Siem Reap Factuals

Energy & Fuel

Savong School is located in Bakong District, part of Siem Reap province which despite the tourism boom based around Angkor Wat remains the second poorest province out of 24 in all Cambodia.

What do they use for lighting and cooking? In the west we take household energy for granted, that‟s for sure. Electricity is there at the flick of a switch. It is relatively cheap. But in rural Cambodia the fuel and energy needed for cooking, lighting or other household appliances is a really expensive component of the household budget.

The figures for household lighting tell some of the story. In Cambodia, outside the cities, just 8% of home lighting is powered from the national grid. By contrast 17% is battery powered—and a typical system is for a village to have one businessperson making a living by charging car batteries and for households to swap charged batteries for their discharged batteries, for a dollar or two.

Meanwhile 70% of households use kerosene lamps for lighting.

Cooking is the big user of fuel however, and in Siem Reap 93% of households use firewood for cooking. A small percentage use charcoal. This is expensive, and increasingly so, and wood is going to be in increasingly short supply in years to come.

Vietnam has faced a similar crisis and one increasingly used option is the development of bio-gas generators, using animal manure. Tens of thousands of these units—cess pits with a domed „collector‟ have been installed successfully. So far there does not appear to be a similar program in Cambodia. Another solution is to install wood stoves with a much more efficient design - and again, initiatives along this line are apparent in Africa, but not so far in Cambodia.