Roger Pielke, Jr.

Making energy access meaningful

In an essay published in Issues in Science and Technology, Roger Pielke Jr. and Morgan Bazilian (then with the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) seek to help clarify the challenge of energy access, expose assumptions that are informing policy design in the development and diplomatic communities, and offer a framework for future discussions rooted in the aspirations of people around the world to achieve energy access compatible with a decent standard of living. Compounding the difficulty of decision-making in such a complex space is that the concept of “energy access” is often defined in terms that are unacceptably modest. Discussions about energy and poverty commonly assume that the roughly 2 billion to 3 billion people who presently lack modern energy services will only demand or consume them in small amounts over the next several decades. This assumption leads to projections of future energy consumption that are not only potentially far too low, but therefore imply, even if unintentionally, that those billions will remain deeply impoverished. Such limited ambition risks becoming self-fulfilling, because the way we view the scale of the challenge will strongly influence the types of policies, technologies, levels of investment, and investment vehicles that analysts and policy makers consider to be appropriate.