Friends of the Earth, E ku ojo meta (Greetings). A thousand apologies for my recent reticence. Perhaps, the prevailing recession also hit my pen. Lol. No, not at all. I had only gone on short hibernation.
My post today is a reflection from an experience that happened to me recently- the keen relationship between energy and water availability.
It happened that there was power outage in my area for a period of 5 days and, as luck would have it, my generator also developed an intractable fault at the same time. It was total wahala. While I was able to deal with the situation by going out to rent a generator to pump water when my supply got exhausted, all around me people complained of water scarcity in their homes. I could also empathize from a distance.
This scenario plays out everyday in great part of Nigeria and Africa, where people experience acute water shortage simply because there is no light (electricity) to power the pumps that would provide water for their use. In villages and slums, this reality bite harder than in cities, as majority of their inhabitants rely on streams, rivers and wells to get water to use. Investments by the government on water supply over the decades has not been commensurate with expansion of population, and this could lead to disaster in future if it is not checked.
It is why I hope that government policies will involve experts in order to proffer lasting solutions to the issue of water scarcity. There is a solar powered community borehole beside our office at Ikeja that supplies water on a constant basis to the populace around. It was constructed by the Federal Government. I expect this to be replicated in remote villages and slums in Nigeria to bring succor to the citizens there not readily supplied with pipe borne water.
Believe me, energy poverty brings untold suffering for people who cannot afford to get basic supply of it. Yet the irony of it is energy supply is infinite; IT ONLY NEEDS TO BE EXPLORED.
The cloud is a bank of energy, let's generate electricity for you from there.
Take care.
WSO
