Study maps out solar, wind strategy for future of African energy development

SAN FRANCISCO — A team from University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has used resource mapping tools and assessed the potential for large solar and wind farms in 21 countries in southern and eastern Africa, concluding that renewable energy has a robust future in much of Africa.

The countries studied, from Libya and Egypt in the north and along the eastern coast to South Africa, include more than half of Africa’ s population.

“The surprising find is that the wind and solar resources in Africa are absolutely gigantic, and something you could tap into for relatively low cost,” said senior author Duncan Callaway, a UC Berkeley associate professor of energy and resources and a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab.

Duncan Callaway added that “but we need to be thinking now about strategies for fostering international collaboration to tap into the resource in a way that is going to maximize its potential while minimizing its impact.”

With solar and wind farms, and international sharing of power, most African nations could lower the number of conventional power plants — fossil fuel and hydroelectric — they need to build, thereby reducing their infrastructure costs by perhaps billions of dollars.

The team set out to understand where wind and solar generation plants might be built in the future under a range of siting strategy scenarios, and how much renewable generators might offset the need to build other forms of generation.

Based on the team’s analysis, choosing wind sites to match the timing of wind generation with electricity demand is less costly overall than choosing sites with the greatest wind energy production.

Potential

“Together, international energy trade and strategic siting can enable African countries to pursue ‘no-regrets’ wind and solar potential that can compete with conventional generation technologies like coal and hydropower,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Grace Wu, who conducted the study with fellow graduate student Ranjit Deshmukh.

Wu and Deshmukh concluded that even after excluding solar and wind farms from areas that are too remote or too close to sensitive environmental or cultural sites, or what they term “no-regret” sites, there is more than enough land in this part of Africa to produce renewable power to meet the rising demand, if fossil fuel and/or hydroelectric power are in the mix to even out the load.

“If you take the strategy of siting all of these systems such that their total production correlates well with electricity demand, then you save hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year versus the cost of electricity infrastructure dominated by coalfired plants or hydro,” Callaway was quoted as saying in a news release.

“You also get a more equitable distribution of generation sources across these countries.”