This is a chapter in the book entitled ‘How can Tanzania move from poverty to prosperity?’

The idea for this book first originated in 2012 when writing a paper for a workshop for the University of Dar es Salaam Mwalimu Nyerere Chair on Development. More recently, it has been driven by the fact that, despite making some progress, the country continues to struggle in the seemingly never-ending cycle of poverty, disease, aid dependency, the dearth of infrastructure and corruption. These are challenges that policy-makers and the government grapple with day in day out

This paper uses three rounds of a rich panel data set to investigate the determinants of household cooking fuel choice and energy transition in urban Ethiopia. It is observed that the expected energy transition did not occur following economic growth in Ethiopia during the decade 2000–2009.

Coal has fueled China’s fast growth in the last decades, but it also severely pollutes the air and causes many health issues. The magnitude of the health damage caused by air pollution depends on the location of emission sources. In this paper, we look into the spatial distribution of coal-fired power plants, the major emission sources in China, and investigate the determining factors behind the distribution. We see an overall increase in installed coal-fired power capacity in recent years, with capacity leaps in some provinces.

Inefficient firewood and charcoal usage contributes massively to global greenhouse gas emissions and causes four million mortal diseases a year. Relative to other climate protection measures, public investments in the dissemination of improved biomass cooking stoves provide a very effective low cost measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More than three billion people in developing countries rely on inefficient cooking stoves fuelled by firewood and charcoal.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, the international community has dedicated a considerable amount of its lending portfolios and technical assistance capacities to investments into infrastructure such as roads, electricity, and water networks. In spite of these continous efforts, billions of people worldwide are still lacking acces to electricity, clean water, sanitation, and quality roads. At the same time, the lack of infrastructure access is often said to be a major barrier to sustainable human development.

More than 1.1 billion people in developing countries are lacking access to electricity. Based on the assumption that electricity is a prerequisite for human development, the United Nations has proclaimed the goal of providing electricity to all by 2030. In recent years, Pico-Photovoltaic kits have become a low-cost alternative to investment intensive grid electrification. Using a randomized controlled trial, we examine uptake and impacts of a simple Pico-Photovoltaic kit that barely exceeds the modern energy benchmark defined by the United Nations.

The objective of the United Nations Sustainable Energy for All initiative (SE4All) is to provide electricity by 2030 to the 1.1 billion people in developing countries that hitherto lack access. The OECD/IEA quantifies the investment requirements of this to be at 640 billion USD. Little evidence exists on socio-economic impacts of electrification. The present paper is the first to causally investigate the effects of electrification in Africa on all beneficiary groups.

We use a mathematical programming model to examine the impacts of simultaneous implementation of two US biofuel and bioenergy policies on commodity markets and spatial distribution of future cellulosic biorefineries.

We developed a mathematical programming model to estimate the supply of cellulosic biomass in Illinois at various biomass prices and examine the implications of biomass production for the maintenance costs of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). We find that Illinois has the potential to produce about 38.4–54.5 million dry metric tons (MT) of biomass in 2020 at a biomass price of $150/MT, depending on the production costs of cellulosic feedstocks, residue collection technology, and rates of yield increases of conventional crops.