Squatting in front of a hearth built around three stones supporting a pair of giant aluminum pots placed one above other, Surya Maya Lama tended a smoldering fire cooking a pungent local brew. Slivers of sunlight seeped through the bamboo, illuminating the wattle and daub hut as an older woman added cold water to the blackened pots. Raksi, the moonshine that contains 50 percent alcohol, is illegal to produce for commercial purpose. Nevertheless, the 28-year-old and her family sell it in their eatery in the small riverside village of Bhorleni in Makwanpur district.
The police crackdown may be least of the concerns for Tamangs, the indigenous people concentrated in the districts surrounding Kathmandu. Like other communities living in isolated hamlets across the country, they spend large chunk of their working hours in collecting fuel-wood. A few days earlier, Lama and the women members of her family trudged up the hill for one and a half hours and hauled the firewood back to their home.
The alcohol is not only energy intensive; it also consumes a lot of water to distill the fermented rice or millet into strong and sharp liquor. "We need about 15 kilograms of firewood to make roughly 10 liters of raksi," Lama said. "It takes a lot of firewood. But this is all I know; it has been our way of life and livelihood for as far as I can recall." She added: "If there's any other way to minimize firewood or cook it, we will happily adopt it."
Nature will bring all the solace to your troubles. Read out the...
The alternatives Lama spoke about could just be outside her home—only that they were in a much smaller scale.
On a small field at the edge of the village stood two giant wind turbines, their blades whirring idly as people went about their work. On the ground, a dizzying array of solar panels shimmered in the afternoon sun. A few meters down flowed relatively clean Bagmati River, which originates near Kathmandu, where it clogs with toxic chemicals, sewage, household and industrial waste.
The 25 kilowatt hybrid solar (15 kWp) and wind (10 kW) plant began its operation last summer, but was formally inaugurated late last year. The 13 million rupee ($120,522) project, funded by government and the residents of Bhorleni, has electrified 131 households of the village. The project is part of state's program to electrify off-grid, poor and remote communities and promote locally generated mini-grid system. Aside from raising three million rupees, the locals also contributed labor for the construction. Padam Ghalan, who is now the chairman of Wind and Solar Energy Users' Committee, donated a parcel of his land to the project.
"People passing through this village were struck by the air that blew here for several hours a day. The air blows from 5:30 in the evening until 10 in the morning," the 28-year old said. "We are glad that the government built the plant here. Until a few months back, we had to walk for several hours to charge our mobile phones. And we paid 20 rupees for the service. We no longer worry about how to charge our phone or laptop. We can even watch TV and learn about what's going on in our country and across the world." The 11-member committee headed by Ghalan was yet to decide on tariff system, but he said they will resolve it soon. "We will charge a minimum of 150 rupees to a household. But we will charge more if a household has electric appliances such as TV or fridge," he said.
The hybrid plant, second of its kind in Nepal, came into being as a scaled up version of a similar Asian Development Bank-funded 12 kW solar and wind hybrid plant that proved successful in Dhaubadi village of Nawalparasi district. "Now a local cooperative, which runs the project, charges 300 rupees a month for a household. We wanted to replicate that model," said Prakash Aryal, a wind manager of the Alternative Energy Promotion Center (AEPC), the state body that promotes renewable energy. "In 2012, we were looking for three possible sites to scale that up. Bhorleni fitted our criteria as the village was hard to reach, off-grid and inhabited by marginalized Tamang people, who were willing to cooperate and contribute to it."
The AEPC would help two local people train on operation of the plant, Aryal said. It will also assist with the development of a tariff system by hiring a management consultant. "For the first three years, the company that installed the hybrid plant will carry out maintenance service. While solar system may not require much of technical support, the wind blades, which rotate with the help of bearings, may face technical glitches in future," according to Aryal. "The idea is to empower the local communities to have access to energy. This is not a long-term solution. We support them in the interim. Our goal is to help them have access to lighting before national power grid reaches them," Aryal said.
For now, that is a farfetched dream. Without any major oil, gas or coal reserve, Nepal's energy consumption is still primitive wherein age-old methods of cooking and heating with biomass persist. The country's per capita energy consumption is one of the lowest in South Asia and well below the average for Asia.
At a time when Western world is increasingly moving towards renewable energy, Nepal suffers from an energy paradox. While rural communities still rely on traditional energy sources, the fast urbanizing nation's cities, towns and even some villages have only recently transitioned to clean cooking such as Liquefied Petroleum Gas. Despite huge potential to generate hydropower from its vast network of fast-flowing rivers, the country imports 15.74 percent of energy including hydroelectricity and petroleum products from India.
Government data show that cooking takes the lion's share of energy. Biomass including fuel-wood and agriculture waste used mostly for cooking contributes 78 percent of the energy mix. Petroleum products account for 12 percent, coal four percent and electricity and renewable energy each three percent of the country's energy requirements. The residential sector consumes 80 percent of energy. The remaining goes to transport (8 percent), industry (7 percent), commercial (4 percent) and agriculture (1 percent). Seventy six percent of the population has access to electricity.
With the view of meeting the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals, Nepal is working towards achieving universal electrification. By the end of 2017, when the government's 13th three-year plan winds up, it targets to electrify 87 percent of households. The government has also envisioned making all households smokeless by 2017. To meet the target, two million households would have to switch from traditional stoves to improved cooking stoves. So far, the AEPC has distributed improved cooking stoves to 1.2 million households.
"Nepal's off-grid energy policies are formulated with a goal towards alleviating poverty. And thus by providing better lighting and cooking solutions, the government aims to simultaneously improve other social welfare indicators as well. Better energy services can open up new economic opportunities. It's part of the country's development agenda," said Bibek Raj Kandel, national advisor at the AEPC. His office was set up in 1996 as an institution to promote community-based decentralized renewable energy schemes. The only precedence on renewable energy was work on biogas and micro hydropower initiated by the state-run Agriculture Development Bank in the 1970s.
In the 20 years since its founding, the AEPC has evolved into a renewable energy behemoth. Danish and Norwegian aid groups and the United Nations Development Programme supported its various projects. It began work from five of Nepal's 75 districts. Today, it works in all 75 districts, with an energy, environment and climate change officer in each district. It employs 500 people and its central office building in Lalitpur district has a solar photovoltaic cell of 41 kilowatts, the largest such plant for an institution in Nepal.
The AEPC works through 11 of its renewable energy centers spread across the country, with two in Kathmandu. These centers work as focal points that create demand, and facilitate and assure quality. The AEPC also trains stove masters to build improved cooking stoves. It subsidizes metallic cooking stoves for the residents of high altitude Himalayan regions.
In recent years, though, calls for phasing out the subsidy regime and replacing it with market driven approach have grown. "We provide subsidy to end users. There's nothing for the private sector developers or energy service companies," Kandel said. "But as countries like Germany and United Kingdom have demonstrated, it should be driven by market. Nepal's problem is how to transition from subsidy to an approach based on market." In the long term, the subsidy model should come to an end, he said. "The entire sector is so heavily dependent on subsidy and on continued donor support that when the subsidy support is reduced or even when one of its major donors decides to exit, there will be a tremendous shock," Kandel said.
Kandel stressed on the importance of devising appropriate fiscal measures to attract private sector investments. "We must incentivize innovative business ideas and service delivery models for the sustained growth of the sector. This can be done by providing lower interest rates to project developers, or to energy service companies or by providing tax waivers, lucrative feed in tariff rates, purchase guarantees and so on," he said.
The government is also under pressure to tackle the health threatening indoor air pollution caused by traditional cookstoves. Every year, an estimated 7,500 people—mostly women and children—die from respiratory diseases largely attributed to the smoke from open hearth. "The cost are simply too high. It is not only detrimental to health; people are also suffering by losing the productive hours that they would have otherwise spent for productive engagements," Kandel said. "The huge amount of time people spend in collecting firewood is not acceptable in the modern world."
This content was produced with the support of the Access to Energy Journalism Fellowship and Discourse Media (www.discoursemedia.org)
