Renewable energy technologies harness solar and wind power and other natural energy resources, and as such, serve an important role in battling environmental problems. They also provide a very effective means of supplying electricity to the isolated towns and settlements of small island countries. In February 1998, Japan sent an aid survey team to Vanuatu to assess its community power needs and explore the feasibility of exploiting renewable energy resources to foster community development and improve the local standard of living.

As the survey team discovered, Vanuatu is a nation of small, widely scattered villages, each typically of a few dozen households in scale. Only two cities, including the capital, and their surrounding districts receive systematic electric utility service. Most other towns and villages have little more than small, diesel-powered generators to rely on, and the household electrification rate for Vanuatu as a whole is only 7 percent. Yet another finding was that most of the elementary schools do not yet have any access to electricity. In its report, the team concluded that household solar powered electric generation systems would be an effective way of remedying these difficulties.

In order to utilize these systems on a sustained basis and put them into operation on a broad scale, the study report therefore noted that it would be important to establish a maintenance framework through pilot project operations, and provide technical guidance in materials and system operations.

These study findings prompted the government of Vanuatu to ask Japan for technical cooperation. In May 1999, Japan sent a team to the island nation to conduct a preliminary project survey, and also began working on the necessary aid frameworks. Technical cooperation in putting together the system maintenance framework is currently in progress.

The pilot project will install small solar generating units in the homes in four selected model villages, and have the energy unit of the Ministry of Lands, Geology, Winds, Energy, Environment and Water Resource of Vanuatu work together with villagers in providing system maintenance while sustaining their economic self-reliance. In terms of protecting the environment as well as providing an effective means of electrification for isolated island countries like Vanuatu, renewable energy technologies seem destined to assume growing importance in the years ahead.