UNIQUELY SUITED TO RENEWABLES

Since Sub-Saharan Africa is largely off grid, it has a great opportunity to skip installing fossil fuel-based power generation infrastructure and jump to renewables

APERSON LIVING in a remote village in northern Nigeria spends 60 to 80 times more to purchase a unit of electricity than somebody living in New York. That’s how expensive electricity is in Sub-Saharan Africa (ssa), a geographical grouping of 49 African nations lying south of the Sahara desert. The reason behind the high cost is acute shortage of electricity. Over 62 per cent people (609 million) in ssa do not have access to electricity, says the World Bank’s ‘State of Electricity Access Report’ published in 2017. The region has the largest number of countries with the lowest rates of electrification, states another 2017 report by international non-profit Oxfam. But this lack of access to power from the grid puts Africa in a unique position. Can it skip the process of setting up fossil fuel-based power generation infrastructure and move straightaway to renewables?

Efforts to provide electricity to ssa have not borne result in the last one-and-a-half decade. About 26 per cent people in ssa had access to electricity in 2000 and in 2014 the figure was still just a little over 37 per cent, as per the World Bank report. In the same period, the figure for South Asia, which is second in the list of regions without access to electricity (ssa is at the top), jumped from 57 per cent to 80 per cent. Rural communities in ssa will have to wait for another 20-30 years to have access to gridbased electricity, the World Bank report says. That would ensure that the continent fails to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (unsdg) of providing universal access to power by 2030.

Africa needs to add 7,000 MW capacity every year till 2030 to meet the goal. This seems unlikely because to achieve the target, it will need to invest $41 billion every year, but it currently invests $5 billion a year. At current growth rates and government policies, 680 million people in the world will lack access to electricity in 2030, and 80 per cent of these will be in ssa, says an April 2018 report published by the International Renewable Energy Agency (irena), an intergovernmental organisation that supports countries in their transition to a sustainable energy future (see ‘Energy poverty hurts women’ on p77).

Fossil fuel failures

One of the main roadblocks in generating electricity in ssa is expensive fossil fuelbased power utilities. What’s worse, the use of diesel generators is quite common in the region. In Nigeria, for instance, the installed power capacity is 10 GW while