The desert won’t fix Africa’s power problem – not yet anyway
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“It is time to turn the Sahel’s largest natural resource into the most powerful driver of its growth.”
This was African Development Bank president Akinwumi Adesina, speaking at an ECOWAS summit in Burkina Faso over the weekend. He was promoting the Bank’s ‘Desert to Power’ initiative, a plan to provide 10GW of electricity to 250 million people in the Sahel region by 2025 – tapping into the Sahara’s famed solar potential.
At around 10 terawatts – 81 times sub-Saharan Africa’s installed capacity – this has been tipped as a potential solution to the continent’s chronic power shortage.
Efforts to harness this have yielded little to date, but with solar now competing with traditional sources like coal on price and effectiveness, could this be about to change?
It’s doubtful.
There are at least two major obstacles.
One is financing. While solar is getting more affordable, scale isn’t cheap. The cost of Morocco’s 580MW Ouarzazate Solar project, for example, has been estimated at $9 billion.
Assuming similar costs this would translate into $153 billion for Desert to Power – more than total annual infrastructure spend across Africa.
Even more important is the wider development context. The Sahel is a hotbed of instability and underdevelopment, and in no position to implement a project like Desert to Power.
The desert won’t fix Africa’s power problem – not yet anyway.
This report reflects the views of the author alone, not those of How we made it in Africa.
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