Bangladesh sees surge in use of solar energy

Tue, 31 Jul, 2012

By Syful Islam

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AlertNet): As costs fall and incomes rise, power-hungry Bangladesh is seeing a surge in the adaptation home solar energy systems.

Last year, close to 40,000 units a month were installed on average across the country; this year installations have surged to 55,000 a month, according to Ruhul Quddus, head of the Rural Services Foundation, a Bangladeshi charity. His charity is installing 11,000 solar power systems a month, up from 8,000 a month last year, he said.

Altogether, 30 percent more homes are using solar power in Bangladesh than a year ago – a change driven by a rise in purchasing capacity and falling prices.

“Rural people now want to improve their quality of life,” including by trading kerosene lamps for solar and using the latest electrical appliances, said Abser Kamal, chief executive office of Grameen Shakti, a pioneering organisation in renewable energy in Bangladesh.

Per capita income has been rising in Bangladesh in recent years as the country’s growth rate has improved. During the last fiscal year, per capita hit income hit $848 a year, up from $676 three years ago, according to government figures. The country’s growth rate during the last fiscal year was 6.32 percent, and this year the government is targeting growth of 7.2 percent.

Installing solar power in their homes helps families with a variety of tasks, Kamal said.

A RANGE OF BENEFITS

“By using a solar home system they now can work long hours, can keep shops open a longer time, their children’s can study for a longer period, and they also can watch television and recharge their cell phone handsets,” he said.

Kamal’s organisation is responsible for installing about 60 percent of the new solar units being sold in Bangladesh, or about 25,000 a month. By October, the organization hopes to have installed a million units across the country.

Raihan Alam, a rickshaw puller in Nischintapur village in Bangladesh’s southeastern Chandpur district, in April bought a solar home system (SHS) to light his house, paying 20,000 taka (about $250). The money came from earnings from land he inherited from his father and from savings.

“Our village has grid electricity but the government stopped providing new household connections for a long time. So I had no option but to buy a SHS to light my house,” said Alam, the father of two children who attend school.

Before buying the solar system, “my daughters were less interested in studying long into the night by the blunt light of a kerosene lamp and they went to sleep early. Now they are happy to continue studying longer than usual with the sharp light of SHS,” he said.

He said he now also hoped to buy a television set for entertainment in his house.

Alam’s brother Amirul Islam is also saving to buy a solar energy system for his house as his family members are also eager to get better-quality lighting.

Since 2003 the World Bank has provided more than $300 million to support the solar home system program of the Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL), a state-run organization that promotes renewable energy under the Rural Electrification and Renewable Energy Development (RERED) project.

GRID FALLING SHORT

With only 5,500 megawatts of grid electricity generation, heavily populated Bangladesh can meet scarcely half of its power demand via the grid. Almost half the area of the country still remains in the dark at night where grid electricity cannot reach or is not economically viable.

But that is changing as around 5 percent of the country’s 32 million households now have solar home systems, experts said.

At present, renewable energy sources contribute only 55 megawatts of energy to the country’s energy production. But the government aims to increase that to 500 megawatts by 2015 as part of its social commitment to provide electricity to all by 2020.

World Bank funding has helped make the solar energy systems more attractive to families by cutting their cost by about $28 and supporting payment in installments for up to three years.

Rural households can now buy the systems from non-governmental organizations for a 10 to 15 percent down payment, with the remaining payments made in monthly installments over two or three years. The average price of a 50 watt-peak solar home system is about Tk 25,000 ($312).

“With a 50 watt-peak capacity of SHS, one can light four lamps, one television set, and charge cell phone handsets,” said Ruhul Quddus of Rural Services Foundation, one of the installers of systems.

Helping families adopt solar energy also means they no longer use kerosene oil and candles in their homes, which can save money, Quddus said.

STEPPING UP INSTALLATION

The Infrastructure Development Company Ltd. has a target to finance installation of one million solar home systems by the end of 2012. It has partnered with 29 organisations to install the systems.

Today, more than 1.3 million solar home systems have been installed in rural areas of Bangladesh.

Zubair K M Sadeque, energy finance specialist for the World Bank in Dhaka, told the AlertNet that the bank is preparing now a new project to improve access to clean energy in rural areas and promote energy efficiency.

The proposed project would extend support for another 550,000 solar home systems, and support other renewable energy options for providing electricity in rural areas, including solar mini-grids, biomass gasification and the use of biogas.

The program would also aim to replace 1,500 diesel irrigation pumps with solar pumps, and put in place a million improved cookstoves and 20,000 biogas plants to produce energy for cooking, as well as support replacement of incandescent lights with more energy efficient ones.

“An average 50 watt-peak SHS saves about 6 liters of kerosene consumption per month per household. When the total number of installed SHS is considered, this represents a significant fuel savings. The SHS program is being registered with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) so that Bangladesh can claim carbon credits for this fuel savings,” said Sadeque.

Syful Islam is a journalist with The Financial Express newspaper in Bangladesh. He can be reached at: youths1990@yahoo.com

http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/bangladesh-sees-surge-in-use-of-solar-energy/

Experts seek ways to avert water crisis in Dhaka

Mon, 16 Jul 2012

By Syful Islam

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AlertNet) – Bangladesh’s water experts are forecasting a water crisis in the country’s capital, due to its rapidly rising population and overdependence on underground water which is being depleted at an alarming rate.

According to the World Bank, Dhaka is fast becoming one of the world’s largest cities, with its population of nearly 14 million expected to rise to 22-25 million by 2020.

“Every day new buildings are rising up and people from the countryside are pouring (in) here, but no new water sources are created,” said Hasin Jahan, programme director of WaterAid Bangladesh, a development organisation.

According to Jahan, the area of Dhaka city has doubled in size since the 1990s and the population has increased by 1.5 times. Water for drinking is only part of the issue, she said. Large quantities are also consumed by everything from flushing lavatories to gardening, and washing cars to construction work.

At present Dhaka is dependent on underground sources for 87 percent of the 2.2 billion litres of water consumed every day. The balance is collected from surface sources.

The Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (WASA) extracts groundwater using 620 deep tube wells. In addition, more than 2,200 private wells also draw water to serve high-rise buildings and various institutions.

FALLING WATER LEVELS

But the overdependence on groundwater is causing the water table to fall by about one meter (three feet) per year in the metropolitan area. According to Eftekharul Alam of the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation, by 2011 Dhaka’s groundwater level had dropped to 52 metres (169 feet) below mean sea level, compared with 46 metres (150 feet) in 2004.

“The excessive extraction of water by the Dhaka WASA is causing the water level (to) drop,” he said.

Alam, an agricultural, water and environmental engineer, said that the underground water supply used to be recharged with water from nearby Gazipur and Mymensingh districts. But this is no longer happening as the water level in those districts has itself dropped.

Worse, Alam anticipates a serious water crisis in the capital because the aquifers are now being recharged with seawater, he said.

“Saline water is intruding to fill up the space, posing a threat to getting fresh drinking water in the future,” he said.

The only effective way to recharge the aquifers, he said, is by injecting rainwater and river water – but that would first have to be treated to ensure the aquifers don’t become polluted.

Alam said the Dhaka WASA emits 1,000 tonnes of untreated human waste into the rivers adjacent to the city every day, which means river water is unfit for human consumption.

PLENTY OF RAIN

However, WaterAid’s Jahan said the average rainfall in Dhaka is more than 2,100 millimetres per year, and that a significant amount of this could be used to meet water demand and recharge aquifers if it were captured.

The organisation has constructed four rainwater harvesting systems in Dhaka. The water gathered is used partly for flushing lavatories and partly for groundwater recharging.

The Institute of Water Modelling (IWM), a government organisation, estimates that if 60 percent of rainfall falling on the existing concrete rooftops in Dhaka were harvested, it would provide nearly 200 million litres of water to residents each day.

Managing director of Dhaka WASA Taqsem A. Khan said that steps are being taken to gradually reduce the city’s dependence on groundwater because of the declining water table. According to Khan, it is difficult for groundwater to recharge adequately in the city because of the increasing lack of open space for it to collect.

“Artificial recharge of the underground aquifers through injecting harvested rainwater is the only solution,” Khan said.

WASA is constructing four surface water treatment plants in Dhaka at a cost of $1.8 billion, with the aim of supplying 70 percent of the city’s water demand from surface sources.

Water for the plants will be drawn from less polluted rivers 60 km (38 miles) from the city. The plants are expected to produce about 1.6 billion litres of clean water per day.

Conservation of water will be equally important to dealing with growing demand, Khan said.

He thinks that the city’s daily demand for water will not exceed 2.3 billion litres in 2021 if individual consumption can be cut down to 80 litres per day.

“Presently Dhaka (residents) consume 120 litres of water per person per day, which is not usual for people of a less-developed country,” he said.

He said most water waste was the result of a general lack of awareness of the need for water conservation and irresponsible water use by middle-income and rich residents.

Syful Islam is a journalist with The Financial Express newspaper in Bangladesh. He can be reached at: youths1990@yahoo.com

http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/experts-seek-ways-to-avert-water-crisis-in-dhaka/

Bangladesh flood forecast ignored

Syful Islam

6 July 2012 |scidev.net

[DHAKA] Forecasts of Bangladesh’s current floods were largely ignored by people living in the affected areas, say scientists, exposing gaps in disaster preparedness.

At least 100 people died and 250,000 were left homeless when flash floods and landslides that followed torrential rains in Bangladesh in the last week of June, according to officials.

Ainun Nishat, vice-chancellor of the BRAC university, said both the meteorological department and the water development board had forecast the floods accurately but their warnings were ignored by many local people.

Sajidul Alam, an official at the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD), said, "Days before the recent disaster in Chittagong, we warned people of possible heavy rainfall and flooding."

"We asked people, especially those who live in the mountainous area, to take safe shelter fearing landslides, since the rains were continuing for three to four days. But they did not take the warnings seriously, resulting in a large number of fatalities," Alam said.

Amirul Hosen, executive director of the Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre, Dhaka, told SciDev.Net that currently, the accuracy for 24-hour forecasts is 93 per cent, 88 per cent for two days and 78 per cent for three days.

A low-lying delta that drains major rivers such as the Ganges, Brahmaputra and the Teesta, Bangladesh is one of the world's most flood-vulnerable countries.

The centre is currently working on five-day flood forecasts by including data from India on water levels in the Brahmaputra and Ganges – rivers that the two countries share.

While Bangladesh has emerged as a leader in disaster management in South Asia, there are still gaps in taking prompt action based on flood forecasts, analysts said.

"We are much better than any in cyclone warning. But in flood prediction, we are lacking," Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, told SciDev.Net.

He said that while the government was making efforts to disseminate flood forecast information through mobile phones, gaps remained in management such as inadequate shelters and people’s varying response to warnings.

Officials at the BMD said while the government has for the last two years been issuing local advisories to people living in mountain areas, anticipating landslides triggered by heavy rains, poor communities have no flood shelters to go to.

Mountain communities normally flee to the plains below to seek shelter. But, in the latest floods, incessant rains had inundated the plains, depriving them of that option.

http://www.scidev.net/en/south-asia/news/bangladesh-flood-forecast-ignored.html

Bangladesh cuts funds for science research, education

Syful Islam

5 July 2012 | scidev.net

[DHAKA] Bangladesh has cut its funds for science research and education by about a quarter — 27 per cent — compared to last year while hiking up allocation for atomic energy in its latest annual budget.

Funding for key scientific organisations, such as the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR) and the National Institute of Biotechnology (NIBT), have suffered cuts.

In the 2012–2013 annual budget announced last week (28 June), Bangladesh’s finance minister Abul Mal Abdul Muhith announced US$ 46.25 million for the science and technology ministry, down from the US$ 63.75 million allocated in 2011–2012.

The Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission received the largest chunk of the science budget pie with US$ 15.57 million – up from US$ 14.28 million in the previous year. In contrast, the NIBT will get US$ 662,500 against the US$ 737,500 allocated last year.

In the new fiscal year some US$ 1,750,000 have been allocated for science and technology programmes against last fiscal’s US$1,875,000.

BCSIR will get US$120 million against last year’s US$ 128.75 million. However, BCSIR’s member for finance, Dilip Sharma, told SciDev.Net, "This year’s allocation reduction may not hamper our research activity to a large extent, since the cut was not high."

Scientists say the lower allocation for science could have a negative impact on research(http://www.scidev.net/en/science-and-innovation-policy/r-d/ ) in science and technology and education.

Khandaker Siddique-e-Rabbani, professor at the department of physics at the University of Dhaka, told SciDev.Net: "….you can’t downsize allocation of (science) funds if you really want expansion of the sector."

Ainun Nishat, vice-chancellor of BRAC University, one of Bangladesh’s largest private universities, described the government’s allocation for research and science education as "very meagre". However, Yafes Osman, junior minister for science and technology, contended that the overall allocation for science has not decreased since other ministries are also engaged in science-related programmes.

Osman cited the example of ‘Digital Bangladesh’, a government initiative under the ministry of information and communication to provide free computers to schoolchildren. "So you can’t say that allocation for science education and research has been downsized."

"We are trying to give a laptop and a multimedia projector to every school. So, science is everywhere," Osman added.

http://www.scidev.net/en/south-asia/news/bangladesh-cuts-funds-for-science-research-education.html