Solar power dominates rural Tanzania, says report

Posted on :Wednesday , 19th July 2017

The report, released earlier this week by the National Bureau of Statistics and the Rural Energy Agency shows that grid electricity is the second largest source of power in rural areas with 34.5% of households connected, while solar is leading by nearly 65%.

"The results show that solar power is the dominant electricity source in rural areas as 64.8% of the rural households were using electricity generated from solar power. Private entity and individual electricity generated from own sources (excluding solar) was the least source of electricity among rural households at 0.6%," part of the report reads.

According to the Energy Access Situation Report, in general, electricity access (to any form of electricity) in rural areas has improved from 6.1% in 2011 to 16.9% in 2016.

"One general observation from this data is that more efforts are needed to improve the accessibility of modern energies to rural residents in order to achieve sets of energy targets by 2030 as stipulated in 2015 Energy Policy," the report said.

Solar power accelerate electricity access

The report also indicates that generally 24.7% of the households with access to electricity in Tanzania use solar energy as a source of power.

In urban areas, only about 3.4% of the households use solar power as the only source of power.

"Disparities on sources of energy were significant between rural and urban residents. Households connected to grid electricity were lower (34.5%) in rural than in urban areas (96.4%), while the number of households connected to solar power was higher (64.8%) in rural than in urban areas (3.4%)," the report says.

The distribution of solar power connectivity shows that regions in Mainland Tanzania have adopted the use of solar in varying degrees.

Solar power electricity is significant in Lindi (75.5%), Njombe (63.4%), Mtwara (61.1%), Katavi (57.6%) and Ruvuma (54.7%).

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