Community based power generation: Could thinking small be the next big thing?

Image: Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barefootcollege/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Originally published at Project Survival Media day before yesterday

There has been a lot of discussion about the magnitude of the fund that will be set aside for the developing countries to cope up with climate change. Bangladesh has already made it clear that they deserve 15% of whatever the amount is decided upon. Other nations might have similar demands.But while the size of the pie is an important issue, I am more interested in how this pie will be eaten, meaning, where will the money be invested and in what technologies.

Well, Larry Lohmann seems to think he has an answer and he elaborates on it in his very interesting paper called Climate as an Investment where he says that the future of the world lies in locally produced energy using sustainable methods.

So what does that mean? It means that our notion of industrialization has to completely change, which in turn means that we must move further and further away from fossil fuels as well as fossil fuel substitutes such as agrofuels. Why agrofuels you might ask, two reasons: Firstly, the massive impact they will have on food productivity since they will end up eating a lot of our land (yes the pun was intended) and secondly (and more importantly), they provide security to the fossil fuel infrastructure which many view as a crucial hindrance to our future.

His idea might seem radical to many but this practice isn’t something new. In fact it has been put to practice for over 2 decades in a tiny village in rural Rajasthan called Tilonia in an establishment called the Barefoot College. Barefoot college and it’s founder Bunker Roy have received immense praise for the work they have been doing. Apart from a college for the poorest of the poor, it’s a self sufficient community which produces its own energy using the ample sunlight that it receives. It maintains its own water supply through their rain water harvesting which is stored in hundreds of underground tanks and recycles its own waste to create fodder. The 100,000 people who are taking part in this probably don’t realize that they are leading by example for the whole world to see.

This is a stunning example for 2 reasons:

Firstly, the place where it is being done isn’t paradise, at least not in the conventional sense. When they first started out, it was a wasteland, a desert. And now through their practices they are getting some of the green cover back.

Secondly, they did it out of necessity. As Seth Godin says, today being innovative isn’t a luxury, its a necessity. And that’s what Bunker Roy has been doing for the last thirty years. He didn’t wait for the government to help him. He took matters in his own hands for his community’s survival depended on it.

So while such a project can work in developing nations and small communities, for a city things become quite different mostly because of the difference in ideology of the governments and the corporates (read big oil et al)

So what is the problem, you ask?

As Lohmann puts it:

That can only happen through a process that involves ‘taking over the City’. These include campaigns to reduce the overwhelming influence of Wall Street in Washington; increase workers’ and farmers’ participation in management; disallow banks’ claims about the value of the ‘toxic’ assets they hold; roll back limited corporate liability; challenge shareholder primacy; halt public handouts for CCS and nuclear development; force the World Bank to obey its review panel’s recommendations to stop investing in fossil fuels

I am not saying that this is the solution to the climate change problem, but what I am saying is that with more and more nuclear reactors being set up (and that waste isn’t going to get disposed on its own), with more and more people and less land at our disposal, with Big Oil working overtime to ensure that the laws wont be giving them a raw deal, with geo engineering suggesting that we send sulphur packed rockets every now and then to prevent global warming, we need to start having more discussions and weigh our options and figure out if our leaders’ plan for our future is really going to make it better, for our survival depends on it. Perhaps investing our time in what some communities have already been doing to support themselves might be answer to some of the developing worlds’ climate problems.