Bright lights, small villages: why helping Africa get solar power is good for America.

• Author: Thompson, Nicholas

IN MOST WAYS, PATRIENSA IS JUST ANOTHER tiny town amidst lush fanning land in the Ashanti region of Ghana: a remote part of a I remote country where per-capita income is less than a dollar a day. The day starts when the rooster crows and ends at about 9 p.m., when everyone has finished eating their pounded yams and plantains.

To Osei Darkwa, however, Patriensa is the ideal place to build a technological metropolis. A calm, jovial man who isn't sure whether there are 20 or 30 people living in his house, Darkwa was born in Patriensa, educated in Norway, and able to make a little bit of money working as a professor at the University of Illinois. Now he's come back and is currently building a giant telephone, Internet, and health center, with a radio station and potential data-processing facility for foreign companies to boot. Already, he has shipped hundreds of old computers from the United States, set up computer literacy courses, found donated hospital beds, and even promised space to an indigenous healer and her potions. He's currently maxing out his American credit Cards and cajoling friends and fellow villagers to give free labor and donate land. "It's just a sacrifice for a better tomorrow," he says.

But one thing is Stumping him right now: power. The telecenter lies too far away from Ghana's national power grid to receive any electricity, so Darkwa, who needs lights to build his metropolis, has set up solar cells on his roof. Funded partially by an American non-governmental organizations, Greenstar, the cells provide enough power for basic lighting and about five computers. Darkwa would like to do more, but he doesn't have the money to buy further cells; getting electricity from the grid means wading and bribing his way through a corrupt and convoluted bureaucracy.

At first blush, it may not be clear that Darkwa's problem should concern anyone outside Patriensa. But although most Americans couldn't even find Ghana on a map, the energy choices of this small African country, together with those of millions of other people in the developing world, will ultimately affect the environmental, economic, and energy prospects of all Americans. If Darkwa and those like him--some 2 billion energy-starved people around the world--decide to power their televisions and refrigerators with coal and oil, the eventual environmental meltdown will affect every place on earth.

But if wealthier nations can help a large part of their poorer brethren turn to clean and renewable energy, the air will be a 10t cleaner, there will be less pollution and poverty, and new trading markets will develop and the price of oil may even drop. In other words, the United States shouldn't help Darkwa go green merely for his sake, or just because it's a nice thing to do. We should help Darkwa go green because it is profoundly in our own interest.

Power Gridlock

It may sound far-fetched to ask poor rural communities to adopt solar and renewable energy before rich developed countries. But in fact, solar energy makes vastly more sense in Patriensa than it does in Philadelphia. Americans tend to take electricity for granted. You can buy a hair dryer, plug it in, and turn it on just about anywhere, thanks to a "grid" of generating stations, power lines, and transformers that enmeshes the entire country.

But that grid is the product of hundreds of billions of dollars of government subsidies and private investment over the years. In developing countries, by contrast, fully functioning grids tend to be limited to urban areas, are usually nearing obsolescence, or cannot keep up with demand. Most places lack any grid at all. And even if poor countries had the money or inclination to build grids--most have more pressing worries--bringing electricity to small rural villages like Patriensa wouldn't be at the top of their list. As ESKOM, South Africa's largest utility, has discovered, extending the grid to serve a few households often costs significantly more than providing the same village with solar power, and so it has begun to install solar energy in hard-to-reach communities on a monthly-fee basis.

Even where...