since his 2005 study.
"These numbers
may have fallen somewhat in the past decade, given modest expansion of
centralized electrification programs, temporarily low world oil prices, and
initiatives like Lighting Global that have already brought solar lighting to
nearly 100 million people, but the need remains quite high, and the number of
unelectrified households continues to grow in some regions, particularly
sub-Saharan Africa," he said.
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