Browsing by Subject "Rural electrification"
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Item Open Access Analyzing Electricity Use and Its Relationship with Electricity Quality in Rural India(2020-04-20) Dong, ShiyuanRural electrification in India is progressing rapidly, and most households nationwide are now connected to the electricity grid. However, the country's electricity consumption remains low, and poor electricity quality continues to constrain households' electricity use, especially in rural areas of the northern Gangetic plain. Measuring the electricity access by connection rates alone is insufficient, because poor and intermittent electricity quality impacts electricity use. First, this study investigates the quantity and ways in which families use electricity by adopting ESMAP's 2015 Multitier Framework. Then, it considers the relationship between electricity use and multiple dimensions of electricity quality using regressions that relate electrical appliance ownership indicators (as dependent variables) to these quality attributes, controlling for household and community characteristics. Using data from a survey conducted in the summer of 2018 from 500 households in the border region of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the study finds that nearly all rural households have low levels of electricity use. The evidence of this study also supports the idea that electricity supply quality is a severely limiting factor inhibiting electricity use. These results point to the need for policies that would increase electricity use through enhancements of the power system, such as the transmission and distribution lines.Item Open Access Energy & Development (Global Energy Access Network Case Studies)(2017-06-20) Aggarwal, A; Childress, S; Greene, L; Guidera, L; Guo, K; Holt, D; Klug, T; Litzow, E; Rains, E; Samaddar, S; Wakefield, TThe present volume represents the culmination of one of the Global Energy Access Network's central initiatives in our inaugural 2016-17 year. We observed that many of our student members had previously worked in areas of poor or missing energy access, even if the projects that brought them to those communities were not directly related to energy access. We sought to take advantage of students’ contextual knowledge from these experiences, and provide a forum for them to share their latent experiences widely with others. The six vignettes in this volume address a diverse set of topics related to energy access. They span five countries (India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Nicaragua, and Peru), primarily in rural areas, but sometimes address issues in urban areas as well. The entities featured in these stories include local and state governments, community-based organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Topically, they address a variety of technologies, including solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, as well as improved cookstoves. The issues discussed range from financial viability of utility providers, to relationships between local community members and distant institutions, to the gap that sometimes persists between householders’ beliefs and “expert knowledge.” Throughout, the authors highlight the richness of the setting and context even as they focus in on issues specific to energy access.Item Open Access The Anchor-Business-Community Model for Rural Energy Development: Is it a Viable Option?(2016-04-29) Givens, RebekahThe Anchor Business Community (ABC) Model is a proposed method of rural energy development in which energy companies leverage anchor customers to reduce the risk of business in areas of uncertain demand, thereby incentivizing electrification of all customer types in a community. However, practitioners observe a lower implementation rate than expected of the model. This study examines possible barriers by using HOMER, an economic analysis modeling tool, to compare the levelized costs of rural electricity among eight scenarios. In most cases, the ABC model produces electricity at a lower cost than electrification absent the model, but cost distribution burdens individual customer groups and creates an economic disincentive to engage. Therefore, the ABC model requires public intervention (cross-subsidization, spatial analysis and planning, and forums for customer engagement) to be a viable option.Item Open Access The Impacts of Rural Electrification in the Kingdom of Bhutan(2017-04-28) Litzow, Erin L.Since the 1990s, the Kingdom of Bhutan has made significant investments to achieve universal rural electrification (RE), with goals to improve education, health and employment outcomes and reduce fuelwood consumption. While planners expect that improved energy access generally enhances well-being, previous assessments of RE programs find highly varied, context-dependent impacts. To assess the impact of RE in Bhutan, I rely on survey data from three rounds of the Bhutan Living Standards Survey. Applying linear and non-linear regression methods as well as propensity score matching, I find that the RE program led to improvements in education and reduced fuelwood consumption. I find inconclusive evidence of the effects of RE on non-agricultural employment and find no effect on health. I conduct a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to compare program costs, at both the government and household levels, against estimated benefits. Household level benefits outweigh costs, and the positive net benefits are robust to variation in multiple, estimated parameters. Societal net benefits are slightly negative, but this value is likely a lower bound estimate and is sensitive to parameter variation. Based on these analyses, I conclude that Bhutan’s RE program was a partial success in the time period studied, achieving fuelwood and education related outcomes and improving welfare in rural households.Item Open Access Three Essays on Energy and Development Economics(2019) Usmani, FarazGlobal energy-use patterns are characterized by deep inequality. Electricity is indispensable for households, clinics, schools and firms, yet over a billion people live without it. At the same time, nearly three billion rely on traditional stoves and polluting biomass fuels (such as firewood) for their basic energy needs. The resulting household air pollution causes four million deaths annually, a health burden borne disproportionately by women. The international community has hastened to respond to this global energy challenge. This dissertation highlights how—and under what conditions—policies that seek to ensure universal access to modern energy deliver expected environmental and development benefits.
In the first chapter, I ask what drives heterogeneity in the impacts of large-scale rural electrification. Prior evidence on the labor-market impacts of grid electrification is mixed. I hypothesize that variation in local economic conditions—which can complement investments in infrastructure—may help explain why, and combine two natural experiments in India within a regression discontinuity design to test this hypothesis. Most of the world's guar, a crop that yields a potent thickening agent used during hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), is grown in northwestern India. The rapid rise of fracking in the United States induced a parallel commodity boom in Indian guar production, resulting in a large positive shock to rural economic activity. Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India's massive rural electrification scheme, I show that access to electricity significantly increased non-agricultural employment in villages located in India's booming guar belt. Where these complementary economic conditions were lacking, electrification had almost no discernible impact. Using a firm-level panel dataset, I then provide suggestive evidence that this growth in non-farm work is partly driven by the rise of electricity-intensive firms that complement agricultural production. In line with the prior literature, I show that electrification alone may not be sufficient to deliver economic benefits, but I also demonstrate that, when combined with complementary economic conditions on the ground, access to electricity can enable individuals, households and firms to take advantage of new opportunities in potentially welfare-enhancing ways.
In the second chapter, I turn to household-level energy use and empirically evaluate the role played by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in delivering environmental, energy and development interventions in remote, rural settings. I develop a model of household decision-making to evaluate how NGOs address implementation-related challenges and influence intervention effectiveness. To test the model's predictions, I apply quasi-experimental methods to household-survey data from a randomized controlled trial designed to promote clean-cooking solutions in rural India. I uncover a large, positive and statistically significant "NGO effect": prior engagement with the implementing NGO increases the effectiveness of the intervention by at least thirty percent. These findings provide some of the first causal evidence on how NGOs directly influence outcomes, which has implications for the generalizability of experimental research conducted jointly with such local partners. In particular, attempts to scale up findings from such work may prove less successful than anticipated if the role of NGOs is insufficiently understood. Alternatively, policymakers looking to scale up could achieve greater success by fostering partnerships with trusted local institutions.
In the final chapter, I consider how heterogeneity in households' preferences influences demand for energy technologies. I conduct technology-promotion campaigns followed by second-price, sealed-bid ("Vickrey") auctions for two cleaner cooking technologies with over 1,000 households across seventy communities in rural Senegal. I induce exogenous variation in the extent to which these promotion activities cater to heterogeneous preferences by randomly assigning a subset of communities to an auction arm in which both devices are promoted jointly. Consistent with a model in which preferences are constructed—and not simply revealed—as agents make repeated choices, joint promotion lowers willingness to pay for the relatively less familiar alternative compared to settings in which the two devices are promoted exclusively. Rather than simply providing additional choices, implementers looking to enhance uptake of improved technologies must instead devise approaches to help potential end-users think carefully through trade-offs, crystallize and understand their own preferences, and identify solutions that fit their needs.