More than 100 years after Edison's life changing discovery, 1.6-2 billion people around the globe still live without light, in dark and smoke filled homes. The remote and impoverished Himalayan villages of upper Humla, in north-west Nepal, belong to some of the 2.4 billion people who still depend on the use of traditional biomass for their daily energy services such as cooking, heating and light. These activities on open fireplaces have a direct chronic impact on the health and extremely low life expectancy of the women and children along with devastating deforestation.There is a strong relationship between prosperity and access to electricity. The more remote and isolated communities in Nepal generally live in great poverty. Eighty percent of Nepal's 28.5 million people live in rural areas, with around half of these so remote, that neither a road, nor the national grid is ever likely to reach them.While Nepal has no fossil fuel resources, it is a country that is rich in renewable energy resources such as hydropower and solar energy. These abundant and locally available renewable energy resources can be tapped into with appropriate locally developed technologies. Generating and storing electrical energy derived from these rich local energy resources can provide for appropriate and sustainable lighting, which brings potential health, education, social and economic benefits to the people who have previously lived in homes with excessive indoor air pollution. This paper describes the living conditions of some villages in upper Humla, and the possible benefits of a simple village electrification system that provides basic lighting for the homes and the consequent improvements in the living conditions of the villagers.

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Humla Province is a remote mountainous region of northwest Nepal. The climate is harsh and the local people are extremely poor. Most people endure a subsistence culture, living in traditional housing. Energy for cooking and heating comes from fuelwood, supplies of which are diminishing. In order to improve the indoor environment and reduce fuelwood use, smokeless stoves are being introduced to replace the open fire in Humli homes. There is some concern, however, that comfort levels may not be as acceptable with these stoves. The aim of this research was therefore to investigate ways in which the comfort levels in traditional Humli housing might be improved using simple and low cost strategies. Temperature data was recorded in four rooms of a traditional Humli home over a 12-day period and used with fuelwood data to validate a TRNSYS simulation model of the house. This model was then used to evaluate the impact on comfort levels in the house of various energy conservation strategies using PMV and PPD indicators. As a single strategy, it was found that reducing infiltration of outside air was likely to be more effective than increasing the insulation level in the ceilings. The most successful strategy, however, was the creation of sunspaces at the entrances to the living rooms. This strategy increased average internal temperatures by 1.7 and 2.3 °C. In combination with increased insulation levels, the sunspaces reduced comfort dissatisfaction levels by over 50%.

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Development workers' understanding of subsistence farmers' and herders' reluctance to adopt new technologies has been informed for several decades by a focus on the perception of risks and on patterns of diffusion of innovations. People living on the produce of their own land and herds have been described as "risk-averse" and culturally "conservative," and as preferring not to adopt new technologies and farming or husbandry methods that might negatively impact their ability to make it through the next dry or cold season. We have been living and working with agropas

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Abstract. Remote communities in the Nepalese mountains above 2500 m a.s.l. belong to the most precarious in the world. Inhabitants struggle for the minimum in terms of safe drinking water, food and sanitation. Reliable, affordable and clean energy for cooking, room heating and warm water for personal hygiene is often lacking and dependency on firewood very high. The remoteness and unlikeliness of electric grid connection in the coming decades make a diversified energy supply from renewable local resources crucial. Small-scale anaerobic digestion (AD) of organic substrates has been used for long in rural areas of developing countries to produce biogas as energy source and recover residue as organic fertilizer. AD is challenging at high elevations due to year around lower ambient temperatures and lower annual biomass production per area compared to lowlands. Nevertheless, examples of operational household AD exist even above 3000 m a.s.l. in the Andes. Here we compare firewood consumption with biogas potential from organic substrates in a community with 39 households at 3150 m a.s.l. in Jumla District, Nepal. In five households with varying numbers of members and animals kept, mean firewood use and its energy content per capita (cap) and day (d) were 2.1 kg or ca. 25 MJ in spring and 2.3 kg or ca. 28 MJ in winter. Easily available substrates include cow, sheep and horse dung from overnight shelters and human excrements from pit latrines, amounting on average to 1.7 kg wet weight (kg ww ) cap À1 d À1 in spring and 2.2 kg ww cap À1 d À1 in winter. Adjusted to normal conditions (Nm 3 at 0°C, 1013.15 hPa), these substrates yielded on average 0.08 Nm 3 cap À1 d À1 biogas in spring and 0.12 Nm 3 cap À1 d À1 in winter (35-60% methane content) in biochemical methane potential (BMPs) tests at 36°C. This could provide up to 60% of basic cooking needs on average and up to 75% in a "typical" household in terms of members and animals kept. Of the overall thermal energy needs including also room heating ca. 10-20% could be covered, substituting 0.1-0.4 (mean: 0.2) kg firewood cap À1 d À1 . If only animal dung and human excrements are considered, no competition for resources arises as residues can still be used as organic fertilizer. This study supports the design and introduction of planned pilot digesters integrated into on-going community development including pit latrines for substrate availability, greenhouses as possible way of thermal insulation, and planned pico-hydropower plants to use excess electricity during the night for digester heating.