Are High initial costs of renewable energy installation hampering mitigation efforts?

A decision on May 21, 2018, by a Nakuru court in Kenya to temporarily ban the Energy Regulation Commission (ERC) from cracking down on landlords who fail to install solar water heaters on their property has turned the spotlight on whether cost could be a barrier to the adoption of practices that promote climate change mitigation.

In 2012 Kenya came up with the Energy (Solar Water Heating) Regulations, aiming to increase the use of renewable energy by residences and institutions whose occupants use more than 100 litres of heated water per day. These include residential apartments, universities, hospitals, schools and commercial laundries (dry cleaners) among others.

This move was in tandem with Kenya’s desire to adopt a low carbon development pathway, having developed its National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS) in 2010. At the time of coming up with the regulations, the country had just embarked on the development of the National Climate Change Action Plan (NCAP), which is the blueprint for implementing the NCCRS.

The ERC, being cognizant of the need to allow sufficient time for property owners to install solar water heaters, set aside a period of five years up to November 2017 for building owners to comply with the regulations. However, most landlords had not complied by the deadline and hence the reason why one of them went to court to contest the ban.

The latest intervention by the judiciary might be as good an indicator as any other that the time has come to assess whether cost might be a barrier to adoption of renewable energy technologies in line with Kenya’s stated objective of integration climate change mitigation in development planning.

At the time when the regulations were developed, a number of challenges that needed to be overcome in order to have all residences meet set criteria had solar water heaters installed had been brought to the fore.  One of them was the shortage of personnel with skills for installing solar thermal systems for heating water. The sheer scale of the installations required was enormous. Given that the regulations were to apply throughout the country, it was evident that shortage of skilled manpower to undertake the work on that scale was going to be an impediment to building owners and investors even if installation cost was not a barrier.

This challenge was underscored by the fact that the regulations were specific about the qualifications of persons to carry out the installations, which were quite high. According to the regulations, those authorised to install the solar water heating systems had to be engineering graduates with qualifications in plumbing. Other cadres were holders of higher national diploma with specialisation in plumbing or plumbers with Government Trade Certificate Grade 1 with additional experience of three years in plumbing, or those with Government Trade Certificate Grade 2 and six years experience in plumbing.

The other barriers identified at the outset was the cost. Many felt that requiring buildings that have already been constructed to install solar water heaters would make construction more expensive and might, therefore, slow down investments in the construction sector. Particularly vocal on this particular score was the consumers federation of Kenya (Cofek).

With the most recent suspension of the mandatory installation of solar water heating by the courts, which has come despite a six-month extension of the compliance period, it is emerging that cost is indeed an impediment to the enforcement of the ban.

The current stalemate between the ERC on one hand and building owners on the other is a good illustration that measures to address climate change mitigation can take a financial dimension, and hence require the involvement of a range of stakeholders and the existence of supportive policies and laws for their sustainable implementation. This is probably why mitigation actions have remained harder to implement, given that they might involve high cost of adoption or change to more climate-friendly alternatives, which though good for the climate may require either additional investment or the use of new unfamiliar systems or protocols and hence the need for overcoming the inevitable resistance to change.

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