Using energy as a community currency for sustainable development of newly electrified communities

Abstract

Investments in energy access and clean energy for Global South countries are considered unprofitable or untenable unless the electrification projects open new avenues of income stream for the affected communities. This study proposes to use energy as a community currency to resolve the economy-ecology dichotomy, crowdfund the electrification project, provide an additional income stream to the community, and thereby ease the addition of clean energy capacity. The study compares the incomes, trade surplus, economic inequality, cost of reliable electricity, and carbon footprint of three newly electrified communities from Cambodia in three scenarios: before and after electrification and a simulated scenario when energy is used as a community currency. The simulated results from our study show that using energy as a community currency helps the newly electrified communities towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) better than conventional electrification. Our results suggest that using Energy as a community currency reduces the cost of reliable energy by at least 5 %, increases income levels by at least 4 %, and reduces the carbon footprint by at least 6 % for a newly electrified community when compared to the conventional electrification process. However, the effects on income inequality could not be confirmed. The results are also simulated with different proportions of household expenses towards externally produced goods, dominated by food expenses, which showed that using energy as a community currency benefits households with lesser dependency on externally produced goods. The overall results suggest that the use of community currency is likely to contribute towards poverty alleviation, access to electrified cooking, lesser consumption of fossil fuel, more hours of study time for children, affordable clean energy, decent economic growth, promote sustainable industrialization, incentivize responsible consumption and institutionalize self-sufficiency at the grass-roots level. Thus, it positively impacts 7 SDGs (#1, #7, #8, #9, #11, #12, #13) directly and 5 SDGs (#3, #4, #5, #6, #16) indirectly, leading to the sustainable development of newly electrified communities.