ARTICLES

Lighting is one of the most important devices in homes, buildings and learning facilities. The provision of lighting allows us to extend our social and economic activities. It offers protection and security to individuals and families. However lighting devices are not created equal.

Uni-directional electric meters are like electrified barbed wires that confine villagers inside a hamlet. Utility customers are locked in, unable to take advantage of the cheap solar electricity that one gets from a simple grid-tied configuration. Anyone who tries climbing over the wires gets electrocuted. Instead of enjoying solar savings, they are punished severely and charged for trying to share their surplus with neighbors.

The micro/mainframe terminology is derived from the early debate in the computing industry between IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. IBM was the pioneer and leader in the computer industry of the 1960s, and faced only a few small competitors. The industry players were often described as “Snow White and the seven dwarfs”.

Today, basically the same set of rules apply to small-scale renewable projects below 100 kW as well as to 100 MW projects. This is a huge disincentive for small-scale RE. The experience of the Romblon Electric Cooperative (Romelco) is a case in point. Their 20-kW hybrid facility in Cobrador Island, which involves a mixture of solar power, battery storage and diesel generator back-up, also had to go through essentially the same bureaucratic maze at the Department of Energy and the Energy Regulatory Commission as 100 MW solar farm projects.

By microrenewables, we mean small-scale renewables, whose outputs are at kilowatt instead of megawatt levels. These include solar PV systems on home and building rooftops, microhydro facilities, small wind turbines, small biogas digesters, and other micro-systems. As a rough guide, we can use the government limit of 100 kilowatts and below.

Those who do not have access to electricity use candles or kerosene lamps at night. We will compare the cost of these lighting technologies to the cost of electric lighting.

Shifting to energy-efficient LED lighting is a good example of an energy efficiency measure and makes eminent sense, as the following calculations will show.

To reduce climate change risk in the next ten years, we need more than one technology. We need technology approaches and business models that can make carbon-free or carbon-neutral renewable energy as accessible and abundant as information has become today.