Media (social and paper) is triumphantly announcing that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but which of the tunnels? Is it the post-pandemic tunnel? Is it the socio-economic tunnel of our society? Or individual tunnels? To answer these questions, I believe each of us needs a bit of time to transition through this post-crisis mode, heal (physically, emotionally or maybe both) and connect/disconnect to or from the network of worldwide and high-frequency exchange relationships (social, commercial, informational, etc.).

 

Thanks to a resilient company structure and a committed team, ME Consult has confidently surpassed the COVID-19 crisis. And although in 2020, working from home seemed to be the new normal, to which we have smoothly transitioned, the second half of 2021 will bring us back to the office. ME Consult is committed to creating and maintaining a safe working environment for its team members. Social facilitation, the sense of collaboration, cohesion and ideation can only be made when we are all physically together. 

 

But how about the beneficiaries of our work, households, small and medium-sized enterprises located in developing countries, already energy and climate-vulnerable? Although the 2021 report on Tracking SDG 7 (collaboration of IEA, IRENA, UNSD, WB, WHO) shows positive statistics, the general trends are rather worrying. The share of people with access to electricity grew up to 90 percent in 2019, meaning that 759 million people still live off-grid. However, when it comes to clean cooking technologies, the share of the global population having such access increased only to 66 percent; in 2019, 2.6 billion people still had no access to clean cooking. Will SDG 7 be achieved by 2030? Will the rate of electrification surpass population growth? Are 9 years sufficient to provide clean cooking to 2.6 billion people, considering that between 2010 and 2019, only 400 million people (out of 3 billion people without access to clean cooking) have been served? On top of that, the COVID-19 crisis has derailed many of the achievements realized in the past 10 years; inequalities between urban and rural, Global North and Global South, men and women, have increased more than ever. End-user affordability and clean energy technology adoption rates have decreased to levels lower than 6 years ago.  

 

Despite such bleak imagery, there is light. Not at the end of the tunnel, but in the tunnel. Climatic events (such as the Amphan cyclone which struck in 2020 Eastern India and Bangladesh, disrupted distribution lines and transformation stations, leaving more than 10 million houses unelectrified), disruptions in global supply chains (due to travel restrictions, lockdowns) and failures of the public sector actors (in 2019, 80 percent of the African national utilities made losses with each new connection, estimated to cost USD 4,000 per each new customer) have demonstrated once again the importance of decentralizing and democratizing access to energy, transforming it then into energy wellbeing (through energy-efficiency measures) and local value creation (through financial inclusion, access to appliances for productive use, and micro-entrepreneurship). These are some of the principles that will guide our projects, content creation, and implementation, with the broader mission of contributing to the development of an economically and socially resilient supply system, which allows a globally just existence within Earth’s ecological limits.