In 2017, I wrote a post, The Case of the Missing Alternative Energy Numbers, on my Worldat100 website. My concern then was that if we didn’t have accurate numbers on how much energy we were producing, how could we know how much we needed to meet our energy needs?  Two years later, frustrated (and surprised!) that there was still no one counting the small amounts of energy people are generating all over the planet, I thought I’d try with the little extra time I have, just out of curiosity. Why not, right? So that’s how it started and I just seem to keep going while waiting for some bigger organization to do this better than I can.

Afghanistan turned out to be the perfect place to begin.* It’s not a country generally associated with modern technology much less solar, wind, and hydropower renewable energy infrastructure. Yet there are renewables everywhere precisely because no reliable country-wide power supply exists. People, especially in rural areas, have been left to fend for themselves. Electrical power is thus decentralized and becoming more so. We’ll probably see this trend in many more countries in the future but Afghanistan is one of the first countries where out of pure necessity people are producing their own renewable energy rather than relying on governments or private companies.

*The reason for starting with Afghanistan is simply that it’s the first country on this list, Renewable electricity output (% of total electricity output) | Data, which was the metric for my Worldat100.org blog and I wanted to start at the beginning. By pure chance, Afghanistan also happens to be the setting for my first novel, An Invisible Woman in Afghanistan.