5/28 Renewable Tuesday: Solar disasters in Africa

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Why doesn’t solar scaling occur in Africa?

The World Bank’s goal was to set Africa on a course towards sustainable energy. Instead, it shed light on how a lack of transparency in the climate and development industry is hindering progress.

Although Africa has 60% of the world’s best solar energy resources, it currently represents only 1% of installed solar capacity. The entire region of 1.2 billion people has just one-fifth the solar power of cloudy, temperate Germany.

In 2015, the private sector arm of the World Bank launched Scaling Solar to prove that pooling investment support can pave the way to a solar future for all. Its first major project made an impression: Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, was able not only to attract private capital but also to reduce energy costs by more than 80%. Another Scaling Solar project in Senegal was even cheaper. Then the solar farm in Uzbekistan in 2019 was even lower. And then… nothing.

This claim is rather exaggerated. The program is currently working on four more projects in Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Niger and Togo. Yet seven projects in 49 sub-Saharan African countries remain a disaster.

In 2022, Africa as a whole added less new solar capacity than Belgium. At least 30 countries on the continent have not added any new utility-scale solar capacity this year.

In 2015, the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, launched Scaling Solar, a high-profile initiative funded in part by a $5 million grant from US government-led Power Africa. The expectations were huge. The IFC implementation concluded that “large-scale photovoltaic solar energy can be developed quickly and economically.”

There can be no question of this assumption – if the needed help arrives.

About that-

Analyst Teal Emery’s deep dive into Scaling Solar is revealing. After reviewing public documents and interviewing many key players, Emery concluded that Scaling Solar is a thoughtful and well-designed program. It covered the entire value chain covering the construction of a photovoltaic farm from the idea to putting a shovel into the ground, with assistance in preparing the project, developing the tender and managing legal documentation.

However, the characteristic that explains the lowest prices is additional assistance at virtually every step. While you can certainly increase efficiency through streamlining and bundling, it takes an 80% reduction in energy costs

• cheaper starting capital,
• free technical and legal assistance and
• lots of other unique gadgets

to lower the final price. A simple fact probably explains why Scaling Solar never scaled: the program was saddled with one thing that no one wanted to admit – subsidies.

In this situation, there’s nothing wrong with real pump-priming grants, except that not enough countries are willing to prioritize them in their foreign aid packages.

IEA: Africa’s Energy System

The IEA has separate pages for 37 African countries.

IEA: Financing clean energy in Africa – World Energy Outlook special report

By 2030, energy investment must double to over $200 billion per year for African countries to achieve all their energy development goals, including universal access to modern energy, while meeting their contributions on time and in full. national level.

Peanuts compared to the costs of ongoing wars, famines, terrible diseases and oppression, and the now forgotten value of economic development that will be estimated in the tens of trillions of dollars annually. But some political movements don’t want to hear about it.

Next week

We have seen peak carbon emissions and peak pollution. This leads us

The death of a billion cuts

with the latest round of greenwashing.