African Renewable Energy Gains Attention
The potential for renewable energy development in Africa is experiencing
an increase in attention lately as investors and world leaders seek a new
clean energy frontier.
The continent could become a gold mine for renewable energy due to abundant
solar and wind resources. But roadblocks to clean energy worldwide are
amplified throughout the troubled regions of Africa - financial resources
are thin and infrastructure is often unreliable.
Meeting at the Africa
Carbon Forum in Senegal's capital Dakar last week, United Nations
officials, World Bank specialists, and business leaders exchanged strategies
for "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM) projects on the continent -
greenhouse gas-reducing initiatives that industrialized countries can
support as a way to compensate for their excess emissions. A theme
throughout the meetings was the possibility of future CDM projects under a
successor agreement to the Kyoto
Protocol, especially if the United States joins the market.
Yet so far, Africa has benefited the least among all continents from the $7
billion annual CDM market. Since the European Union began trading "carbon
credits" through its Emissions
Trading Scheme in 2005, only 27 of the 1,156 CDM projects included under
the scheme have been registered in Africa, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary
of the U.N.
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told the carbon forum.
But a World
Bank report [PDF] released on Monday provides further evidence of the
continent's potential. Sub-Saharan Africa could provide more than 170
gigawatts of additional power-generation capacity - more than double the
region's current installations - through 3,200 "low-carbon" energy projects,
such as combined heat-and-power, biofuels production, mass transportation,
and energy efficiency, according to the report.
Together these projects could avoid some 740 million tons of carbon
dioxide-equivalent reductions each year. The total capital costs are
estimated to be at least $157 billion, the report said. "The pipeline of
similar projects in other regions shows us that such projects are often
economically viable when carbon revenues are added," said World Bank senior
energy specialist Massamba Thioye, who co-authored the report, in a statement.
A look into the near future suggests the international market still does not
consider Africa to be a priority investment region. Sub-Saharan Africa is
set to receive only 1.4 percent of the 3,700 CDM projects under way
worldwide as of September 1. Furthermore, during the Africa
Energy Forum this past June, participants focused almost entirely on
fossil fuel-based energy sources, according to World
Council for Renewable Energy Chairman Preben Maegaard.
After Maegaard complained that the forum lacked a renewable energy focus,
conference director Rod Cargill responded that Africa's future energy growth
is reliant on conventional power sources and that the renewable energy hype
has only provided set-backs. "To claim that Africa's problems of poverty
would be alleviated by relying on renewable energy is folly," Cargill wrote
in an e-mail that Maegaard
later published. "The number of failed renewable energy projects in
Africa over the last 20 years is unacceptable, and verging on the
irresponsible. These failed projects have set back development by raising
aspirations and then failing to deliver."
Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the electric utility infrastructure
necessary for large-scale renewable energy power plants is lacking. In
Kenya, for instance, at least 50 power outages occur each year. Across the
region, 500 million people lack access to electricity. "African countries
will need to spend at least six percent of their GDP on energy over the next
10 years to keep up with their economic growth. It is therefore clear that a
number of technologies (both traditional and new) will need to be applied,"
said Dana Rysankova, a World Bank senior energy specialist for Africa, in
the report's press release.
But grand renewable energy schemes are still being drawn.
A researcher from the European Commission's Institute for Energy reported
earlier this year that 0.3 percent of the sunlight that shines on the Sahara
and Middle East deserts could
supply all of Europe's energy needs. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have supported plans to build a 45
billion Euro ($64 billion) "super grid" that would connect renewable energy
resources across Europe and Africa.
Along the Great Rift Valley - a 6,000 kilometer terrain stretching from
Syria to Mozambique - a huge amount of untapped geothermal energy may soon
be developed. In June, Kenya announced that it would install some 1,700
megawatts of geothermal capacity within the next 10 years - 150 percent
of the country's total electricity generating capacity. Djibouti
plans to supply nearly all of its electricity needs through geothermal
energy, with the help of Reykjavik Energy Invest and the World Bank.
At the Senegal convention, among the plans
announced were a solar-powered university in Nigeria, biofuels
development in the Ivory Coast, and a wind farm in Senegal. Biofuel
production from jatropha,
a drought-resistant oilseed bush, could provide the most opportunities if
the plant can be effectively domesticated and its energy conversion rate
improves. The World Bank report counted 555 potential jatropha projects in
sub-Saharan Africa.
Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch
Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.
For permission to reprint this article, please contact Julia Tier at jtier@worldwatch.org.
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