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 

Africa And Asia 'Going Green' For Electricity Needs

A significant part of the population of Africa and Asia at present has no access to electricity, and in some countries those deprived amount to as much as 80 percent of the population. That is true in Ethiopia, for instance.

Demand for electricity will therefore grow enormously in Africa and Asia over the next 50 years. Some countries aware of the dangers of climate disruption and mindful of the costs in money, health and climate of fossil fuels, are determined to add the new electricity generation capacity via renewables like Wind, solar and geothermal.

Ethiopia is one of those virtuous countries with regard to carbon emissions. They are building a dam over the Nile for hydroelectric power, which they expect to be substantial. In addition, they have big wind, solar and geothermal plans. They have a 140 megawatt windfarm nearing completion, for instance.

Even a country like Kenya, which seems to be backsliding on its renewable energy plans, expects to get 60% of its new electricity in the coming decades from geothermal (26%), wind, hydro and nuclear. As critics note, the government entirely slights solar energy, which is ideal for Kenya given its climate. But since the country is privatizing and decentralizing its electricity generation, it seems likely that families and entrepreneurs will put in a lot of solar (this is happening in India, so will likely also happen in Kenya).

India plans to add 20 gigawatts of solar energy by 2020 and is among the countries with the best solar potential. Some 4 gigawatts of that will come from just one solar installation, in Rajasthan, which will be the largest in the world.

In just 6 months during 2013, Japan put in 4 gigawatts of new solar energy generation, about a fourth of that residential solar panels and the other 3 gigs utility-scale. Japan has a feed-in tariff, which rewards owners of new solar. It also has an energy crisis caused by the closure of the Fukushima nuclear facility and other reactors (though some of those may be reopened by the conservative government of PM Shinzo Abe). Ironically, the prefecture of Fukushima has pledged to generate 100% of its electricity from green sources, and has revved up a 2 megawatt offshore wind farm.

Taiwan is moving to get 4 gigs of energy from wind over the next 15 years and wants its energy mix to be about a fourth from renewables by 2030. Taiwan is deeply dependent on imported fossil fuels for energy, with about a third of electricity generation coming from nuclear. It seems highly likely that the government is underestimating how quickly it can economically replace fossil fuels with wind, solar and geothermal (Idaho has an agreement to help it with the latter).

Countries with few fossil fuels of their own (all of the countries above fall in that category except with regard to coal) are especially likely to move to renewables over the next 10 to 15 years, as wind and solar reach grid parity. Solar PV panels have fallen in price dramatically just in the past 18 months, and further price reductions and increases in inefficiency are likely over the next 5 years. That is one reason projections like Taiwan’s of how much of the energy mix will be renewables in 2030 are likely underestimates. Increasingly, it will be crazy to build a new coal plant when you could put in solar or wind or geothermal instead.

from here