Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China and elsewhere have become a favourite way to make electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets.
This article was written by Keith Bradsher and was published in the International Herald Tribune on January 8, 2007.
Excerpts from the article :
Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China and elsewhere have become a favorite way to make electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world.
But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution problems in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas.
"There has been a mushrooming of these decentralized diesel generators," said Ibrahim Rehman, a rural energy expert at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. While many generators are purchased initially to power irrigation pumps, they have also opened up a huge new market for television sets, which in turn creates demand for even more diesel generators.
"You either want clean air or television" in many villages, said Nandita Mongia, the chief of the United Nations Development Program's regional energy program for Asia and the Pacific. In nearly all cases, television wins.
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