The Need for Power

20 percent of Zimbabwe’s urban households do not have access to electricity, and rely mainly on firewood for their energy needs. Across the country slightly more than three million households, 44 percent are electrified. Of the un-electrified households, 62% percent use wood as the main source of energy for cooking, especially in rural areas where 90 percent live without access to energy.

Worldwide, energy access has become a key determinant in improving people’s lives, mainly in rural communities where basic needs are met with difficulty. In Zimbabwe, access to modern energy is very low, casting doubts on the country’s efforts at sustainable development, which energy experts say is not possible without sustainable energy.

Zimbabwe Energy Council executive director Panganayi Sithole told IPS that modern energy services were crucial to human welfare, yet over 70 percent of the population remain trapped in energy poverty. “The prevalence of energy of poverty in Zimbabwe cuts across both urban and rural areas. The situation is very dire in peri-urban areas due to deforestation and the non-availability of modern energy services,” said Sithole. “Take Epworth [a poor suburb in Harare] for example. There are no forests to talk about and at the same time you cannot talk of the use of liquefied petrol gas (LPG) there due to costs and lack of knowledge. People there are using grass, plastics and animal dung to cook. It’s very sad,” he noted. Sithole said there was a need to recognise energy poverty as a national challenge and priority, which all past and present ministers of energy have failed to do.

The need for energy to improve productivity in rural areas cannot be over-emphasised but current power generated is not sufficient to support all the energy-demanding activities in the country. The country has abundant renewable energy sources, most of which are yet to be fully utilized. France has a population of 65 million people, yet it generates four times more electricity than all the 47 sub-Saharan African countries generate for their 805 million people.

Renewables for a new Africa

Of the world's 7 billion people, more than 1.2 billion (250-300 million households) currently lack access to electricity; hundreds of millions more contend with power supplies that are low-quality or very unreliable. Power outages cause businesses to lose, on average, 13% in Africa. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest publicly traded coal company, unsurprisingly declares that coal is “essential to meet the scale of Africa’s desperate need for electricity.”

There are a couple of inescapable flaws in the “coal for Africa” argument.

84% of those living without energy access throughout Africa and India live in rural and remote areas — areas without an existing energy grid. Without an energy grid, the energy generated by coal would have no way of reaching its intended recipients, requiring a massive outlay to build the necessary infrastructure to reach the very people renewables apparently “can’t.”

Furthermore, coal is not distributed well to serve Africa’s energy poor. Only 7% of the people in sub-Saharan Africa who currently lack access to energy actually living in coal-rich countries. On top of that, the transport links necessary to remedy this problem — between north and south — are poor, and would once again require massive infrastructure costs to solve the problem.

It is clear that solar power is the future. Solar can be decentralized, and a simple solar panel, can provide enough electricity for one small home in the developing world. In Mongolia, one solar panel provides enough electricity for one hut, without the need for ugly transmission lines crisscrossing the country. Clearly solar, and small wind are better options than large dirty coal plants, which require miles of ugly transmission lines. Instead of trying to build massive coal plants which pollute and are expensive and transmission lines (where the copper is often stolen), at this point it is much better to do small local solar PV which is used to charge up LED lanterns, cellphones, radios, laptops, etc. Solving energy poverty also requires producing large quantities of electricity needed to power services, government buildings and of course the ever expanding cities that dot the continent. Oh, and let's not forget about powering the mines, factories and other forms of industry. Many African countries are beginning to experiment with utility scale wind and solar farms. And let's not forget about hydro-power: the vast rivers of equatorial Africa could almost single-handedly power the entire continent (Grand Inga alone could power the whole of equatorial Africa).

From here

Sustainable and Renewal Energy for Africa

There are fewer people living in the entire African continent than in India, but India is 10 times smaller than Africa. Building electricity grids across such distances to reach families that live on $4-5 a day does not make sense. Getting the power grid to remote communities can be a costly venture and the returns are highly unlikely to justify the investment.

Africa never managed to build a proper telephone cable network. And it will never need it. The continent has nearly 500 million mobile connections and only 12 million fixed telephone lines. Something similar could happen with energy.

Off grid solar energy is rapidly spreading. In the last few years over 7 million off-grid Africans have replaced their kerosene lamps with solar lights. This might be just 1 percent of the off-grid African population, but it is on a scale sufficient to introduce a technology that could disrupt the expected path of development. The reasons are at least four.

First, the change to the family budget that a solar light brings is significant. According to SolarAid, one of the organisations introducing solar lights to Africa, by replacing kerosene with solar power LED light in Tanzania, typically you can save more than a dollar a week. This is a significant amount of money for the 48 percent of the sub-Saharan people that live on less than $1.25 a day.

Second, solar power can be expanded and connected. You can get one panel and you will replace a kerosene lamp. Get two and you will be able to charge your mobile phone. Add another one and you can have a radio. With one more you might have a computer or a TV. In other words, the solar generation could add to your life different consumer products. And you can also team up with a neighbour and build a small local grid.

Third, the technological advances are staggering. The LED light uses five to 10 times less energy than the old incandescent light. Chinese, Spanish and German subsidies have turned photovoltaic panels into a commodity with a rapidly falling price. What looked 10 years ago like a rich government's game now is simply cheap. The cost of solar power is falling below new nuclear or gas generated power and even below coal, if you care to include into the electricity price the cost of all the environmental and health damage that coal causes.

Fourth, solar, and other renewable energy technologies do not need the hugely expensive power infrastructure required to bring the electricity generated by a nuclear reactor or a coal power block 2,000 kilometres to a poor African village.

Put these four reasons together and you will see that the traditional centralised power grid structure will lag far behind the economic and technological development of Africa. In other words, the off-grid electricity network will grow faster than the centralised energy economy. The centralised power grid economy will never be able to catch up with the faster growing off-grid economy.

By the time you secure financing for the 2,000 km grid to a remote village, it will have the LED lights at home and in school, chargers for mobiles phones, power for TVs and computers and mobile access to high quality education through the MOOC (mass online open courses) system.

There are already countries in Africa, like Rwanda, that are looking at a 100 percent renewable electricity option by 2020.

 Obama promised more than $7bn for the Power Africa programme. The money will most likely go into grids and conventional energy projects. Bad choice.

From here 

Electric Power or People?

As the construction of a major transmission line to export electricity generated from one of Ethiopia’s major hydropower projects gets underway, there are growing concerns that pastoralist communities living in the region are under threat. The Gibe III dam, which will generate 1,800 megawatts, is being built in southeast Ethiopia on the Omo River at a cost of 1.7 billion dollars. It is expected to earn the government over 400 million dollars annually from power exports. On completion in 2015 it will be the world’s fourth-largest dam. Top global financiers, including the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB), have committed 1.2 billion dollars to a 1,070 km high-voltage line that will run from Wolayta-Sodo in Ethiopia to Suswa, 100 km northwest of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. The transmission line, powered by Ethiopia’s Gibe III, will connect the country’s electrical grid with Kenya and will have a capacity to carry 2,000 MW between the two countries.

But the dam is expected to debilitate the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of indigenous communities in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley and those living around Kenya’s Lake Turkana who depend on the Omo River. The Bodi, Daasanach, Kara, Mursi, Kwegu and Nyangatom ethnic communities who live along the Omo River depend on its annual flooding to practice flood-retreat cultivation for their survival and livelihoods. But the semi-nomadic Mursi ethnic community are being resettled as part of the Ethiopian government’s villagisation programme to make room for a large sugar plantation, which will turn roaming pastoralists into sedentary farmers. The hundreds of kilometres of irrigation canals currently being dug to divert the Omo River’s waters to feed these large plantations will make it impossible for the indigenous communities to live as they have always done.

“We are being told that our land is private property. We are very worried about our survival as we are being forced to move where there is no water, grass or crops,” a Mursi community member told IPS. “We fear for the future. Our way of life is under threat. We are being told to stop moving with our cattle, to stop wearing our traditional dress and to sell our cattle. Cattle and movement is everything to the Mursi.”

The Gibe III will worsen poverty for the most vulnerable. The government already has trouble managing hunger and poverty among its citizenry. By taking over land and water resources in the Omo Valley, it is creating a new class of ‘internal refugees’ who will no longer be self-sufficient,” Lori Pottinger from environmental NGO International Rivers said.

What water shortage? What energy crisis?

Water is a saleable commodity underr capitalism. And, of course, the first thing is to declare that water is a scarce resource and that there exists a shortage of water, a water "crisis" that only capitalism remedies with a price-rationing. The fiction of water shortage in Africa has been a multi-million dollar business.

Much of the conquest of Africa by colonial powers was to reach the source of the Nile and always central to imperial objectives in Africa, requiring the water to support colonial mining, agriculture and industrial uses to the detriment of the vast majority of the peoples. Settler colonialists consumed vast amounts of water for irrigation, sprinkling elegant gardens and for their swimming pools while there was water shortage for the majority. Irrigation schemes had been established by the settlers to provide water for the farms and the political and economic power of settlers. During the period of apartheid, the minority government in cooperation with the World Bank invested in the Lesotho High Water Dam to dispossess the people of Lesotho for industries and big corporate entities in South Africa. As in South Africa, so all over Africa these schemes benefited the rich. And there the negative lessons from the old forms of capitalist industrialization, as witnessed the obscene waste of the Arab Sheiks in the Emirates who are building mega projects based on the salinization of water.

Today we are now being told the truth about the abundance of water resources in Africa."Huge water resource exists under Africa ... Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater. They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface. The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource."

 In reality, the publication by the British scientists on the large underground supplies of water should not be news. The scientists collated their information from existing hydro-geological maps from national governments as well as 283 aquifer studies.  It is the kind of work that should have been undertaken by the Economic Commission for Africa and the commissions of the African Union.

The fact that Libya has the highest storage of ground water in Africa has been known by the people of Libya and the people of North Africa. It is for this reason that the government of Libya had embarked on the great water transfer scheme to harness the resources of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. The Libyan state had invested $25 billion in the Great Man-made River Project, a complex 4,000-km long water pipeline buried beneath the desert that could transport two million cubic metres of water a day. The objective of this, (up to 2011) the largest engineering project in Africa was to turn Libya - a nation that is 95 per cent desert - into a food self-sufficient arable oasis.

African policy makers and planners also know that in Africa there are abundant freshwater resources in large rivers and lakes such as the Congo, Nile and Zambezi River basins and in Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world. However, there are great disparities in water availability and use within and between African countries, because the water resources are so unevenly distributed. In regards to the nile , the mal-distribution can be traced back to colonial-dated water treaties.

This fabrication of water shortage had been successfully sold to the point where the idea of providing clean water for all in Africa is reproduced as part of ‘aid’ packages. reproducing the story about food shortages as the story of water risks provided a good foundation for the multibillion dollar aid industry. Food and water ‘security’ became interwoven. Under Millenium Development Goals,  number 7C to "Half, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation" that can only be reached by more neo-liberalism and by opening up African resources to international capital. The World Bank continues to promote the privatization of water resources and support giant water projects that dispossess the working peoples of the urban and rural areas. The World Bank have been at the forefront of the struggles over the ideas of whether water should remain a public good, shared by humans everywhere, or a commodity to be bought and sold on the market.  This same struggle over water has taken place elsewhere in the world and intensified in Latin America where the struggles of the Bolivian people are now legendary. There is deep dispute over water as a source of life for the common good, as opposed to water being understood as an economic "good"  – a commodity to be bought and sold.

The unification of the water resources of Africa is one of the primary bases for African unity with a system of canals linking rivers and lakes in the kind of infrastructure planning that ensures that all will have water. It is socialist planning at the Pan African level which can make water for all a reality. The Nile water shed,  the Congo River basin, the Mano River basin, the Niger River societies and the societies of the Zambezi and Orange rivers there is need for planning so that there is a new concept of integration and unity. These rivers, lakes and underground water resources are commonly owned by all of the peoples.

In the socialism the reconstruction and transformation of Africa will mobilize the energy, skills and talents of all Africans so that the peoples can believe in the ideas of African and World Unity. This vision of reforestation and healing the African environment by the Great Green Wall (a 15km wide and 7000km long swath of land from Djibouti in the east and stretching to Senegal in the West and passing through Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania, can mobilize millions of workers, youths and engineers for a new sense of priorities for Africa. Advances in solar energy technology, harnessing the underground water resources, the electrification of Africa and an infrastructure of canal systems await Africa. Such projects places the concept of One People at the level where it touches concretely the lives of the people.

The management of water and water resources continues to be at the top of the list of re-construction. But also ready to be tackled by socialist democratisation are health, electrification and energy,  infrastructure (roads, bridges, rail, canals, and airports), education, agriculture and aquaculture, housing, and information and computer technology. It is time for a complete break from the old forms of "development" and industrialization that threaten to destroy the planet Earth.

The African continent has abundant supplies of water and energy. Among the ample renewable energy resources; hydraulic energy, solar energy, wind energy,  the tidal energy and volcanic thermal energy. It is now possible to plan for the mobilization of the physical and "spiritual" energy of people and with these abundant resources create a new world. The politics of transformation of Africa requires a new politics among the people.

Adapted from here

Nations vy for Nigerian gas

The EU is proposing to help the Nigerian government develop a trans-Saharan pipeline which would take gas from Nigeria through Niger and Algeria, direct to Europe.

But Russia also has realised Nigeria's importance too .A week before the EU offer, the Russian gas giant Gazprom signed a deal with the Nigerian government for gas exploration and transportation, and has clearly stated its interest in the proposed pipeline. Gazprom can offer huge investment in infrastructure as an inducement to do deals.

Europe is increasingly worried about its dependence on Russian gas, especially after Russia's action in Georgia increased its influence over European energy supply routes through the Caucasus.

Watch this space as Nigerian resources once more becomes the focal point for world capitalism competition .

Nigeria has the world's seventh largest gas reserves.

Africa - The Power-house of Europe

Rationally organised , African natural resources can provide world-wide solutions to the energy crisis .

Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts to meet all of Europe's energy needs.A tiny rectangle ,an area slightly smaller than Wales yet scientists claimed it could one day generate enough solar energy to supply all of Europe with clean electricity. The scientists are calling for the creation of a series of huge solar farms - producing electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the sun's heat to boil water and drive turbines - as part of a plan to share Europe's renewable energy resources across the continent.

Scientists argue that harnessing the Sahara would be particularly effective because the sunlight in this area is more intense: solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in northern Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

The Scramble for Bio-Fuel in Africa

Apart from the frenetic Scramble For Oil in Africa that is currently taking place ( see earlier blog entries here and also here and here ,here , too, as well as here and here ) , but there is now also the beginnings of a frantic , feverish Scramble For Bio-Fuel ( or agro-fuel as some quarters call it ) - ethanol production - in the African continent . The EU alone wants to see at least 10% of road fuel derived from plants by 2020 and to achieve that aim it has to acquire resources .

The GRAIN report says its research shows show that governments and biofuels firms in developing countries are collaborating to push hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and peasant communities off their land.
GRAIN said: “The numbers involved are mind-boggling… an agrofuel lobby is speaking of 379 million hectares being available in 15 African countries. We are talking about expropriation on an unprecedented scale."

Brazil, largely by way of the state-owned oil company Petrobrás, has cut deals for ethanol imports and technology transfer with a range of African countries, from Senegal to Nigeria, Mozambique to Angola
Viscount Energy (China) Memorandum of understanding with the Ebonyi state government in Nigeria to establish a US$80-million ethanol factory in Nigeria using both cassava and sugar cane.
21st Century Energy (USA) Plans to invest up to US$130 million over the next five years in the production of ethanol from sugar cane, maize and sweet sorghum, and later to manufacture biodiesel from cottonseed and cashew nut residues in Cote d’Ivoire.
Bioenergy International (Switzerland) Plans to set up a 93,000-hectare jatropha plantation with a biodiesel refinery and an electrification plant in Kenya.
Sun Biofuels (UK) In association with the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC), has acquired 18,000 hectares of top quality agricultural land for jatropha production.
AlcoGroup (Belgium) Bought South Africa’s NCP Alcohols, Africa’s largest producer of fermentation ethanol, in 2001.
MagIndustries (Canada) Acquired a 68,000-hectare eucalyptus forestry plantation and is constructing a 500,000-tonnes per-year wood-chipping plant near the port city of Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo. The wood chips will be shipped to Europe for use as biomass.
Aurantia (Spain) Investing in oil-palm plantations and possibly four biodiesel refineries in the Republic of Congo.
Dagris (France) Investing in the development of biodiesel production from cottonseed oil in Burkina Faso through its local oil processor SN Citec.
SOCAPALM and Socfinal (Belgium) Plans to expand its 30,000-hectare oil-palm plantation in Cameroon .

Rather than improving energy security, biofuels will create a new problem of food insecurity, for the price of the national staples, cassava and palm oil, will almost certainly rise substantially when agrofuel production is under way. This year South Africa is running a deficit in its maize production, instead of the expected surplus. In only the last six months the “ethanol effect” (that is, the extra demand from the ethanol producers), combined with a drought in Southern Africa, have caused maize prices to skyrocket, with a percentage increase four times the level predicted in the Biofuels Strategy. As maize is the country’s staple food, the poor are suffering most.

There is evidence elsewhere that leads many to believe that agrofuels may, in part, be a smokescreen for the investors’ real agenda, which is to obtain land. The agrofuels sector, which is only a few years old, is almost entirely unregulated. In the confusion investors are obtaining large chunks of land for nominal fees. One ministry of energy official confided in an off-the-record briefing: “It is possible that the whole thing is being abused by night-flyers, since the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.” By the time the government wakes up to what is happening, many more of the country’s precious natural resources will have been destroyed .

In South Africa, the Eastern Cape government is to make 3 million hectares of “under-utilised” and fertile communal land available for agro fuel investments. One such project involves the planting of 70,000 hectares of canola for export by German investors. Rural communities use this land in several ways, including grazing, and it makes a considerable contribution to their livelihood. South Africa has a long history of expropriating rural communities or restructuring land use in a way that impoverishes them. This new scheme for taking land away and using it to plant crops for export is, unfortunately,
just more of the same.

“Southern Africa has the potential to be the Middle East of biofuels”, said Andrew Owens, CEO of the UK’s Greenergy at an agrofuels meeting in Cape Town.

But as in any other sector of agribusiness, corporate profit with agrofuel crops is best assured when these plantations are on the most fertile lands, close to major transportation routes. Millions of small farmers still occupy these lands. In Tanzania, the prime minister is fast-tracking agrofuels to accommodate a Swedish investor looking for 400,000 hectares in the Wami Basin, one of the country’s major wetlands, to plant sugar cane for ethanol. The project will inevitably displace local small-scale rice farmers. In Liberia, a UK company, Equatorial Biofuels, acquired Liberian Forest Products (LFP), which holds management agreements and permits covering over 700,000 hectares of land for the cultivation of oil palm. In Ethiopia, where land pressure is high, over 1 million hectares are being granted to agrofuel corporations to grow mainly jatropha, a potentially invasive species that is being introduced on a large scale without proper environmental impact assessments .

The truth is that the agrofuels boom in Africa is not about rural development and improving the living standards of poor farmers. On the contrary, it is about foreign companies taking over the land: by striking deals with government officials and lobbying for legal protection, subsidies and tax breaks; by acquiring scarce fertile land and water rights; by coercing farmers into becoming cheap labour on their own land; by introducing new crops in large-scale plantations; by introducing GM crops through this backdoor; by displacing people and biodiversity-based systems; and by enslaving Africa even more to the global market. Land grabbing on an unprecedented scale is on the march in Africa.

The agrofuels boom is being driven by the government’s desire to increase export earnings, mainly through the export of cassava and sugar cane for agrofuels. The reality is that, just as in the case of oil and all other global commodities, the market will fix the price of agrofuels. The country of origin will have little control, especially if ownership of the whole value chain is in the hands of international companies. The production of agrofuels will not guarantee cheap fuel to the local population.

Bio-fuels will not improve the lot of the vast majority of African people for various reasons:-
First, the poor simply cannot afford them because they do not have money to buy energy, but rely on wood, charcoal and dung.
Secondly, it makes no sense for rural families to replace their sustainable and food-secure agricultural systems and forests with foreign-owned industrial plantations and in the process become cheap and dispensable labour.
Thirdly, the privatisation of the land that is the source of Africa’s wealth will undermine any chance that Africans have of determining their own future.

The aim of capitalism is not to satisfy people's needs but to accumulate profits. This is not a policy choice but an economic necessity imposed by the operation of impersonal and uncontrollable economic laws which governments have to abide by, unless they want to risk making things worse by provoking an economic crisis and stagnation in the area they rule over.

Governments put profits before poor people because they are obliged to by the impersonal workings of world market forces, not out of choice. The same goes for the capitalist corporations. Their whole purpose is to make a profit on the capital invested in their businesses so that their shareholders can benefit. That's the nature of the beast . As long as the international capitalist system continues to exist, its economic laws will operate.

What is required is the end of the economic principle "can't pay - can't have" , not a reform of this system but its abolition and its replacement by one in which the Earth's resources become the common heritage of all humanity. Only on this basis can these resources be mobilised to eradicate world poverty and ensure a decent life for every man, woman and child on the planet. Yes, the world and Africa does possess the wealth and means to end world poverty .