Energy Access: How Much is Enough?

By Emily Haves, Ashden Research Programme Coordinator
Energy access is an increasingly hot topic in development circles, but what does it actually mean? We talk about it as if it’s a binary state – either you have it, or you don’t – but is this helpful? And how much is enough?
Is hauling a car battery across town to charge it up so you can power a few lights for a few hours considered ‘access’?  Most people would say that being connected to the national grid means you have energy access. But what if this regularly cuts out without notice, as we saw dramatically in India last summer?
From my internet trawl, everyone writing about and working in this field is generally clear that ‘energy’ means electricity and clean cooking. Yet startlingly, few actually define ‘access’.
The three attempts at definition I found came from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a paper by UNIDO/The Earth Institute, and UNDP.  The first thing I noticed is that they are loooong: the IEA and UNIDO’s definitions are both a page, and UNDP’s a good half page.
Reliability and affordability
Both the IEA’s and UNDP’s definitions highlight that access must be both reliable and affordable. UNDP says it is “‘available’ if the household is within the economic connection and supply range of the energy network or supplier, and ‘affordable’ when the household is able to pay the up-front connection cost (or first cost) and energy usage costs”.
I agree that these are two important criteria, but they still left me asking questions.  For example, ‘able to pay’ is ambiguous – a lot of people spend a large proportion of their income on energy simply because they have no choice to satisfy basic needs, leaving less for other essentials.
Put a number on it?
The IEA is the only definition that dares put a number on what they think constitutes a minimum level of electricity consumption: 250 kWh per year for rural households and 500 kWh per year for urban households.  250 kWh would ‘provide for the use of a floor fan, a mobile telephone and two compact fluorescent light bulbs for about five hours per day’, and 500 kWh would provide for ‘an efficient refrigerator, a second mobile telephone per household and another appliance, such as a small television or a computer’.
It seems to take as axiomatic that rural households only need half the electricity of urban households, but I’m not sure I see the logic in this: for example, urban people are likely to be closer to facilities such as internet cafés, so arguably have less need for a computer at home, not more.
Different levels of need
The UNIDO/Earth Institute paper provides a helpful graphic illustrating the different levels of energy access (see p6 of the report).  This at least recognises that access to satisfy basic human needs is not the same level of access that is required to significantly stimulate an economy.  But we’re still left with the high consumption levels of ‘modern society needs’ as the ultimate goal – the dubiousness of which is a separate issue, to be discussed another time.
This tiered approach seems to be winning. The UN's Sustainable Energy for All initiative is working with many organisations on defining an approach that measures levels of access, but this is still in the early stages and threatens to be hideously complex.  Which might explain why Sustainable Energy for All, the leader in the global drive for universal energy access, does not even attempt a definition on its website.
You might question whether this matters, but with Sustainable Energy for All’s ambitious energy access targets and the possibility that it may be included in the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals, without a definition of what we hope to achieve it’s hard to see how progress can be measured.
If we are going to work together to make universal energy access a reality, we need to find a way to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing, without losing the nuances that capture different levels of need and the changing nature of energy services provision.  No easy task.