44 ENERGY
ENERGY ACCESS THROUGH
OFF-GRID RENEWABLES:
ENABLING THE
TRANSITION
The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, approved at the UN
General Assembly in September, seek to eradicate poverty while
healing and securing our planet. A central component of this agenda
is to ensure universal access to clean, reliable electricity.
Adnan Amin, Director General, IRENA
For those of us living with electricity, it is easy to forget the social and economic impact of going
without. Power shortages cut economic growth by 2 to 4 per cent annually. Households without
electricity pay 60 to 80 times more for energy-related products – charcoal, candles and kerosene
– than people in New York or London. Health clinics without electricity struggle to refrigerate
much needed medicines and exposure to smoke from wood-fired cook stoves cause 4.3 million
premature deaths per year.
Great strides have been made in the last two decades to increase global access to electricity,
with nearly two billion more people connected today than in 1990, but there is still too large a gap