Electricity
It gets very dark here. The Gambia is not far from the equator and we have a fairly steady 12 hour day and 12 hour night, throughout the year. Night falls rapidly. The sun is hot; just half an hour before the sun turns red and sinks behind the Atlantic horizon the intense rays are still sufficient to burn your skin. But half an hour after sunset, the sky is already deeply dark and studded with points of light from far-off stars that dance in their constellations.
When night falls I have to watch my footing as I walk in my neighbourhood. One time I stepped into a (fortunately dry) drainage ditch cutting across my path that I simply did not see. It is common to become victim of the potholes and dips and mounds that make our roads so difficult to drive on (for the skiers amongst you, think of driving on moguls). But if you are unlucky you could fall into a seriously big hole in the road. When water pipes burst they are dug out and fixed, but some holes remain for weeks before they are filled. There was a large hole at the end of my road recently, wide and deep, and it filled with water from the leaking pipe. And there was a man who came each morning to wash there at the side of the road, and drink from the pool.
There appear to be few Health and Safety regulations in operation. These vicious traps are rarely guarded by barriers. During the rainy season, drain covers along the highway were removed. I think they get clogged by debris and the rainwater drains too slowly, so the covers were taken up. And as a result there were lethal holes at the side of the road for three months creating an obstacle for cyclists and the potential for a broken-leg for an absent-minded pedestrian. It would be easy to step from the pavement straight into a hole, particularly in a night-time power-cut when the streetlights go off.
May be this is a surprise, but yes there are streetlights here in the urban districts around the capital, but only along the main highways. Many of them were installed during 2006 when The Gambia hosted the African Union summit. Markets typically close at dusk, but merchants set up stands along the road taking advantage of the artificial light. (And when the lights fail an appealing sight is created by a line of candles illuminating these roadside stalls and stretching into the distance). As a result the highway through my neighbourhood bustles with activity until late evening. It is interesting how human activity is drawn to these lit areas, like insects around a lamp, and it has made me consider how much we rely on light, and for those of us in developed parts of the world, on electric light.
Is there any invention which has had a more dramatic impact on our lifestyles than electricity? Not just light, but kettles and irons, televisions and computers, air conditioning and refrigeration, the internet, music amplification, tube trains and…and so many things. Many of these would be far more difficult if it had not been for the remarkable discovery of how to generate electric current and harness it for a useful purpose. One day, try living an electricity-free day, and see how far you get. If that is too difficult, try simply a day without electric light.
This is the daily experience of most of my friends here. The majority of homes are not connected to any mains services; no water and no electricity. After dark it is hard to prepare food, hard to produce tailored or craft items for sale, it is obviously not possible to work on the land, and it is difficult for children to complete homework. (To read a BBC article about students in Guinea studying under floodlights at the airport in Conakry, click here). When I visit friends, as afternoon turns to evening I get a small taste of what this is like and find the darkness quite debilitating. You adjust your routine to cope with the circumstances but that does not stop the lack of electricity being seriously restrictive to what you and I might consider to be ‘normal’ activity.
It is also interesting that when my Gambian neighbours think of electricity, they think first of light. If a friend enquires whether my home has electricity they actually ask ‘Does your house have light?’ If the power is off when I go to an internet café (think of a dusty cement-block room with simple computers on wooden benches, and a frightening number of extension cables connected to one socket) the attendant might point to the ceiling and tell me ‘We have no light’. Light is synonymous with electricity. And I have realised that, in spite of all the sophisticated technologies and domestic appliances we enjoy that are powered by electricity, the biggest difference to our lives is made by light. The confusion and difficulty to be found in darkness are replaced by the clarity and certainty of the light, and what a transformation that is. I now understand why the writer of Genesis suggested that the first and defining work of the Almighty in creation was to make light. And when Jesus described himself as the Light of the World, I now realise how much that meant to people who, like my neighbours here, struggled in darkness for so many hours out of every day.
Power-cuts are common place. The output of our two Gambian power stations cannot cope with demand, so the lights frequently go off in the evening. It has been worse since the tourist season recommenced in late October; I guess that the hotel districts are given priority. In the few larger towns upcountry that do have power there is a fixed schedule of the hours when current is supplied (for example 6pm to 2am) so at least that enables residents to plan. But in rural areas there is no prospect of connecting ‘light’ to the villages, not for some time yet. So we use lamps and candles (that cause house fires), and businesses that depend on supply must have their own generators. Even that is not trouble-free, as there is no guaranteed supply of fuel.
When power is restored following a power cut there is often a surge that can damage connected appliances. So at work all our computers are plugged into clever boxes (heavy things, about the size of two bricks together) that have two functions. First they act as a surge protector, and secondly they hold sufficient charge that when the power goes off the computer will keep running until the generator in the yard is kicks in. To me it seems ironically unkind that in a country that can hardly afford the computers in the first place we also need further expensive equipment because the electricity supply is unreliable. These boxes do not last long in this dusty environment, and there are several broken ones lying around the office. In fact I have one holding up my desk, which collapsed recently when I was teaching my colleagues how to play rugby.
There is a certain amount of power trading in West African countries, though The Gambia appears to have been omitted. The Manantali Dam in Mali also supplies Mauritania and Senegal as part of the West Africa Power Pool. In a continent which cannot afford oil at current global prices, many countries, like Mali, are searching for alternative means to generate power. Morocco has wind farms and plans to build a thermo-solar power station. Ghana generates hydro-electricity using the huge Volta Dam. South Africa has turned to nuclear generation; Namibia has large reserves of uranium and might follow suit. Biofuel is a possibility; poisonous jatropha nuts grow in arid climates can be crushed into oil. This has been successful in Brazil but perhaps it is ethically questionable in a continent that cannot feed itself to sacrifice land for this purpose.
Guinea, with both mountains and considerable rainfall, has the potential to supply much of West African with hydropower, but due to instability in the region it has not been straightforward to find investors willing to risk their capital in such a project. The World Bank, for example, presented Guinea with a list of 240 conditions to meet before receiving funding. However China, which has become an increasingly conspicuous donor to this region, has offered Guinea a commitment of support in exchange for access to their reserves of bauxite. (‘You people came to take our silver and our gold,’ a man accused me recently as we shared a taxi. And now your aluminium too, I thought).
I saw a picture in a magazine of the world at night, some kind of composite photograph showing urban areas bright with electric light. Europe and North America were lit up like two Christmas trees. In Asia and South America too it was possible to identify the main cities. But the African continent was dark. Most people here want Africa to ‘develop’, whatever that means. They look enviously at the spoils of industrialised Europe. There are countries, mainly in Asia, which have developed considerably in the last twenty years. Taiwan, South Korea and China, amongst others, have experienced significant economic growth (though of course economic performance is not the only way of measuring development).
But there is an ominous cost to industrial expansion. Economic growth invariably means more industry and a higher per capita consumption of energy. As a global community we are now consuming more energy per day than ever before, in terms of oil, gas, coal and electricity. What is the world going to be like when these resources start to run out? Less developed nations are determined to industrialise but they rely on older inefficient technologies that are less clean. Whilst agreements are signed to cut carbon emissions, more and more factories and roads and power stations are built. In China one new coal-fired power station is opened every week. Kyoto targets will be missed.
My impression on all of this is that the rich nations of the world are using more than their fair share of energy. It seems to me that our current levels of energy consumption cannot be sustained and we are going to have to cut back. At the national and international levels we need to consider how to restrict energy use. And at the level of our households we can make appropriate decisions on, for example, reducing our reliance on cars and central heating, considering the efficiency of appliances we buy, and making more effort to recycle and reuse rather than discard.
But we are comfortable in our lavish lifestyles, and not many will vote for a leader who promises, ‘I will increase taxation and ask you to make your lives less comfortable’. So if we cannot reduce, can we make a serious commitment to invest in alternative methods of producing energy? Before the oil runs out, let us use it to build wind and tide turbines and thermo-solar power stations in remote rural hot places (Africa springs to mind). I know there are often environmental issues with these schemes, for example bird habitats that might be destroyed in the Severn Estuary by the installation of a tidal barrage. But I am convinced we should seriously consider these schemes. Will the rich countries make a commitment to finding reliable efficient sources of clean energy? Surely we have the technology. May be we could elect leaders who have this kind of vision, not just those who promise ‘economic growth’, for that way just might be the road towards global climate meltdown.
