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Renewable Energy: Scaling Deployment in the United States Chapter j 5 99

with scaling renewable energy within an established sociotechnical system that
is already capable of providing a full set of “modern” energy services. For
many countries, however, the rate of provision of essential energy services
falls well short of the desirable levels. In such cases, distributed renewable
energy (DRE) systems can be instrumental in achieving goals for sustainable
developments.

THE ENERGY ACCESS GAP: REMOTE AND UNDER-GRID
POPULATIONS NOT BEING REACHED

Providing universal energy access is one of the greatest development chal-
lenges of our time. With almost 16% of the global population lacking access to
electricity, the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7), to
ensure affordable and clean energy to all people by 2030, is a welcome vehicle
by which to unlock the underlying benefits of energy access, which include
choice, opportunity, and freedom. Universal energy access is critical to the
achievement of many other SDG goals, such as ending poverty, achieving food
security and promoting sustainable agriculture, ensuring equitable quality
education, achieving gender equality, promoting sustainable economies and
productive employment for all, reducing inequality, and responding with
urgency to climate change and its impacts.
However, all authoritative sources tracking global electrification rates (such
as the World Bank’s Global Tracking Framework) find that the absolute
number of unelectrified people globally is changing slowly and that more
concerted global action is needed to close the access gap and achieve universal
electricity access by 2030. At the current electrification rates we are not on
track to reach SDG7 goals (Global Tracking Framework, 2017). More
specifically:

l 1.06 billion people lacked access to electricity in 2014, an improvement of
only 2 million over 2012. Although 86.5 million people gained electricity
access each year, this was offset by population growth of 85.5 million per
year.
l The energy access gap is decreasing everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa
(SSA), where, over 2012e2014, energy access growth of 19 million people
per year was outpaced by population growth of 25 million people per year.
In SSA, 600 million people lack access to electricity.
l Based on International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook
projections, with the current trajectory 784 million people will continue to
lack access to electricity in 2030.

Most importantly, over 80% of unelectrified people live in rural areas,
where connections to the central grid are often economically prohibitive and
can take many years to realize (World Energy Outlook (WEO)). Unelectrified
rural populations in low energy access (LEA) countriesdwhere 50% or less of