Bangladesh’s green revolution starts with solar power

[Naveed Yaseen]

NAYEB ALI BAZAR, Bangladesh: Like all rural Bangladeshis, Saidul Islam knows the hardships of summer, when his tin-roofed house turns into a furnace with not enough electricity to power even a fan.

For the 100 million Bangladeshis, most of them farmers, who live in the countryside, the notion of electricity supply is little more than an empty promise bandied about by politicians at election time.

Only villages close to highways or large farms with irrigation pumps have access to the national grid, and even then for an average of just one hour in four. Fed up with promises of a connection that never came, Islam took matters into his own hands, and four years ago scraped together $335 to buy a solar panel for the roof of his modest mudbrick-and-tin home.

“My family and friends thought I was stupid, but I knew it would be worth it even though the price was eight months of income,” said Islam, who lives in the village of Nayeb Ali Bazar, 80 kilometres (50 miles) north of Dhaka.

The investment has more than paid off for the 40-year-old tailor, who used to finish work when the sun set. Now most days he sews until midnight, thanks to five hours of power from the solar panel, and his income has doubled.

For the 70 per cent of Bangladesh’s 144 million people who have little or no access to electricity, alternative energy sources are the only option. Years of under-investment means state-owned power plants generate only 3,500 megawatts of electricity a day, whereas demand is 6,000 megawatts and growing by 500 megawatts a year due to increasing industrialisation.

The government, elected in December, has promised to boost power supply but says improvements are at least three years off. In the meantime, figures show that Bangladeshis are doing it for themselves. In the past year alone, the number of solar-powered household systems has doubled to 300,000, delivering electricity to 2.5 million people.

Leading the rapid expansion is Grameen Shakti, a sister concern of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus’s micro credit giant Grameen Bank. The charity, along with 14 other smaller organisations, extends loans with generous conditions to enable the poor to purchase the wherewithal to produce solar energy.

“Solar systems are selling so fast in rural areas that we’re struggling to keep up with demand,” said Dipal Barua, Grameen Shakti’s head. Growth also means new employment opportunities. “We have created some 20,000 green jobs, some 2,000 of them employing rural women who earn a decent income of $100 a month,” Barua said.

“Our goal is to get half of the country’s rural households using solar energy by 2015 and create jobs for 100,000 women.” Energy expert Shahidul Islam, from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, said the rapid expansion of solar energy had helped bring the cost of panels down.

“What we are witnessing in rural areas is nothing short of a green revolution,” he said. “It is changing the face of rural Bangladesh, which has until now been in the dark.”

Local company Rahimafrooz, which produces batteries to store the solar energy, has tripled output this year to meet demand. “The renewable energy business in Bangladesh is the fastest growing green industry in the world,” said company CEO Niaz Rahim.

“It will be a billion-dollar industry within the next six years. Every solar accessory except the panels is now produced in Bangladesh which means we are going to be self-sufficient very soon to keep driving the growth.”

In Bhutuli, north of Dhaka, greengrocer Nurul Islam jokes that his village was once renowned for producing jackfruit, but is now better known for the number of solar panels sprouting from its roofs.

“The best thing about having solar energy is coming home at 10pm from work and seeing my three sons reading their books,” he said. “We never had the opportunity to do this in the past. It’s changing our country’s fate.”

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