Two major global challenges can effectively be tackled by the increased use of renewable energies:

• insufficient access to energy for the population in rural areas
• local pollution and emission of greenhouse gases caused by electricity generation from fossil energy sources. 

Energy supply in rural areas

Today, approximately 1.6 billion people – more than one quarter of the world’s population – have no, or insufficient access to modern energy services. More than 80 percent of these people live in rural areas. Stimulating the use of renewable energies (RE) will help to improve living conditions in developing countries while sustainably fuelling the basis for economic development.

In remote and sparsely populated areas RE technologies are often the most suitable and cost effective option to satisfy the basic energy demand for cooking, lighting and heating where required. Additionally RE solutions enable cost effective supply of drinking water, health care, education, communication and other infrastructure services.

The GIZ supports its partners in the dissemination of technologies for rural electrification such as solar-electric systems or mini hydropower plants.

For the supply of cooking energy biogas and improved stoves as well as solar cookers can minimize health risks caused by harmful smoke emission from open fires. At the same time the consumption of local biomass, especially firewood, is reduced. This makes a crucial contribution to reducing the overexploitation of natural resources and therefore helps to preserve this valuable traditional energy source.

In remote areas far from central power stations, RE technologies can contribute to increasing agricultural productivity e.g. through the use of photovoltaic pumping systems. Another example: Solar dryers help to conserve agricultural products.

Mitigation of airborne pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions caused by electricity generation

RE technologies help to avoid local and global environmental damage caused by the use of fossil fuels used in centralised power plants. While local pollution can be avoided by using filter systems, combating global warming requires prevention of greenhouse gas emissions from the outset. Wind energy, hydropower, and geothermal power plants allow the generation of electricity without producing CO₂. The GIZ supports its partners in the design and implementation of appropriate policies, thus enabling them to reach greenhouse gas emission targets in an economically beneficial way through the use of RE options.

Foreign currency expenses can be decreased by reducing the amount of imported fossil fuel for consumption. Using a greater number of different energy sources helps to increase supply security and to protect a country’s economy against external influences such as crude oil price fluctuations on the world market.

A special and rather controversial topic within the field of renewable energy is large-scale hydroelectric plants and the huge dams associated with them. Social, ecological and technical problems, as well as spiralling costs, have lead to strong opposition to new dam projects. Currently, hydroelectric power accounts for about 20 percent of the world’s electricity supply. We believe that well-considered hydroelectric projects, combined with a wide range of appropriate social and ecological measures, should continue to contribute towards covering the world’s electricity demand with little or no CO₂ emissions. Therefore the GIZ supports the development and implementation of improved decision-making and planning processes. Our objective is to minimise the problems mentioned above in order to allow countries to profit from the advantages of large-scale hydroelectric schemes in the future.