Green Options

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Chances are the next time you are served tea with sugar, it probably may interest you to know that both commodities passed through green and sustainable processes to reach your breakfast table.

And what’s more - small holder farmers in east Africa who worked hard to put a more environmentally friendly cup of tea in front of you not only reaped a bumper harvest from their labor, they also got to sell excess electricity generated to local grid operators.

The green funding mechanism, Global Environment Facility or GEF and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) are collaborating to implement small-scale hydropower projects and cogeneration power projects in several East African states in two initiatives.

The projects are meant to reduce the tea industry’s energy costs, enhance global competitiveness of the region’s tea industry. It hopes to increase the share of global tea revenues, flowing to the region’s tea farming community as well as provide opportunities for extending clean electricity to rural communities.

It sounded to me like the biblical story of Moses and the Burning Bush. As an African who maintains a second home (nearly all of us do) somewhere deep in the African bush, what more use of the bush could I think of other than to put my livestock to graze in the scorching sun whole day, then return home with a few dry wood sticks to light up the yard fire under the twilight moon while ebbing away at my favorite roast corn cob? Or where the wild animals make their homes?

Aha, the African Bush! Savor a-bush-to-electricity energy project in the African hinterland! What’s the connection? Well, it controls the wildlife habitat in a positive way that ensures an ecological balance in the Namibian bush, provides a source of livelihood to surrounding communities by opening more space in the farmlands as a way of community conservation and powers local homes and businesses by feeding the electricity grid!

I like what they called the project: CBEND or Combating Bush Encroachment for Namibia’s Development because an 1MW electricity plant will be entirely powered by harvested invader bush and the electricity produced will be supplied to the national grid using technology dubbed wood gasification.

Ten million hectares of land containing up to 10,000 bushes per hectare will be freed to produce between 5 to 25 tons of biomass per hectare in a bush thinning process that allows re-growth from the roots with a repeat maturity period of 10 to 15 years. This translates to 125 million tons of biomass or 500 TWh.