Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries, and does a disservice to the actual government institutions working on development.
They should explicitly call out Nigeria instead of treating it as "Africa". Nigeria is unique in how they actually have a formal industrial strategy for mini-grids [0] thanks to World Bank support [1]
It's a uniquely Nigerian program and Nigeria's Rural Electrification Administration (REA) should be given it's due credit. When Boko Haram does something bad it's "Nigeria", but when Abuja does something good it's "Africa".
Finally, what works for a federal state with a relatively strong civil service like Nigeria cannot be replicated in every "African" country, due to entirely different administrative and bureaucratic norms and capacity.
Let's say you are an editor: You can be accurate and write 'Nigeria' in the headline, but you realize that most people have no idea where or what Nigeria is - that's a bad thing, but true. If you write 'Africa', then many more people will learn about Nigeria.
I don't have a good answer. Maybe they should squeeze both into the headline: 'For African climate and livelihoods, Nigeria bets big ...'
> Maybe they should squeeze both into the headline: 'For African climate and livelihoods, Nigeria bets big ...'
Yep! That's what I feel is much more constructive as a title, because it both gives credit to the originator of a success AND makes it potentially generalizable.
Btw, the proposed title you mentioned is the norm for reporting on the minigrid project in business news.
This gets my goat as well, particularly given how vast Africa is (the Mercator projection does it no favours in that regard) and the diversity of cultures.
Amen to all of that. It feels like all discourse about Africa is either super negative ("heart of darkness") or super paternalistic ("white/outsider [asian and middle eastern countries use the same discourse] savior complex").
It's similar to the discourse I'd see about Asia as a kid 20-30 years ago, and ignores a lot of the tangible on the ground innovations happening.
It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
Grids are better if you have the capital to build them. Most of arfica has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost.
Of course with the large number of countries there, that generalization is false. But it is overall close a
enough to true.
> Most of arfica (sic) has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost
You can't view Africa with such broad strokes. A West African country with British administrative norms like Nigeria is going to have entirely different outcomes compared to a former Portuguese colony impacted by the Colonial Wars like Mozambique.
Reality is, plenty of African countries do have the right building blocks, and are seeing a significant amount of capital investment from the Gulf States, China, and India because their investors understand how to operate in similar conditions from 10-30 years ago.
Whenever an African country like Nigeria or Kenya does something good, it's positive attributes as masked as part of "Africa" so Western donor organizations can continue to justify spending in basket cases like Rwanda or Mozambique, which is what this article itself is doing.
The Mini-Grid project in the article is a program that private and public sector players in Nigeria worked on, and only succeeded because of Nigeria's administrative apparatus and 10 years of hard work (started back in 2015-16).
The only learning this provides is that
1. You need a relatively competent bureaucratic system in order to actually execute on initiatives
2. You need to have a robust domestic private sector that works closely with the public sector and foreign investors
3. This can only be done through a profit motivation, not a local or international non-profit boondoggle, as that's the only way to unlock the economies of scale needed and incentivize execution
I hesitate to write this, but can you please read an entire post before your respond? If you could you would see that I made it clear my point was broadly true but has plenty of exceptions.
Ethiopia is threating to decend into a another civil war. Military Coups happens someplace every few years. ISIS is doing their terrorism in the north east. Lately Kenya has been one of the better countries in the region, but who knows if that will continue - I wish them luck.
Even in context of Nigeria, all your points miss the important fact that if the government isn't stable and protects you from crime/terrorists all investments are a waste as they will be destroyed.
Are you really characterizing Nigeria's notoriously kleptocratic bureaucratic system as "relatively competent", while self-styled Singapore of Africa Rwanda is a "basket case"? Most observers would reverse those labels.
They spent dozens of millions of dollars on PR to make themselves the "Singapore of Africa".
I've documented this on HN previously [0][1].
Most notably, 20-25% of Rwanda's GDP remains Aid driven unlike their closest peer Uganda who now has 15% of GDP derived from ICT and an additional 10% from Finance. Yet Uganda doesn't beat their drum despite also being a personalist dictatorship. Museveni is a dick (and I went to school with some opposition members of his), but I will hand it to his administration - they concentrate on administrative capacity to a certain extent.
> Nigeria's notoriously kleptocratic bureaucratic system
They are not the most efficient, but the Nigerian Civil Service has drastically reformed over the past 15 years. Daniel "Dan" Roggers has been instrumental in this change [2], specifically by revamping the Nigerian Civil Service in the early 2010s as part of a World Bank bailout (he's now helping Lithuania and other Baltic States).
I think the example would have been better if they had put Ghana in the place of Nigeria.
I have no idea how anyone did an analysis of the stability of African nations, and came out of it thinking Nigeria was an example to hold up as some kind of gold standard? It reinforces my belief that we Westerners, as a group, know very little about the African continent.
Yes, and in many cases it's the same companies enabling both:
Over 1 million solar home systems sold, avoiding 2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions
Over 1 million individuals access high-quality smartphones, enabling access to information and earning opportunities online
> The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
It doesn't help that Africa is huge and the population density of most of it is damn near zero. Grids of any form make very little sense given those constraints.
The world’s first hydrogen exploration company was founded in Mali. No one knows for a fact what the development pathway is. Solar might turn out to be inconsequential.
> In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity in the nearby village.
> Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The company is drilling wells near the original site that have yielded high concentrations of the gas.
They leak, hydrogen is smaller then all other atoms, so they are hard to contain. local production and immediate use is the only option that makes sense. Pipelines are non-sensical
These mini grids will never lift any African country into modernity. The cost of renewables is not falling, if you take into account the hours those renewables are not producing power. If a country cannot build a basic power grid, they will remain a village, most likely with widespread poverty.
> The cost of renewables is not falling, if you take into account the hours those renewables are not producing power.
This is false, like logic wise even if your assumptions were true. You might say that supposed cost right now is fake. If it's actually much higher (accounting for batteries or NatGas) the ridiculous drop in price from panels still means that the cost is falling.
> If a country cannot build a basic power grid, they will remain a village, most likely with widespread poverty.
They are probably not gonna be smelting with arc furnaces in bumbfuck-nowhere, Nigeria; but that's also not happening in some hamlet in the UK. African cities and resource extractions areas already have power grinds, the problem are rural areas.
> There is no reason why, in some places, (firm and reliable supply) cannot be achieved via a mix of intermittent renewables, provided that this mix is ‘firmed’ via batteries and other sources.
> “The hurdle here is not technical, it is, … the overall net economic cost of the combined solution. This is materially helped by the continuous downward trend of battery costs, but the incremental cost of the last percentages of firming can indeed prove expensive.”
(Also of relevance, Australia is actually replacing some long distance grid connections with mini solar grids as a cost reduction move, which suggests mini grids are the right option for remote communities)
I mean, it's not going to turn these countries into rich places, but the article points out several ways that having power - even intermittent power - at a very low cost has improved people's lives significantly. They no longer have to walk miles to get drinking water; they drilled a well and put in an electric pump. Water towers are pretty straightforward tech; run the pump during the day until the tower is full, and the villagers can walk a couple of blocks to the spigot to get water. Charge spare phone batteries during the day. Any task that doesn't actually have to run 24 hours a day can take advantage of the power when it's there.
You are wrong, the capital IS there, Africa is rich, it's just the capitsl is leaving for US, Europe, and Asia, instead of staying in Africa because of colonial history.
Plenty of African nations are building strong private sector players.
Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Ghana are all building competitive local financial markets and private sector players.
There are plenty of Sub-Saharan states are remain perpetually underdeveloped, but that's ignoring plenty of foundational work happening in plenty of other African states.
The main difference is administrative capacity - some states have relatively decent bureaucracies and administrative norms, others don't.
It's up to individual countries political and economic leadership to decide which track they want to take.
They do have a private sector, and that should be lauded.
But we also have to be honest and concede that while the others may have usable rule of law to varying degrees, Nigeria has a looong way to go in this regard. Uganda could use a bit of help as well in that dimension.
I think the usual explanation involves debt repayments.
There are others, such as forced structural adjustments (e.g. privatisation) and currency control (in the case of the French and former West African colonies).
To get a good insight into the problems faced by nations in West Africa and Southwest Africa as they try to implement electricity-based technologies to their populations, I highly recommend watching Season 7 of Itchy Boots on YouTube [0].
Her experiences as she "adventure rides" through this region tacitly documents the true nature of "life as it is lived" by the millions and millions of human beings residing there.
It is stunning to consider and is an Africa I never knew existed.
If people are buying them because they're a good idea and profitable / economical.. of course the state will want a cut. That's how it always works, everywhere.
Perhaps easier but less versatile. A large storage site connected to a national high voltage grid can take electricity from a much wider variety of sources and send it to a wider variety of consumers.
> you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind
You will only need enough storage to cover 12-24 hours to reduce that a lot: Much of the surplus power can be put into vehicles when they're resting at home overnight, or for evening and next morning peak.
For the rest, well, so what? Temporary "oversupply" on days when there's lots of sun and no vehicle to charge up is not the worst problem to have - it won't kill anyone. The worst that you can say about it is that it's a misallocation of resources to sometimes have the power supply that you can't use or sell. But solar panels and batteries are becoming cheap. So the upside of having occasional surplus remains, the downside diminishes.
The problem is not necessarily day/night but summer with solar+and possible wind and winter with less solar and possible no wind.
So you need to store energy for more than a few hours or generate it from something else.
You then have the choice to use batteries(costly for megwatts as of now), things like hydrostorage, fossil fuels(gas/coal/oil) or hydrogen generated from renewable sources.
If you need big energy storages anyway, it makes more sense that communities pool their money together and invest in something like hydrostorage, but then you need a grid to connect the communities and if you do that, you might as well connect everything in the country so the grid is better at balancing.
I don't think 30% comes close to cutting it.
Look up the difference in production for a solar panel in summer vs winter in let's say Berlin.
And that's average. Consider extended lowpoints.
Yes, that's exactly why you would over-provision. So the upside of having occasional surplus is that in other times such as winter with less solar, you are more likely to still have enough capacity.
Sure, power on for 24/7/365 from Solar + Wind + Battery alone is hard; and 99% uptime is more expensive than 95% because of the batteries needed.
However when talking about rural communities that might not have power at all, or run a diesel generator in the evenings, that 95% from clean sources is a good start.
The problem of rural communities having no power is, I think mostly a non issue across most of europe.
Having most of the electrical grid already it makes no sense to scale it back or not connect the few not connected communities
I'm not arguing against renewable I'm arguing against the idea that in most of europe it would be better to use small grids instead of an european wide big grid.
Hydrostorage is cheap if it provides enough energy for more than one small community, having the ability to balance energy production and needs across europe is easier than being at the mercy of local weather.
A good example for that is austria, where the grid has a problem where a better connection between east and west is not finished/buid because of discussions about environmental impact.
This leads to overproduction in one place which can't be transferred to places that need electricity.
Yes, you need some redundant power supply. We should probably be investing more on research about synthetic fuels than we are right now (and shelf-stable flow batteries; hydrogen won't cut it in a micro-scale, even though it's great for national grids), but for a long time everybody will still use fossil fuels for that.
I think transmission losses are exactly the point? Locally, the losses are practically zero, the further you need to push it, the more significant various losses become. If you could line up someone's production to someone else nearby who needs to consume, as a whole the system would incur considerably less losses, no?
> I think transmission losses are exactly the point?
That can't be, your panel is charging up your neighbor's car in exactly the same way independently of you being connected to outside of your neighborhood.
solar power is nice on a household and retail level.
but let's be frank solar will not power industrial machinery needed to change africa's fortunes.
hydrocarbons are cheap. solar yeah can be free but the capital needed to say a 1MW solar plant is about 350K USD while a 1 MW generator can be from 25k USD to 200K depending on manufacturer, type of fuel etc.
Plus the generator can run all night.
Because they failed to maintain or invest in a regular grid. Off-grid, battery-backed is far more expensive than generator-backed at scale… at least for now. And you still need generators for poor weather.
Africa is leapfrogging legacy electrical infra models, and likely has no need for the legacy model of centralized generation and long haul transmission to load centers.
I recently bought 4 lifepo4 12v 100ah ~1200 wh for $159 off Amazon as a retail customer. Battery storage is indeed cheap and accessible to the average person. Pair it with new 24% efficient solar panels and you can see why there's little to be gained by running expensive lines to distribute power when it can be sent everywhere wirelessly.
It's not too different to how developing counties rolled out wireless Internet and gained a huge benefit without much infrastructure investment.
Indeed, and that is current state; renewables and battery manufacturing continues to ramp, which will encourage further cost declines. This is objectively good, it democratizes low carbon, cheap energy.
Youre also forgetting another component which is that the instrastructure gets torn down or stolen because it has market value. The replacement, maintenance, and security of wired grids is likely higher.
I was at my local Home Depot last weekend and the rep told me that just a few weeks prior, a couple people stole a couple rolls of electrical wire (romex) and the value was over $4,000 because of the cost of the copper in it.
It's probably worth even less if you have to resell wire to recycling businesses of the "no questions about where you got it" variety. Are these wire rolls large enough to contain a thousand pounds of copper?
You seem to have conveniently forgotten about centuries of colonialism, resource exploitation and state-sponsored regime changes, which still plague Africa today.
1) se asia is a much more densely populated region, making infrastructure cheaper per capita to produce (some things scale better, most do not) and 2) se asia has capital flowing through it at a far higher volume, mostly because of manufacturing.
I can't speak to why there historically hasn't been as much manufacturing in Africa—I'm guessing it's just cheaper to colocate with others for lower costs across the board?
Regardless, (neo)colonialism does dominate both regions—it's a hard state to avoid if you want to interact with a global economy at a deep financial disadvantage.
> se asia is a much more densely populated region, making infrastructure cheaper per capita to produce
Most of South East Asia has developmental indicators comparable to most of Sub Saharan Africa. Sub Saharan Africa has plenty of basket cases (DRC, CAR, Mozambique), but it also has plenty of countries on the same general trajectory as South East Asian countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal). "Africa" and "Asia" is broad and it's dumb ti compare the two.
> se asia has capital flowing through it at a far higher volume, mostly because of manufacturing
Not exactly. Much of South East Asia has strong capital market integrations with Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea which makes it easier for liquid capital to flow.
African nations that have integrated their capital markets with foreign markets open to taking risks in LDCs (UAE, China, India) have seen a leapfrogging in economic capabilities. You see this with Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda.
> se asia
What do you mean by SEA? And what do you mean by East Asia?
Let's look at the successful economies of East Asia:
Japan was a first world country, an economic success before WWII, and then had the US occupation after the war to rebuild it economically and politically as a hedge against future Japanese threats and against Russia and China.
South Korea never suffered Western colonialism (?) but did suffer under Japan. After that and the Korean War, iirc it was one of the poorest places on Earth. Now they are among the wealthiest and most free, maybe the greatest such accomplishment ever. They also benefitted from direct US support, as a counter-balance to the neighboring communist states.
Taiwan has direct US support to contain the communist regime in mainland China, first as a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship and then as a democracy.
China suffered 50-150 years of Western colonialsm, depending on how you measure it (the UK still controlled Hong Kong until the late 1990s). They were very poor into the 1990s. Then, opening their economy to investment (a project begun in the late 1970s), and with major manufacturing economies as neighbors (Japan, Taiwan, S Korea, etc.), they became the center of global manufacturing and trade and reaped the financial benefits.
By comparison, how will African countries attract investment? They are geopolitically located in a place that matters, and are not the global center of population nor many of the other Chinese advantages such as a massive single market that complied with Western requirements, proximity to wealthy neighbors such as Japan, Taiwan, etc.
I would assume that Africa will in fact be the global center of population in a few decades? Natural resources plus population is usually a winning formula for long-term growth.
Compare all of Africa with East Asia. The latter is a heavily coastal population along an oceanic trade route, also near the massive South Asian population.
Also, Africa doesn't have the geopoitical importance, an accident of geography but a reality. Unless and until world power changes dramatically to Africa from the US, Europe, and East Asia, it doesn't seem like that will change.
That doesn't mean they can't grow wealthier, etc. But compared to East Asian countries, they lack the means to compel investment
Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries, and does a disservice to the actual government institutions working on development.
They should explicitly call out Nigeria instead of treating it as "Africa". Nigeria is unique in how they actually have a formal industrial strategy for mini-grids [0] thanks to World Bank support [1]
It's a uniquely Nigerian program and Nigeria's Rural Electrification Administration (REA) should be given it's due credit. When Boko Haram does something bad it's "Nigeria", but when Abuja does something good it's "Africa".
Finally, what works for a federal state with a relatively strong civil service like Nigeria cannot be replicated in every "African" country, due to entirely different administrative and bureaucratic norms and capacity.
[0] - https://rea.gov.ng/minigrids/
[1] - https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/1ea...
That was my first thought.
Let's say you are an editor: You can be accurate and write 'Nigeria' in the headline, but you realize that most people have no idea where or what Nigeria is - that's a bad thing, but true. If you write 'Africa', then many more people will learn about Nigeria.
I don't have a good answer. Maybe they should squeeze both into the headline: 'For African climate and livelihoods, Nigeria bets big ...'
> Maybe they should squeeze both into the headline: 'For African climate and livelihoods, Nigeria bets big ...'
Yep! That's what I feel is much more constructive as a title, because it both gives credit to the originator of a success AND makes it potentially generalizable.
Btw, the proposed title you mentioned is the norm for reporting on the minigrid project in business news.
> most people have no idea where or what Nigeria is
Really? I'm pretty sure that everyone I know knows where Nigeria is.
> everyone I know
Not a representative sample of Western humanity. Look up surveys on knowledge and beliefs; you'll be very surprised.
This gets my goat as well, particularly given how vast Africa is (the Mercator projection does it no favours in that regard) and the diversity of cultures.
Amen to all of that. It feels like all discourse about Africa is either super negative ("heart of darkness") or super paternalistic ("white/outsider [asian and middle eastern countries use the same discourse] savior complex").
It's similar to the discourse I'd see about Asia as a kid 20-30 years ago, and ignores a lot of the tangible on the ground innovations happening.
> Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries
And in one of those 54, Cameroon to be exact, there are over 300 languages spoken.
It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
Grids are better if you have the capital to build them. Most of arfica has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost.
Of course with the large number of countries there, that generalization is false. But it is overall close a enough to true.
> Most of arfica (sic) has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost
You can't view Africa with such broad strokes. A West African country with British administrative norms like Nigeria is going to have entirely different outcomes compared to a former Portuguese colony impacted by the Colonial Wars like Mozambique.
Reality is, plenty of African countries do have the right building blocks, and are seeing a significant amount of capital investment from the Gulf States, China, and India because their investors understand how to operate in similar conditions from 10-30 years ago.
Whenever an African country like Nigeria or Kenya does something good, it's positive attributes as masked as part of "Africa" so Western donor organizations can continue to justify spending in basket cases like Rwanda or Mozambique, which is what this article itself is doing.
The Mini-Grid project in the article is a program that private and public sector players in Nigeria worked on, and only succeeded because of Nigeria's administrative apparatus and 10 years of hard work (started back in 2015-16).
The only learning this provides is that
1. You need a relatively competent bureaucratic system in order to actually execute on initiatives
2. You need to have a robust domestic private sector that works closely with the public sector and foreign investors
3. This can only be done through a profit motivation, not a local or international non-profit boondoggle, as that's the only way to unlock the economies of scale needed and incentivize execution
I hesitate to write this, but can you please read an entire post before your respond? If you could you would see that I made it clear my point was broadly true but has plenty of exceptions.
Ethiopia is threating to decend into a another civil war. Military Coups happens someplace every few years. ISIS is doing their terrorism in the north east. Lately Kenya has been one of the better countries in the region, but who knows if that will continue - I wish them luck.
Even in context of Nigeria, all your points miss the important fact that if the government isn't stable and protects you from crime/terrorists all investments are a waste as they will be destroyed.
Are you really characterizing Nigeria's notoriously kleptocratic bureaucratic system as "relatively competent", while self-styled Singapore of Africa Rwanda is a "basket case"? Most observers would reverse those labels.
> Singapore of Africa Rwanda is a "basket case"
They spent dozens of millions of dollars on PR to make themselves the "Singapore of Africa".
I've documented this on HN previously [0][1].
Most notably, 20-25% of Rwanda's GDP remains Aid driven unlike their closest peer Uganda who now has 15% of GDP derived from ICT and an additional 10% from Finance. Yet Uganda doesn't beat their drum despite also being a personalist dictatorship. Museveni is a dick (and I went to school with some opposition members of his), but I will hand it to his administration - they concentrate on administrative capacity to a certain extent.
> Nigeria's notoriously kleptocratic bureaucratic system
They are not the most efficient, but the Nigerian Civil Service has drastically reformed over the past 15 years. Daniel "Dan" Roggers has been instrumental in this change [2], specifically by revamping the Nigerian Civil Service in the early 2010s as part of a World Bank bailout (he's now helping Lithuania and other Baltic States).
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38147110
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847829
[2] - https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/people/d/daniel-oliver-ro...
I think the example would have been better if they had put Ghana in the place of Nigeria.
I have no idea how anyone did an analysis of the stability of African nations, and came out of it thinking Nigeria was an example to hold up as some kind of gold standard? It reinforces my belief that we Westerners, as a group, know very little about the African continent.
> they had put Ghana in the place of Nigeria
Absolutely not.
> reinforces my belief that we Westerners, as a group, know very little about the African continent
Or normies like you only listen to BTP Adviser funded submarine articles.
Yes, and in many cases it's the same companies enabling both:
all because they figured this out: https://www.m-kopa.com/newsroom/m-kopa-releases-annual-impac...> The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
It doesn't help that Africa is huge and the population density of most of it is damn near zero. Grids of any form make very little sense given those constraints.
Nigeria has higher population density than the US.
https://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/201807
An island of density in a sea of empty.
And Nigeria's grid has its own set of issues.
Point is it's not caused by low population density.
The world’s first hydrogen exploration company was founded in Mali. No one knows for a fact what the development pathway is. Solar might turn out to be inconsequential.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/iwnetim-abate-aims-extract-hydroge...
> In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity in the nearby village.
> Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The company is drilling wells near the original site that have yielded high concentrations of the gas.
Promising but how do pipelines deal with hydrogen?
They leak, hydrogen is smaller then all other atoms, so they are hard to contain. local production and immediate use is the only option that makes sense. Pipelines are non-sensical
This must limit electricity generation to local hydrogen sources which may be challenging compared to natural gas. Prob similar to nuclear?
These mini grids will never lift any African country into modernity. The cost of renewables is not falling, if you take into account the hours those renewables are not producing power. If a country cannot build a basic power grid, they will remain a village, most likely with widespread poverty.
> The cost of renewables is not falling, if you take into account the hours those renewables are not producing power.
This is false, like logic wise even if your assumptions were true. You might say that supposed cost right now is fake. If it's actually much higher (accounting for batteries or NatGas) the ridiculous drop in price from panels still means that the cost is falling.
> If a country cannot build a basic power grid, they will remain a village, most likely with widespread poverty.
They are probably not gonna be smelting with arc furnaces in bumbfuck-nowhere, Nigeria; but that's also not happening in some hamlet in the UK. African cities and resource extractions areas already have power grinds, the problem are rural areas.
Rio Tinto's smelters in Australia are already deploying batteries and renewables because relying on coal would make them too expensive:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/rio-tinto-signs-massive-solar-an...
> There is no reason why, in some places, (firm and reliable supply) cannot be achieved via a mix of intermittent renewables, provided that this mix is ‘firmed’ via batteries and other sources.
> “The hurdle here is not technical, it is, … the overall net economic cost of the combined solution. This is materially helped by the continuous downward trend of battery costs, but the incremental cost of the last percentages of firming can indeed prove expensive.”
(Also of relevance, Australia is actually replacing some long distance grid connections with mini solar grids as a cost reduction move, which suggests mini grids are the right option for remote communities)
I mean, it's not going to turn these countries into rich places, but the article points out several ways that having power - even intermittent power - at a very low cost has improved people's lives significantly. They no longer have to walk miles to get drinking water; they drilled a well and put in an electric pump. Water towers are pretty straightforward tech; run the pump during the day until the tower is full, and the villagers can walk a couple of blocks to the spigot to get water. Charge spare phone batteries during the day. Any task that doesn't actually have to run 24 hours a day can take advantage of the power when it's there.
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You are wrong, the capital IS there, Africa is rich, it's just the capitsl is leaving for US, Europe, and Asia, instead of staying in Africa because of colonial history.
Plenty of African nations are building strong private sector players.
Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Ghana are all building competitive local financial markets and private sector players.
There are plenty of Sub-Saharan states are remain perpetually underdeveloped, but that's ignoring plenty of foundational work happening in plenty of other African states.
The main difference is administrative capacity - some states have relatively decent bureaucracies and administrative norms, others don't.
It's up to individual countries political and economic leadership to decide which track they want to take.
They do have a private sector, and that should be lauded.
But we also have to be honest and concede that while the others may have usable rule of law to varying degrees, Nigeria has a looong way to go in this regard. Uganda could use a bit of help as well in that dimension.
Why does africans send their capital to US, Europe and Asia?
Stop saying "Africans".
Each African country has a different context, and it does a disservice to laggards and over performers to club everyone as "African".
There are unique administrative hurdles and innovations that African countries have to either spark industries or smother them.
Humans are the same irrespective of our country of origin - the main difference is how public and private institutions manage humans.
And how, pray tell, is the money being siphoned off to the evil colonial empires?
I think the usual explanation involves debt repayments.
There are others, such as forced structural adjustments (e.g. privatisation) and currency control (in the case of the French and former West African colonies).
To get a good insight into the problems faced by nations in West Africa and Southwest Africa as they try to implement electricity-based technologies to their populations, I highly recommend watching Season 7 of Itchy Boots on YouTube [0].
Her experiences as she "adventure rides" through this region tacitly documents the true nature of "life as it is lived" by the millions and millions of human beings residing there.
It is stunning to consider and is an Africa I never knew existed.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8M9dV_BySaXNvQ_V1q4U...
Why are solar panels subject to VAT? If it's the way of the future and we want everyone to buy and use them then why are there taxes on them?
If people are buying them because they're a good idea and profitable / economical.. of course the state will want a cut. That's how it always works, everywhere.
State wanting a cut proves that the clean energy is not the number one priority
Well that goes without saying.
Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
But with mini grids you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind with nobody at all to sell the excess to
In the near future most cars could be happy to accept a charge
That’s a problem big grids also share. It‘s probably easier to buffer power for a small neighborhood, than for a city.
Perhaps easier but less versatile. A large storage site connected to a national high voltage grid can take electricity from a much wider variety of sources and send it to a wider variety of consumers.
> you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind
You will only need enough storage to cover 12-24 hours to reduce that a lot: Much of the surplus power can be put into vehicles when they're resting at home overnight, or for evening and next morning peak.
For the rest, well, so what? Temporary "oversupply" on days when there's lots of sun and no vehicle to charge up is not the worst problem to have - it won't kill anyone. The worst that you can say about it is that it's a misallocation of resources to sometimes have the power supply that you can't use or sell. But solar panels and batteries are becoming cheap. So the upside of having occasional surplus remains, the downside diminishes.
The problem is not necessarily day/night but summer with solar+and possible wind and winter with less solar and possible no wind.
So you need to store energy for more than a few hours or generate it from something else.
You then have the choice to use batteries(costly for megwatts as of now), things like hydrostorage, fossil fuels(gas/coal/oil) or hydrogen generated from renewable sources.
If you need big energy storages anyway, it makes more sense that communities pool their money together and invest in something like hydrostorage, but then you need a grid to connect the communities and if you do that, you might as well connect everything in the country so the grid is better at balancing.
> The problem is not necessarily day/night but summer with solar+and possible wind and winter with less solar and possible no wind.
So they have to buy some 30% more panels.
I don't think 30% comes close to cutting it. Look up the difference in production for a solar panel in summer vs winter in let's say Berlin. And that's average. Consider extended lowpoints.
Yes, that's exactly why you would over-provision. So the upside of having occasional surplus is that in other times such as winter with less solar, you are more likely to still have enough capacity.
sorry my bad for formulating it badly: less solar and now wind means days or even weeks with no solar and no wind aka "dunkelflaute"
In germany a week long dukelflaute occurs every 2 years.
Sure, power on for 24/7/365 from Solar + Wind + Battery alone is hard; and 99% uptime is more expensive than 95% because of the batteries needed.
However when talking about rural communities that might not have power at all, or run a diesel generator in the evenings, that 95% from clean sources is a good start.
The problem of rural communities having no power is, I think mostly a non issue across most of europe.
Having most of the electrical grid already it makes no sense to scale it back or not connect the few not connected communities
I'm not arguing against renewable I'm arguing against the idea that in most of europe it would be better to use small grids instead of an european wide big grid.
Hydrostorage is cheap if it provides enough energy for more than one small community, having the ability to balance energy production and needs across europe is easier than being at the mercy of local weather.
A good example for that is austria, where the grid has a problem where a better connection between east and west is not finished/buid because of discussions about environmental impact.
This leads to overproduction in one place which can't be transferred to places that need electricity.
https://kommunal.at/wir-haben-ein-strom-problem
And you'll be churning out hydrogen all summer.
sorry my bad for formulating it badly: less solar and now wind means days or even weeks with no solar and no wind aka "dunkelflaute"
In germany a week long dukelflaute occurs every 2 years.
You don't need 30% more panels, you need to store energy for the all usage for about a week.
Oh, you mean a rare eventuality.
Yes, you need some redundant power supply. We should probably be investing more on research about synthetic fuels than we are right now (and shelf-stable flow batteries; hydrogen won't cut it in a micro-scale, even though it's great for national grids), but for a long time everybody will still use fossil fuels for that.
It's not a huge problem right now.
So you can have thirty percent more not enough!
I’m sorry, we’re all out of solar. Perhaps you can have no wind instead.
Can you use the spare electricity to stockpile some sodium hydroxide or something?
> Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
Electricity is fungible (ignoring transmission losses), so what's the difference?
I think transmission losses are exactly the point? Locally, the losses are practically zero, the further you need to push it, the more significant various losses become. If you could line up someone's production to someone else nearby who needs to consume, as a whole the system would incur considerably less losses, no?
US grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5%. You'd come out ahead pretty quickly if your neighbors can't use your surplus.
> US grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5%
That’s interesting, I had always assumed it would be far higher. Could I trouble you for a source?
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
> I think transmission losses are exactly the point?
That can't be, your panel is charging up your neighbor's car in exactly the same way independently of you being connected to outside of your neighborhood.
taxes and fees. But yea it would not be allowed on a real scale without new taxes and fees and then that benefit is removed.
instead of innovation or investment the only thing the EU does is legislation and policy. it's really sad. :(
solar power is nice on a household and retail level. but let's be frank solar will not power industrial machinery needed to change africa's fortunes. hydrocarbons are cheap. solar yeah can be free but the capital needed to say a 1MW solar plant is about 350K USD while a 1 MW generator can be from 25k USD to 200K depending on manufacturer, type of fuel etc. Plus the generator can run all night.
OnePower is another organization doing this very successfully in Lesotho
https://1pwrafrica.com/
Because they failed to maintain or invest in a regular grid. Off-grid, battery-backed is far more expensive than generator-backed at scale… at least for now. And you still need generators for poor weather.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://developmentreimagined.com/infographic-exploring-afri...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly (center map on Africa)
Africa is leapfrogging legacy electrical infra models, and likely has no need for the legacy model of centralized generation and long haul transmission to load centers.
(the battery costs in the Our World in Data citation are already out of date, and as of 2023, the average global price of batteries was $95/kWh, see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA for more)
I recently bought 4 lifepo4 12v 100ah ~1200 wh for $159 off Amazon as a retail customer. Battery storage is indeed cheap and accessible to the average person. Pair it with new 24% efficient solar panels and you can see why there's little to be gained by running expensive lines to distribute power when it can be sent everywhere wirelessly.
It's not too different to how developing counties rolled out wireless Internet and gained a huge benefit without much infrastructure investment.
Indeed, and that is current state; renewables and battery manufacturing continues to ramp, which will encourage further cost declines. This is objectively good, it democratizes low carbon, cheap energy.
Youre also forgetting another component which is that the instrastructure gets torn down or stolen because it has market value. The replacement, maintenance, and security of wired grids is likely higher.
Why would infrastructure get torn down once it’s in place?
The local militia or government wants money and doesn't care overmuch about the locals themselves, presumably.
Copper wire has high resale value. So do solar panels. Copper theft is a problem worldwide, including the US.
I was at my local Home Depot last weekend and the rep told me that just a few weeks prior, a couple people stole a couple rolls of electrical wire (romex) and the value was over $4,000 because of the cost of the copper in it.
I was buying a 15ft strand and it was $18.
Copper as a commodity is currently worth under $5/pound: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/copper
It's probably worth even less if you have to resell wire to recycling businesses of the "no questions about where you got it" variety. Are these wire rolls large enough to contain a thousand pounds of copper?
Not sure but the price tag of each roll was about $1,500. So I think it was a 1000ft spool.
You seem to have conveniently forgotten about centuries of colonialism, resource exploitation and state-sponsored regime changes, which still plague Africa today.
How would you differentiate Africa from East Asia in those regards?
1) se asia is a much more densely populated region, making infrastructure cheaper per capita to produce (some things scale better, most do not) and 2) se asia has capital flowing through it at a far higher volume, mostly because of manufacturing.
I can't speak to why there historically hasn't been as much manufacturing in Africa—I'm guessing it's just cheaper to colocate with others for lower costs across the board?
Regardless, (neo)colonialism does dominate both regions—it's a hard state to avoid if you want to interact with a global economy at a deep financial disadvantage.
> se asia is a much more densely populated region, making infrastructure cheaper per capita to produce
Most of South East Asia has developmental indicators comparable to most of Sub Saharan Africa. Sub Saharan Africa has plenty of basket cases (DRC, CAR, Mozambique), but it also has plenty of countries on the same general trajectory as South East Asian countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal). "Africa" and "Asia" is broad and it's dumb ti compare the two.
> se asia has capital flowing through it at a far higher volume, mostly because of manufacturing
Not exactly. Much of South East Asia has strong capital market integrations with Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea which makes it easier for liquid capital to flow.
African nations that have integrated their capital markets with foreign markets open to taking risks in LDCs (UAE, China, India) have seen a leapfrogging in economic capabilities. You see this with Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda.
> se asia
What do you mean by SEA? And what do you mean by East Asia?
> Most of South East Asia has developmental indicators comparable to most of Sub Saharan Africa.
Africa GDP Per Capita (2023)
Kenya: 1,952.30 USD
Nigeria: 1,596.64 USD
Uganda: 1,002.31 USD
Tanzania: 1,224.49 USD
Senegal: 1,706.44 USD
South East Asia GDP Per Capita (2023)
Brunei: 32,962.91 USD
Myanmar: 1,233.20 USD
Cambodia: 2,429.75 USD
Timor-Leste: 1,502.52 USD
Indonesia: 4,8976.31 USD
Laos: 2,066.95 USD
Malaysia: 11,379.09 USD
The Philippines: 3,804.87 USD
Singapore: 84,734.26 USD
Thailand: 7,182.03 USD
Vietnam: 4,282.09 USD
Africa HDI (2022)
Kenya: 0.601
Nigeria: 0.548
Uganda: 0.550
Tanzania: 0.532
Senegal: 0.517
South East Asia HDI (2022)
Brunei: 0.823
Myanmar: 0.608
Cambodia: 0.6
Timor-Leste: 0.566
Indonesia: 0.713
Laos: 0.620
Malaysia: 0.807
The Philippines: 0.710
Singapore: 0.949
Thailand: 0.803
Vietnam: 0.726
Africa Under-Five Mortality (2020, Estimates):
Kenya: 29.8
Nigeria: 59.8
Uganda: 32.6
Tanzania: 36.4
Senegal: 45.7
South East Asia Under-Five Mortality Rates (2020, Estimates):
Brunei: 8.8
Myanmar: 31.7
Cambodia: 43.7
Timor-Leste: 31.7
Indonesia: 20.4
Laos: 45.6
Malaysia: 11.4
The Philippines: 20.0
Singapore: 2.3
Thailand: 8.6
Vietnam: 15.7
Let's look at the successful economies of East Asia:
Japan was a first world country, an economic success before WWII, and then had the US occupation after the war to rebuild it economically and politically as a hedge against future Japanese threats and against Russia and China.
South Korea never suffered Western colonialism (?) but did suffer under Japan. After that and the Korean War, iirc it was one of the poorest places on Earth. Now they are among the wealthiest and most free, maybe the greatest such accomplishment ever. They also benefitted from direct US support, as a counter-balance to the neighboring communist states.
Taiwan has direct US support to contain the communist regime in mainland China, first as a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship and then as a democracy.
China suffered 50-150 years of Western colonialsm, depending on how you measure it (the UK still controlled Hong Kong until the late 1990s). They were very poor into the 1990s. Then, opening their economy to investment (a project begun in the late 1970s), and with major manufacturing economies as neighbors (Japan, Taiwan, S Korea, etc.), they became the center of global manufacturing and trade and reaped the financial benefits.
By comparison, how will African countries attract investment? They are geopolitically located in a place that matters, and are not the global center of population nor many of the other Chinese advantages such as a massive single market that complied with Western requirements, proximity to wealthy neighbors such as Japan, Taiwan, etc.
I would assume that Africa will in fact be the global center of population in a few decades? Natural resources plus population is usually a winning formula for long-term growth.
Compare all of Africa with East Asia. The latter is a heavily coastal population along an oceanic trade route, also near the massive South Asian population.
Also, Africa doesn't have the geopoitical importance, an accident of geography but a reality. Unless and until world power changes dramatically to Africa from the US, Europe, and East Asia, it doesn't seem like that will change.
That doesn't mean they can't grow wealthier, etc. But compared to East Asian countries, they lack the means to compel investment
> They are geopolitically located in a place that matters
I meant, 'they are not geopolitically located in a place that matters'. Oops.
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Most colonization in Asia occurred in the South and Southeastern regions.
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