In the next ten years, Australia will close a couple of coal plants, while Africa will build 1250.
Africa is going to double its energy and almost all the increase is coming from fossil fuels. This is hard to explain, given that renewables are “free” and Africa is poor. But at the end of the decade unreliable renewables will still make less than 10% of the energy in Africa.
Fossil fuels to dominate Africa’s energy mix this decade – report
Power Engineering International
A new study into Africa’s energy generation landscape uses a state-of-the-art machine-learning technique to analyse the pipeline of more than 2,500 planned power plants and their chances of successful commission.
African power generation, 2030, graph.
The study predicts that in 2030, fossil fuels will account for two-thirds of all generated electricity across Africa. While an additional 18% of generation is set to come from hydro-energy projects. These have their own challenges, such as being vulnerable to an increasing number of droughts caused by climate change.
This is only the start. Most countries in Africa are not even in the race yet:
South Africa alone is forecast to add almost 40% of Africa’s total predicted new solar capacity by 2030.
Five years ago TonyfromOz looked at Niger — a nation of 17 million people and estimated that the entire country used about as much electricity as Dubbo, Australia, a town with about 40,000 residents.
As Matt Ridley says: Africa Needs To Be Rich – Rather Than Green
REFERENCE
Alova et al (2021) A machine-learning approach to predicting Africa’s electricity mix based on planned power plants and their chances of success, Nature Energy volume 6, pages158–166(2021)
NASA — Africa: https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/79000/79793/city_lights_africa_8k.jpg
