Abstract
Globally, around 1.06 billion people still do not have access to electricity, and most are living in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia. Off-grid renewable energy solutions have arisen as a mainstream solution to expand access to modern energy services. The purpose of this study was to assess the role of a solar home system to socioeconomic development and reduction of greenhouse gas emission in rural kebele of Gesha wereda, southern, Ethiopia. From the total population, a survey was conducted with a structured questionnaire for 229 households that were systematically selected from three rural kebeles which were selected purposively.
The total of 18 the semi-structured interview and 6 focus group discussion was conducted. Due to technology-based social research, a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches is applied. All collected data were analyzed by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences and Microsoft excel and, the qualitative data were analyzed through intensive textual analysis. The descriptive statistics results shown households were agreeing on the solar home system in social aspect benefit to health, education, access to information, socialization, safety and security, consuming women, and children's time. From an economical point of view; better to consuming day to day traditional energy source expenditure and create new income for the beneficiary. The solar home system has the ability to substitute the total traditional energy source expenditure from one to two years by reducing greenhouse gas emissions effectively at the same time, households are able to get more than one better illuminate light. An average enterprise monthly generates 944.45Ethiopian birr by watching TV and hair barberries. Also, from exaction on mobile charging monthly, they get an average of 550 Ethiopian birrs. Environmental aspect; it reduced traditional energy sources relate to greenhouse gas emission. An average of the annual rate of total Emissions reduction by firewood light source was 4.83 t CO2 equivalent per household and kerosene was of 0.046t CO2 equivalent per household. As soon as, households installing SHS, can able to offset a significant amount of greenhouse gas emission from the traditional source of light. To increase the role of the solar home system on rural area households it is better to share the best practice trends of SHS user to other non -user to improve their awareness on the technology, provides appropriate credit access of SHS to address the rural and remote area poor households, strength the potential of local solar technicians through finance and skill improvements to minimize the maintenance cost of SHS, controls illegal solar supplier and seller and support the legal supplier and seller of SHS to sustain the technology adoption.
Keywords: Benefit, renewable energy, off-grid, traditional energy source, solar home system,
greenhouse gas.