Electricity lifts people out of poverty and improves their
health and standards of living. Yet 1.3 billion of the world’s people don’t
have access to it. And more than half of them are in sub-Saharan
Africa.
Getting affordable electricity to the sub-Saharan population
is a multifaceted challenge. Demand is expected to increase by 4% year on
year, but the supply shortage already results in frequent blackouts.
People are forced to use expensive and inefficient generators which run on
fossil fuels to provide
reliable power.
If sub-Saharan Africa is to meet the UN
Sustainable Development Goals, including goal 7 to ensure access to
affordable, reliable and modern energy for all and goal 13 to combat climate
change and its impact, electricity should not only be affordable and reliable,
but also from clean energy sources.
The region needs a significant increase in investments in
renewable energy projects. Many economic and political challenges stand in the
way. But there are ways to make renewable energy projects more attractive and
competitive, and to turn these into more sustainable ways of living.
Most of the developed world has started to move away from
dirty energy sources (fossil fuels) to clean energy. Since sub-Saharan Africa
does not already have a lot of dirty energy supply in place, it makes perfect
sense for the region to invest in renewable energy sources. Renewables are able
to meet most of the region’s electricity demand. And they have never been more
cost effective.
One problem is the weak electricity grids south of the
Sahara. Take the electricity grid of Nigeria, for example. It’s the continent’s
largest economy together with South Africa, but it runs mostly on private
generators and will struggle to integrate large amounts of intermittent solar
and wind power. Big investments in energy storage systems or backup capacity
are needed for when the sun does not shine or when the wind is not blowing.
Concentrating solar power technology is one of these systems.
Concentrating solar power is based on solar thermal
technology to store power, which has the advantage to provide electricity to
communities when the sun goes down. The technology uses different mirror
configurations to collect and focus the sun lights energy onto a receiver. The
solar energy is turned into heat, which is stored in molten salts, which is
used to generate steam and in turn this steam drives a turbine to generate
electricity.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the sunshine that is needed for these
projects and the cost of the
electricity generated has fallen in recent years. But there are
still economic and
political challenges to implementation.
Challenges and barriers
Renewable energy projects are expensive to set up and cheap
to run compared to conventional power sources based on fossil fuels. The
investment and financing costs are the dominant drivers of the electricity
cost. And the risks are seen as higher in sub-Saharan Africa, which makes
financing more expensive than in the developed world. Finance providers worry
about political, regulatory, financial and administrative barriers. It can take
a long time to get permission for projects
Sub-Saharan Africa has several power regions where participating
countries trade electricity to improve the reliability of the
whole electricity system. The trade is still limited, though, partly because of
the lack of interconnections. Long-distance trade across power regions is
particularly difficult.
An example is the controversial Inga 3 hydropower
project in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. The project was initially proposed in
the 1950s and was supposed to have delivered 4.8 GW of
power. Most of the power was destined for export to South Africa and
the balance for mining operations in the DRC.
But the project was halted in 2013 because of investors’
concerns.
They pointed to the project’s flawed economics and the
country’s political instability. The project has since been resurrected and
there are plans to double the capacity and supply excess power to Nigeria.
Again, the challenge is transmission infrastructure and administrative
capacity.
Solutions
There are several initiatives that African nations can take
to increase their clean energy portfolio while also reducing energy poverty.
These include:
. Improving access to electricity for the urban poor,
possibly using pay-as-you-go meters. The meters encourage efficient use of
electricity, and make revenue collection much easier.
. Providing government guarantees for banks that offer
investment loans in generation of clean renewable energy.
. Removing import duties and production taxes for renewable
energy systems.
. Resolving structural issues in Africa’s energy markets,
where monopolies keep out new players and stifle innovation. Governments should
adopt policies that decentralize the market and ensure easy access for new
renewable energy producers.
. Increasing the availability of renewable energy finance,
such as microcredit programs to enable the poor to purchase solar panels and
solar lanterns, and to help renewable energy providers expand their businesses
to Africa. The multilateral development banks should establish distributed
clean energy funds for Africa.
. Governments should adopt feed-in tariffs to level the
playing field for clean energy sources.
. Global climate finance funds should be made available for
clean energy projects that reduce energy poverty in Africa.
. In many African nations, energy subsidies are mostly
assisting industrial users and better-off households, who are the ones using
the great bulk of electricity. Such subsidies need to be analyzed and possibly
reworked to ensure they are effective in reducing poverty and increasing energy
access for the poorest.
If solar power projects are to succeed in African countries,
it’s key to make finance less risky, to strengthen institutional capacity so
that regions can co-operate, and to improve domestic logistical infrastructure.
#CleanEnergy #Affordable #SDGS #SDG7 #Sustainability 
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