Climate and Energy

Written by Paul Okondo

Part of the challenges that affect how we can inform sustainable industrialisation through deployment of renewable energy is the black box approach.The fact that consumers are often seen as passive users and the potential for them to inform on the 'how' the 'what 'and the 'when' means that they are only viewed as receivers who accept and respond to the product. This is a key area of the conversation that one needs to focus on if we are to deploy renewable energy sustainably and promote enterprises within a structure that can inform sustainable industrialisation.If you involve users at the tail end of the process then it will come with many challenges.

Secondly a lot of financing mechanisms are deterministic and tailored for big ticket investment. They have this 'big bang' approach where you bring big technology ,dominated by big players who have the capacity. There is need to rethink about the whole value system chain, value chain-development of technology ,the provision ,application and utilisation also become part of the problem. It has also been identified that the technology innovation system for small businesses is quite weak in Kenya.

My suggestion is that we start with small projects that do small development but as we move forward we can see incremental development of capabilities and sophistication as people get confidence in developing small and learn to do bigger projects .this is something we need to think and see how we can take it forward.

In conclusion, involvement is the need to come up with sustainable business models, how do we become more creative in formulating business models that are more flexible and that allow participation and involvement of more actors. One method that WREPA is approaching this is by training young people in solar energy, more information on our programmes and how it will change rural living to come soon.