Two hours outside Durban, South Africa, deep in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, Myeka High School had no electricity. Students struggled to read by candlelight, and few textbooks and newspapers were available. The school was clearly having a hard time doing its job: only 30 percent of the students graduated, and even those had little hope of going beyond their isolated village.
Then, in the spring of last year, solar energy came to town. Photovoltaic solar panels, firing up 2.4Kw of power, were brought into the school by the Solar Electric Light Fund, a nonprofit group based in Washington. SELF also persuaded Dell Computer and Infosat Telecommunications to donate computers and a satellite uplink so that the students could have Internet access.
Now that the students can download materials from the Internet and have access to the Learning Channel, the graduation rate has shot up to 70 percent. Some students have won science awards, and many are applying for college. "I never thought the sun could do all this," said Melusi Zwane, the school's principal.
Myeka is a vivid example of the impact of computers on society. But what makes this tale stand out is the arrival of solar power. "It's the reason for all that we have now," Zwane said. "Everything comes from power."
Business has long been keenly aware of the potential of providing energy to deprived areas. And interest in narrowing the world's much-discussed digital divide, between the connected and the unconnected, has only made the opportunity more inviting.
That is why energy projects like the one at Myeka High School are not solely philanthropic. Though many financing hurdles remain, there is money to be made, especially for solar energy companies, when markets like these go online.
Rural markets
In fact, according to Strategies Unlimited, a market research firm in Mountain View, California, for the solar industry, roughly 40 percent, or US$1.2 billion, of the US$3 billion worldwide solar business last year came from rural markets like the Valley of a Thousand Hills. In the US, for example, solar has had decent sales as an environmentally friendly complement to the existing power grid, but there is a more immediate need for it in rural areas. Strategies Unlimited predicts that the leading companies in the industry, like the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Siemens, BP, Sanyo Electric, Sharp, Kyocera and AstroPower, will continue to have revenue growth of about 20 percent a year from these markets. That will make the remote rural market alone worth roughly US$2.5 billion by 2005.
Two billion people, roughly 30 percent of the world population, are off the energy grid, living in areas without utility services. And a billion of them have the means to pay for power, said Professor Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.
According to solar industry vendors and analysts, many of these billion people spend US$5 to US$10 a month on kerosene, almost exclusively for lights. Solar power, of course, has many more uses, and by amortizing the start-up costs over perhaps five years, the total cash outlay is about the same.
"There's a lot of money to be made in converting those people to solar," said Allen M. Barnett, chief executive of AstroPower, a publicly traded company based in Newark, New Jersey. In July, for example, Shell Solar signed an agreement with the Sun Oasis Co, a distributor in Beijing, to supply systems for up to 78,000 households in rural western China.
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