How much will Africa exploit cheap renewable energy as it expands its energy grid?

Africa’s electricity generation capacity is expected to double by 2030, and with the rapidly falling costs of renewable energy technologies, it may seem like the continent is going green. However, new analysis suggests fossil fuels will continue to dominate Africa’s energy mix over the next decade.

The researchers used a machine learning approach that analyzes what characteristics, such as fuel type and financing, have influenced the past success and failure of power plants across the continent. Their research suggests that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power will account for less than 10 percent of Africa’s total electricity production by 2030, the team reports Jan. 11 in Nature Energy.

In 2015, 195 countries pledged to cut emissions from fossil fuels to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius by 2100. To meet this goal, the world would need to reduce its emissions by 2.7% annually in the 2020s –2030 — but current commitments are not sufficient to achieve this goal (SN: 11/26/19). Energy demand in developing economies, including many on the African continent, is expected to increase dramatically by 2030, which could lead to even more fossil fuel emissions over the next decades.

However, the price of renewable energy technologies, particularly wind and solar power, has fallen dramatically over the past few years. Many scientists and activists have expressed hope that African countries will be able to take advantage of these technologies by overcoming the increase in greenhouse gas emissions that use coal or oil and moving straight to building renewable energy plants.

It’s not clear whether this is a realistic scenario, says Galina Alova, a sustainability scientist at the University of Oxford. There is great uncertainty about how and why new and planned energy projects may succeed or fail on the continent, he says. “We wanted to understand whether Africa was actually moving towards making this decisive leap, but we wanted to do it by looking at the data.”

So Alova, together with Oxford sustainability researchers Philipp Trotter and Alex Money, collected data on almost 3,000 energy projects – both fossil fuel-based and renewable – that have been commissioned over the past 20 years in 54 African countries. These projects included both successful and unsuccessful power plants. The data includes a variety of characteristics specific to different power plants, such as how much energy a plant can produce, what type of fuel it uses, how well it is connected to the power grid, who owns the plant and how it is financed.

The team then used a machine learning approach, creating a computer algorithm to determine which of these characteristics were the best predictors of past success. Finally, the researchers analyzed the success rates of nearly 2,500 projects currently in the pipeline based on these characteristics, as well as various country characteristics such as economic strength, population density and political stability.

These country-level factors matter, but were not the most important predictors of project success, Trotter says. “We see some truth in good management, but the project level (factors) were consistently more important.”

These factors include, for example, the size of the power plant and whether the power plant was publicly or privately financed. Smaller renewable energy plants have typically had a better chance of success than larger projects, as have plants financed by large public donors such as the World Bank, which are less likely to back out in the face of delays or roadblocks. In terms of fuel type, the team found that the odds of success have increased recently, particularly for solar power, but overall, oil and gas projects still have a much higher chance of success.

The team found that this adds up to fossil fuels still accounting for two-thirds of all energy produced on the continent by 2030. Renewable energy, especially wind and solar, will account for less than 10 percent, and the remainder, about 18 percent of the energy mix, will come mainly from hydropower.

The new plants will approximately double the total electricity generating capacity on the African continent – the maximum possible energy that all power plants could generate if they were operating under ideal conditions – over the next decade, increasing from about 244 gigawatts in 2019. to 472 gigawatts in 2030, according to a new study. The projected generation capacity in 2030 is based on the number of new plants that are in the pipeline, minus those that will be retired by 2030, as well as those for which the study predicts a probability of failure.

As of October 2019, wind and solar capacity were only about 4 percent. By 2030, 17 percent of production capacity will come from wind and solar power, although actual energy production from these renewable sources is expected to be less than 10 percent of the continent’s electricity. Meanwhile, 62 percent power will come from fossil fuels, including coal and natural gas, and another 17 percent from hydroelectric power plant. Other planned energy sources include biomass and geothermal technologies.

The findings were “both quite surprising and not so surprising to me,” says Wikus Kruger, an African energy sector researcher at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who was not involved in the new study. The finding that project-level factors, especially financing, are very important in research by him and others, he says. But he says he’s not convinced that the falling costs of renewables won’t be a bigger factor.

“We are seeing huge disruption (in the energy market) in terms of the costs of renewable energy sources. The way we plan has simply changed completely. What’s exciting about this watershed moment is that these smaller renewable energy projects are in states of conflict that have historically struggled to achieve anything,” says Kruger. “But these are smaller, more modular projects and people are willing to commit smaller amounts (of money) to projects that spread the risk across many different countries.”

Alova says another factor that could change the prospects for renewable energy would be the closure of many of the fossil fuel power plants currently under construction, which the team calls a “sharp decarbonization shock.” However, this would not happen solely due to the decrease in the costs of renewable energy technologies.

Increasing the share of renewable energy in Africa’s electricity mix “will not happen automatically, by some invisible hand,” says Trotter. “This is something that needs to happen from the top, from African governments and the international development community.” The danger, he says, is that once a fossil fuel plant starts producing, it will run for 20 to 30 years, “so it’s really important not to be locked into that. Our data set makes it clear that we need to act now (to shut down fossil fuel power plants); “It’s not something we can put off any longer.”