Africa’s energy crisis: Wakanda’s Afro-futurist dream is more remote than ever
Africa's energy crisis is stark: 571 million people lack power access, making up 80% of the global total without electricity. While other continents progress, Africa's energy consumption remains low, hindering economic growth. Renewables offer promise but face significant financial and regulatory barriers. To avoid falling further behind, international institutions must act urgently, supporting Africa's transition to abundant, clean energy and fostering the development essential for the continent's prosperity.
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By David Fickling
Behind most visions of a high-tech future, there's an assumption that energy will become super-abundant. Take Wakanda, the secretly rich, technologically advanced nation portrayed in Marvel's Black Panther series. With its flying cars, maglev trains, and levitating, invisibility-shielded fighter aircraft, it's positively dripping in the power gleaned from deposits of the fictional metal vibranium.
The reality across today's Africa couldn't be more different. Living without a plug socket is rapidly becoming an almost exclusively African problem; of the 685 million people globally without access to power, 571 million live there. Just five countries outside the continent — Haiti, Myanmar, North Korea, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu — have been unable to give more than three-quarters of their population access to electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, 39 out of 45 nations fail that test.
The significance of this problem becomes apparent when you consider how indispensable energy is as the fuel for economic growth. There's no rich country on the planet that doesn't use it to a lavish extent.
Each year, fast-growing middle-income countries such as India and Indonesia use around 30 gigajoules per capita or more. You start to enjoy rich-country standards of living in the region of 80 GJ/capita to 100 GJ/capita. (The European Union stands at about 125 GJ/capita, and the US is more than double that.)
Africa is in a quite different place. Its consumption stands at 23 GJ/capita, about where India was 15 years ago — and even this number is flattered by the petroleum-rich nations bordering the Mediterranean and coal-fired South Africa. The sub-Saharan countries in between, where 80% of Africans live, mostly get by on about 5 GJ/capita or so.
Population growth over the coming decades is set to make this problem worse. Africa's energy consumption will expand by about half between now and 2050, the International Energy Agency wrote in its annual outlook last week. On a per-capita basis, however, consumption is likely to go backwards, with a drop of about 10% from levels already well below every other place on the planet.
That's a disastrous prospect. While the IEA doesn't break out its numbers for individual countries, such an outcome would leave the average African in 2050 using about the same amount of energy as they did when decolonization began in the 1960s.
In that era, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser (and the white minority government of modern-day Zimbabwe) built vast hydroelectric projects to drive industrialization. The idea that the region might be heading back to colonial levels of energy scarcity, rather than advancing toward a prosperous 21st century, makes Afro-Futurist dreams feel like a bad joke.
What could change this picture? In theory, there's a strong case for Africa to be given a pass on fossil fuel development. With about a fifth of the global population, the continent has contributed just 3% or so of historic emissions. A group of oil-producing countries is seeking to set up a $5 billion "energy bank" for projects that rich countries will no longer lend money to support, the Financial Times reported last week.
That may be justifiable in moral terms. The problem is geology and economics. Outside of South Africa, the continent is notably poorly-endowed with coal reserves, the cheap and dirty fuel that powered the initial stages of China and India's growth. It's in a better situation with petroleum (Africa's oil reserves, at about 125 billion barrels, are more than twice those of Asia, Europe and Oceania put together) but, in keeping with a long history of extractive industries, that resource is better exported to bring in foreign exchange than used at home.
Nuclear faces comparable challenges. There's just a single atomic power station on the continent, a five-decade-old plant in South Africa. In a region where funding is scarce and expensive, such a capital-intensive power source is unlikely to get far.
That leaves renewables — and here, at least, there are promising prospects in a region baked by the sun, strafed with winds, bisected by a volcanic rift valley that offers potential for geothermal power, and rich in hydroelectricity from the highlands of Ethiopia to the downstream rapids of the Congo.
Renewables face similar finance problems to nuclear, however, as well as unique issues around regulation: African countries impose tariffs and other trade barriers on wind and solar equipment at almost three times the levels in rich countries, and more than twice those in Asia and Latin America, according to a report last week from the Unctad, the United Nations trade and development body. Solar projects in Ghana must be made with 60% local content. Such requirements might just be a small hurdle in countries with relatively vibrant manufacturing sectors like the US or India. In Ghana, they can resemble a de facto ban.
If those barriers can be reduced, there's a real opportunity. China's rapid expansion of wind and solar manufacturing means there's no shortage of increasingly cheap clean energy equipment out there. If it's serious about development, the International Monetary Fund should recognize the urgency of the situation and the potential of a solution by using its quasi-currency as a form of quantitative easing for African energy.
Africa's 1.5 billion people lack access to the clean, abundant energy to which they're entitled. That can't be allowed to continue. The current situation is holding back a region that was the cradle of humanity, and should be its future.
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