Africa´s entire installed capacity for electricity generation of 147 GW (Gigawatts) is equivalent to that of Belgium and to what China installs every two years.
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A satellite image of the world at night shows a brightly lit Europe covered with starry dots and in sharp contrast, a dark, unlit Africa.
More than a century after the light bulb was invented, African school children “often cannot read after dusk, business cannot grow, clinics cannot refrigerate medicine or vaccines, and industries are idled hampering economic growth, jobs, and livelihoods,” says a report by the World Bank.
According to the U.S. government, there are 1.2 billion people on the planet who live without electricity and half of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. The total installed capacity in Africa is 147 GW, the equivalent of the total capacity installed in Belgium, according to the International Energy Agency. It is also roughly the equivalent of what China installs every two years.
Other comparisons show the gigantic gap between our richly lit “first” world and unlit Africa. For instance: one refrigerator in the U.S. consumes in one year six times more electricity than an average person in Tanzania.
Yet, the continent has enormous power potential: huge rivers, vast reserves of oil and gas, coal, as well as the resources for solar, wind and geothermal energy. But it lacks infrastructure for generation, transport and distribution or the capacity to finance projects.
Since the mid-1990s, external finance to Africa’s power sector has averaged only around $600m per year of public assistance, plus a similar volume of private finance, according to the World Bank.
Indeed, according to the International Energy Agency, sub-Saharan Africa needs more than $300bn in investment if it wants to achieve universal electricity access by 2030.
With Africa having already achieved an average growth rate of 5%, new projects are being developed which require new sources of financing, in particular from the private sector. Following is a brief presentation of some of the most exciting ones:
Ghana: the largest solar park in Africa.
Already an exporter of electricity, oil and gas, Ghana is on course to develop the largest solar photovoltaic park in Africa. In this sense, it is leading the way among African countries looking to develop renewables as a viable solution to reduce their dependency on oil imports.
The 155 MW Nzema solar park, which will have about 630,000 photovoltaic panels, is scheduled to start operating by mid-2015. Plans for the $400m plant were first unveiled in December 2012 as part of Ghana’s initiative to expand its renewable energy industry, which is set to produce 10% of its energy needs by 2020.
Rwanda: harnessing volcanic gases from Lake Kivu
Lake Kivu, in Rwanda, just at the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a rare “exploding lake” that contains an estimated 256 cubic kilometres of carbon dioxide (CO2) and 65 cubic kilometres of methane.
A groundbreaking project is being carried out here to produce electricity by extracting the methane trapped deep in the water. The state-owned Kibuye Power plant already produces 3.6 MW but the government forecasts Lake Kivu could provide about a third of Rwanda’s electricity within two years.
Already, local and foreign investors are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to new methane plants along the lakeshore, both in Rwanda and DR Congo (the border between the two countries crosses the lake). According to a research by Bloomberg Energy Finance, Rwanda could generate 100% of its electricity through renewable sources by 2030.
Tanzania: a British-built wind farm
Although it has considerable resources in natural gas –estimated at 41.7 trillion cubic feet– which it is beginning to exploit to produce much needed electricity, Tanzania, East Africa’s second largest economy, is also looking into renewable sources of power.
