There needs to be more case studies on actual productive uses of solar, now more of those are happening - egg incubating, mills, water pumps. Particularly anything that saves hours of manual labour for women. Studying the effect of lights and phone charging is so 15 years ago. Even look at some non-solar efforts in refugee camps like The Washing Machine Project (https://thewashingmachineproject.org) which could be further improved by motorizing their manual washing machines that already reduce manual labour considerably, savings hours of manual labour for women. Even solar electric cooking can reduce many hours of collecting fuel (or paying for it, in urban areas) and is easily the biggest potential reducer of CO2 emissions - imagine the transformative effect a 20-year solar cooker loan for a refugee family would have. 20 year loans are standard for grid connected World Bank power projects, but there are zero such loans for offgrid - why force the poor to pay for their power in much shorter time periods of 1-5 years, increasing the price and decreasing affordability? Amortization is the biggest tool we have available to make productive uses of solar power affordable, and absolutely nothing is being done about it. Please use a study like this to try to move the needle - cost savings are strongly linked to amortization periods, so perhaps it is investor and Bank mindsets we need to be more focused on changing than customer mindsets....? What is the mindset behind refusing to make 10-20 year loans available offgrid solar when they are standard and normal for on-grid solar?
There needs to be more case studies on actual productive uses of solar, now more of those are happening - egg incubating, mills, water pumps. Particularly anything that saves hours of manual labour for women. Studying the effect of lights and phone charging is so 15 years ago. Even look at some non-solar efforts in refugee camps like The Washing Machine Project (https://thewashingmachineproject.org) which could be further improved by motorizing their manual washing machines that already reduce manual labour considerably, savings hours of manual labour for women. Even solar electric cooking can reduce many hours of collecting fuel (or paying for it, in urban areas) and is easily the biggest potential reducer of CO2 emissions - imagine the transformative effect a 20-year solar cooker loan for a refugee family would have. 20 year loans are standard for grid connected World Bank power projects, but there are zero such loans for offgrid - why force the poor to pay for their power in much shorter time periods of 1-5 years, increasing the price and decreasing affordability? Amortization is the biggest tool we have available to make productive uses of solar power affordable, and absolutely nothing is being done about it. Please use a study like this to try to move the needle - cost savings are strongly linked to amortization periods, so perhaps it is investor and Bank mindsets we need to be more focused on changing than customer mindsets....? What is the mindset behind refusing to make 10-20 year loans available offgrid solar when they are standard and normal for on-grid solar?