Electricity Governance Initiative

When Kenya's Najile health clinic lacked electricity, clinicians couldn't vaccinate children or deliver babies at night. Rooftop solar panels changed everything.

It’s easy to see which households are connected to the grid, but regulatory commissions and utilities often lack information on supply interruptions, voltage levels or blackouts. It's a big reason so many Kenyans don't have reliable power.

India plans to generate 160 gigawatts of wind and solar power by 2022, creating 330,000 new jobs. For the country's rural poor, these clean energy positions offer a lucrative alternative to subsistence farming.

A bottom-up open data project is making it possible for residents and utilities to better understand shortfalls in Indonesia's electrical grid.

Electricity planners often confront the energy access gap by increasing supply, without considering how consumers actually use and pay for electricity. Creating a lasting solution is actually far more complicated.

More than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity; 71 million in Kenya and Tanzania alone. Rentable solar systems can provide a safe, affordable solution, but they haven't taken off – yet.

A "prosumer" produces and consumes electricity, usually through rooftop solar panels, while also selling power back to the grid. Prosumers could play an important role in helping India meet its ambitious goal of installing 40 gigawatts of rooftop solar capacity by 2022.

In India, Tamil Nadu Electricity Governance Initiative (TEGI)—a network of consumer and civil society groups—has been using the Electricity Governance Initiative’s new tool, 10 Questions to Ask About Integrated Resources Planning, to evaluate the state’s current planning approach and understand how it can be improved.

This tool was designed to help make decision-making processes more transparent and enable greater engagement in the electricity sector. To date, TEGI’s work provides a good example of how this tool can be used to start putting Integrated Resources Planning (IRP) principles into practice.

How is the price of electricity set and what exactly are consumers paying for? Are today’s electricity tariffs too high or too low?

WRI's Electricity Governance Initiative program explains the details behind electric tariffs in a new working paper, 10 Questions to Ask about Electricity Tariffs, which offers a tool that stakeholders involved in tariff-setting processes can use to increase their knowledge and capacity in decision-making processes.

The authors discuss how energy stakeholders from utilities to government officials to consumers can learn from the Thai Solar PV Roadmap Initiative (TSRI), an initiative that aims to provide the Thai government with recommendations on how to both effectively and inclusively pursue greater solar power development.