Monday 10 August 2009 6:46:35 pm

In the developing world, 1.4 billion low-income people lack electricity. At night, they use kerosene lamps to light up their huts, which produce very limited light, smell unpleasant, and are very smoky. This causes indoor air pollution resulting in respiratory problems, burns from spillages are common and houses frequently burn down.

The only form of electricity available to the poor comes from cheap, low quality batteries, which are purchased in enormous quantities for transistor radios and torches. These batteries chemically pollute drinking water sources and the environment when they are thrown away. Kerosene, candles and batteries are also expensive: the average poor family spends $122 each year on these products when their annual income may be less than $1,000.

Some governments subsidise the use of kerosene. For example in India alone there is an annual subsidy of over $7billion. This is equivalent to over $15 per household without access to electricity per year. We can retail solar panels and lamps at a little over this amount. Can you imagine the impact if every home, without access to electricity, was given this subsidy to buy a solar lamp?

In India alone this would result in a saving of over 23 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

ToughStuff is actively providing appropriate solar solutions designed and priced for the very poorest people on the planet. But we can all take our role, advocating for the removal of subsidies on non-renewable fuels like kerosene, alongside R K Pachauri, the Chairman of the Nobel-prize winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change who has been urging the Government to invest the kerosene subsidy in promoting clean and alternative sources of energy.

Hey, if the Indian Government will buy them – I’ll sell them the ToughStuff solar panels and lamps at $14 - then the government can even make a saving!

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Saturday 15 August 2009 5:07:11 am

Dear Joshua

Getting through the whole process of validation and verification for carbon credits is no small thing. But, whether or not we are able to gain carbon credits because of the use of our solar panels and lamps, I know that we are saving considerable amounts of CO2 emissions. Our research is showing around 50Kg of CO2 saved for every lamp we sell. In other countries, it is reported that there is over 130Kg of CO2.

When there are over 1.4 million people without access to any electricity and hundreds of millions of others who have only partial access – it is not hard to calculate the millions of tonnes of CO2 going into the environment.

Plus, of course, there are the fumes. The UN puts the figures at half a million people per year that die due to upper respiratory tract problems caused by indoor air pollution (IAP).

We are going to stop these emissions.

The removal of kerosene as a source of fuel for lighting has to be an imperative for the coming decade. There are easy technical solutions, there is ToughStuff (providing cutting edge, innovative, manufactured products), and now the price is really very affordable even for the poorest of people . We have even developed a ‘Business-in-a-box’ model to allow the very, very poorest to rent the solar lamps at a cost lower than buying kerosene.

This really is a win-win-win

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