Can renewable energy power Africa’s growth?

All of Africa’s energy needs – in fact many times that – could be covered by renewable energies. The continent is bathed in sunlight all year round and could generate 60 percent of the world’s solar energy. The wind conditions are also sufficient to generate 250 times the electricity that the continent needs. There are opportunities to use this potential from Algeria to South Africa.

Countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia already obtain more than 80 percent of their electricity requirements from hydropower and have the capacity to increase this. Kenya, on the other hand, is the world leader in the exploitation of geothermal energy.

However, clean energy use is very unevenly distributed across the continent. So far, energy production in Africa has been almost exclusively based on fossil fuels. Half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa has no access to electricity, so hundreds of millions of potential customers are waiting to be connected to the utility grid.

Other continents expanded their power supply with coal, oil and gas and are now trying – with varying degrees of commitment – to switch to renewable energies. But couldn’t Africa simply save itself the detour via fossil energies and supply new consumers directly with green energy?

Cleaner, cheaper, more flexible

“Africa is just the right continent to launch these [grünen] Technology simply because the resources are plentiful,” says Tony Tiyou. He is the managing director of engineering firm Renewables in Africa, which operates in Kenya, Mozambique, Ghana, Nigeria and Benin. “I call it the promised land.”

The direct entry into clean energy would have the decisive advantage that the climate crisis would not be fueled further. After all, the people of Africa have felt the effects of fossil fuel consumption on their own bodies.

The greenhouse gases released during combustion warm the atmosphere and make extreme weather events more likely and more severe. For example, devastating droughts in East Africa are jeopardizing food security and forcing thousands of people to leave their homes. Floods and landslides killed hundreds of South Africans in April, while tropical storms devastated Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi earlier in the year.

So far, Africans have hardly contributed to climate change. In 2021, they were responsible for just four percent of emissions worldwide. But the continent’s carbon footprint is growing rapidly. Environmentalists stress that diversifying Africa’s energy mix is ​​essential to prevent the continent becoming part of the problem. “It’s not just about how much emissions you generate. It’s also about what the consequences are for you,” Tiyou explains. “Do you want to make the same mistakes others have already made?”

The good news is that the cost of renewable energy technologies has fallen sharply in recent years and is now comparable to that of fossil fuels. According to figures from the International Renewable Energy Organization, solar projects in Zambia, Senegal and Ethiopia were auctioned in 2020 at a price of just $25 per megawatt hour. This makes them even more profitable than fossil fuels.

In rural regions in Africa, connection to the power grid is often very expensive or not available at all. Renewable energies offer additional flexibility here. The solution: solar panels on the roof or mini-grids that work independently and provide enough electricity for lights and a cell phone charger.

There is a lack of political will and money

However, there are many obstacles standing in the way of the expansion of green technologies in Africa, above all financing. Over the past two decades, only 2 percent of global investment in green energy has gone to the continent.

“Companies that want to invest in renewable energy look at the market in Uganda and see poor people, so there’s little interest,” said Dickens Kamugisha of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, a Ugandan non-profit organization that opposes polluting projects uses. “However, the oil is being produced by giant companies that are attracting funding from around the world.”

The diversification of the energy mix also raises the question of the costs of importing systems from abroad. Although many countries have gained a great deal of knowledge about solar energy in a short period of time, this technology still accounts for less than one percent of all energy production. It must be expanded further so that know-how continues to grow.

According to experts, however, one of the biggest obstacles is the lack of political will. Where foreign observers see the risk of increasing environmental pollution, many African politicians see an opportunity to develop like any other continent. They emphasize that their countries’ emissions will always lag far behind those of the US, China and European countries. “Africa has woken up and we will use our natural resources,” Uganda’s energy minister said last month Reuters news agency.

Prisoners of a CO2-intensive future?

In a 2021 study Oxford University researchers found that the continent is unlikely to move away from fossil fuels in this decade. The research team took a look at currently planned projects and concluded that two-thirds of the energy in 2030 is projected to come from dirty energy sources. About 18 percent would be generated by hydroelectric power and less than 10 percent from renewable sources.

“The development community and African decision-makers must act quickly to prevent the continent from being trapped in a carbon-intensive future,” said Philipp Trotter, one of the study’s authors press statement. The study underlines that plans for fossil power plants that are already in progress must be withdrawn. For activists like Kamugisha, this is the only way to protect rural communities, which are hardest hit by the climate crisis and yet often lack access to unreliable fossil fuel-powered grids.

“If we borrow money to invest in oil, that means the country won’t have money to invest in renewable energy,” he says. “The biggest losers are the poor who live in villages.”

Adapted from the English by Phoenix Hanzo.