Powering Progress

The average African consumes less energy than any of his counterparts anywhere else in the world. Low consumption rates on the continent have nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with lack of supply.

Four paradoxes shed light on the complex challenges that need to be faced: abundant energy but little power; high prices but even higher costs; widespread but ineffective reform; and high expenditure yet inadequate financing.
- IMF Report

The recent commodities boom has provided Africa with a much-needed cash boost and an opportunity for significant investment to upgrade the continent’s infrastructure. Can Africa’s business and political leaders produce a blue print to hardwire sustainability into a new power network?

Discussion programme - Johannesburg

About the Programme

Africa is at a crossroads: desperate to attract investment to and give under-connected people access to electricity, but struggling with inadequate networks and generating capacity. Questions for the Future travelled to Johannesburg in June 2008 to ask the energy sector's best thinkers how to reinvent infrastructure to Power Progress.

The scale of need is formidable - more than 70% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa have no access to electricity. That’s a lot of potential demand. Big energy players believe that this can only be met by big energy projects. “There are 7bn of us on earth – half without access to energy”, said Serge Lafont, Chairman of Areva South Africa. “Nuclear is not the solution, but there’s no solution without nuclear. Whether it’s coal, or renewables, everything will have to be used.”

But for others in our audience this was not the answer. “We need to break away from the current paradigm of large scale centralised power – which is behind the assertion that we need nuclear power,” said Richard Worthington of WWF. “If we want to build the most people-friendly solutions we have to avoid the mistakes that have been made in the development path of the north.”

Tristen Taylor of Earthlife challenged our panel to explain why, in a continent with so much solar potential and such a big energy gap, utilities are putting so much emphasis on coal and nuclear? "Here we are making a 50 year commitment and we're going to back the wrong horse".

Panellist Jacob Maroga, CEO of South Africa's energy utility Eskom, disagreed. "It's not an either or. I don't think it's correct that we can abandon the coal programme. Renewables cannot supply the scale of need.” Conceding that there had been a focus on big, large-scale plants, he added that institutional changes needed to happen before Richard Worthington’s “large-scale centralised power paradigm” was broken.

“More needs to be done to create space for the ordinary consumer,” said Len Van Wyk of Amatola Green Power. “If he is able to sell electricity back into the grid, that will make the whole issue of solar, which is part of Africa’s future, a valuable proposition.”

Another smaller scale solution was Anton Louis-Olivier of NuPlanet Energy’s Bethlehem 7MW hydro project. “It’s negligible compared to Eskom. But we can come in where Eskom cannot – and we can do it cost effectively”

Charles Liebenberg of Biotherm energy added that there were still opportunities in reducing inefficiencies at the level of a factory or industry. “Renewable energy and waste is never going to entirely displace fossil fuels but at the moment there’s a lot of waste fuel and waste heat which is not being turned into electricity. There’s an opportunity to augment the baseload generation capacity of the national utility”.

Some in our audience advocated opening up the grid to the private sector. Clyde Mallinson, a mining and exploration consultant, suggested that “if companies could sell their electricity directly to private clients, using the existing backbone, you could free up the national utility to spend more of its capital on sustainable solutions”

Gordon Thompson of Camec described how his company were taking a private sector solution even further by building their own infrastructure to connect remote mining installations to the existing network. “In the DR Congo we’re 26km from the national grid. At a time of huge risk, the company invested in a power line. Over the course of the deal we get payback in the tariff - and we benefit the local community. The local town has grown from 5,000 to 60,000 people and 50% of them now have access to power.”

In Kenya, our speaker Charles Rioba had a solution which bypasses the grid entirely. “If you look at the use of mobile phones, of radio, of TV, of lights in rural Africa, power consumption is very low and people want to use more. We came up with a concept where instead of outright purchase, you could rent a power pack unit. You go to a distributor and rent a pre-charged unit and you can run one or two lights and recharge your mobile phone. For about 1 dollar you can have power for three or four days. We believe we can provide a solution to the people who can’t afford mains connectivity or solar equipment.”

With much of the continent playing catch-up when it comes to large infrastructure projects, perhaps this is the shape of Africa’s energy use for the foreseeable future.