Abstract
As an increasing number of California households install solar panels, the current approach to retail electricity pricing makes it harder for the state’s utilities to recover their costs. Unless policymakers change how they price grid-supplied electricity, a regulatory crisis where a declining number of less affluent customers will be asked to pay for a growing share of the costs is likely to occur.
Although development organizations agree that reliable access to energy and energy services—one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals—is likely to have profound and perhaps disproportionate impacts on women, few studies have directly empirically estimated the impact of energy access on women's empowerment. This is a result of both a relative dearth of energy access evaluations in general and a lack of clarity on how to quantify gender impacts of development projects. Here we present an evaluation of the impacts of the Solar Market Garden—a distributed photovoltaic irrigation project—on the level and structure of women's empowerment in Benin, West Africa. We use a quasi-experimental design (matched-pair villages) to estimate changes in empowerment for project beneficiaries after one year of Solar Market Garden production relative to non-beneficiaries in both treatment and comparison villages (n = 771). To create an empowerment metric, we constructed a set of general questions based on existing theories of empowerment, and then used latent variable analysis to understand the underlying structure of empowerment locally. We repeated this analysis at follow-up to understand whether the structure of empowerment had changed over time, and then measured changes in both the levels and likelihood of empowerment over time. We show that the Solar Market Garden significantly positively impacted women's empowerment, particularly through the domain of economic independence. In addition to providing rigorous evidence for the impact of a rural renewable energy project on women's empowerment, our work lays out a methodology that can be used in the future to benchmark the gender impacts of energy projects.
Dr. Forbes chairs the Steam Engineering Companies of Forbes Marshall, India’s leading Steam Engineering and Control Instrumentation firm.
Dr. Forbes was an occasional Lecturer and Consulting Professor at Stanford University from 1987 to 2004, where he developed courses on technology in newly industrializing countries. He received his Bachelors, Masters and PhD degrees from Stanford University.
Dr. Forbes is on the Board of several educational institutions and public companies. He is the Chairman of Centre for Technology, Innovation and Economic Research in Pune. He has long been an active member of CII and has, at various times, chaired the National Committees on Higher Education, Innovation, Technology and International Business. He was President of CII from 2016-2017.
About the Colloquia:
In 2016, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in collaboration with the Stanford Center for South Asia, launched a series of public lectures to broaden our understanding and discussion of contemporary India — its enormous domestic potential and problems, its place in the region and the world, and the ambitious agenda of the new Modi administration. Building on the strong engagement of those issues from across the university community and beyond, we are continuing the series, with generous support from the U.S. India Business Council, in the 2017-2018 academic year. We will draw business, political, diplomatic and academic experts from the U.S. and India to explore topics including India’s innovation economy, India-China relations, India’s pivotal role in global health, and U.S.-India relations.
This Colloquia is co-sponsored with
Abstract: The United States is (belatedly) waking up to the risk that adversaries will use social media and botnets to influence U.S. elections. However, we have only begun to analyze how adversaries might conduct information operations in the United States to help advance other political goals, especially during intense crises or escalating cyber conflicts. Strategies to counter such information operations in the U.S. homeland do not exist. To help begin filling that gap, this presentation examines the risk that adversaries will combine cyberattacks on the power grid with disinformation campaigns, tailored to maximize the disruptive effect of blackouts and gain leverage over U.S. leaders for conflict resolution. The presentation also proposes how the electric industry can build on its expertise for “unity of messaging” in hurricane-induced outages, and partner with government agencies to meet the very different (and vastly more difficult) challenges of countering information warfare.
Speaker Bio: Paul Stockton is the Managing Director of Sonecon LLC, an economic and security advisory firm in Washington, DC. Before joining Sonecon, Dr. Stockton served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs from May 2009 until January 2013. In that position, he helped lead the Department’s response to Superstorm Sandy and other disasters. Dr. Stockton also guided Defense Critical Infrastructure Protection policies and programs. Dr. Stockton was twice awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, DOD's highest civilian award. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BA from Dartmouth College. He is the author of Superstorm Sandy: Implications for Designing a Post-Cyber Attack Power Restoration System and numerous other publications on cybersecurity and infrastructure resilience.
Solar energy installations in arid and semi-arid regions are rapidly increasing due to technological advances and policy support. Although solar energy provides several benefits such as reduction of greenhouse gases, reclamation of degraded land, and improved quality of life in developing countries, the deployment of large-scale renewable energy infrastructure may negatively impact land and water resources. Meeting the ever-expanding energy demand with limited land and water resources in the context of increasing demand for alternative uses such as agricultural and domestic consumption is a major challenge. The goal of this study was to explore opportunities to colocate solar infrastructures and agricultural crops to maximize the efficiency of land and water use. We investigated the energy inputs/outputs, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and economics of solar installations in northwestern India in comparison to aloe vera cultivation, another widely promoted and economically important land use in these systems. The life cycle analyses show that the colocated systems are economically viable in some rural areas and may provide opportunities for rural electrification and stimulate economic growth. The water inputs for cleaning solar panels are similar to amounts required for annual aloe productivity, suggesting the possibility of integrating the two systems to maximize land and water use efficiency. A life cycle analysis of a hypothetical colocation indicated higher returns per m3 of water used than either system alone. The northwestern region of India has experienced high population growth in the past decade, creating additional demand for land and water resources. In these water-limited areas, coupled solar infrastructure and agriculture could be established in marginal lands with low water use, thus minimizing the socioeconomic and environmental issues resulting from cultivation of economically important non-food crops (e.g., aloe) in prime agricultural lands.