• Question: why don't you spend the money you would usually spend on researching, on placing more solar power systems in africa?

    Asked by mildred to Pete on 9 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Peter Burgess

      Peter Burgess answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      My company actually installs solar power in Africa and Latin America as well as the UK and Europe. I’m actually trying to get my company to think about the climate impact when we are looking at moving into new countries. For example, Brazil has a huge amount of its electricity from hydro power while South Africa is almost entirely coal-powered and very bad for the environment. So even though they are both sunny countries where solar power makes a lot of sense, from the point of view of the climate it’s maybe better to put your solar power in South Africa to fight coal power than to put it in Brazil where it will be fighting against hydro power.

      We also pay 5% of our profits to our charity, SolarAid that has sold over a million low cost solar lights in Africa. The aim of the charity is to completely replace dirty, dangerous kerosene lighting across the whole of Africa with clean, safe, and cheap solar power within a decade.

      One of the amazing things about solar power is how fast costs have come down. Five years ago, nobody would have even thought about installing solar power in the UK without getting some help to pay for it. Now we are really close to matching the cost of other forms of power generation and as our costs carry on falling, we can see that in only a few more years we will be able to install solar in the UK with no need to get help with the cost.

      In some ways Africa and Latin America are easier places to work in than the UK because there is much more sun, so the cost of energy from solar is much lower. In other ways, they are harder to work in because our local offices are smaller than here in the UK and because the locations are often more remote. For example, we have a solar power system on a tea plantation in Kenya and if we need to visit the site, it’s a day’s drive away from Nairobi so it’s a three day round trip to get anything done.

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