Africa's electrification should be linked to development — Climate Home News
Dola Olutay, a senior fellow in energy and transport policy at the UCL Energy Institute, called for Africa's needs for development and affordable, reliable electricity to be taken into account in implementing global electrification plans. In an op-ed for Climate Home News, she noted that for the continent's countries, electrification means not only replacing fossil fuels with clean technologies but also building an energy system where one often does not exist.
Target for 2035
At the UN climate meetings in Bonn in June, Türkiye's future COP31 presidency presented a target of increasing electricity's share of global final energy consumption from around 20% to 35% by 2035. The initiative is supported by the international Electrify Now campaign, launched in June by the European Commission and governments of countries on five continents, including Ethiopia.
According to Olutay, around 600 million people in Africa do not have access to electricity. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa account for 85% of the global population without access to electricity, compared with 50% in 2010. Nearly half of the people without electricity on the continent live in Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Another 900 million Africans lack access to clean cooking methods.
Connecting to the grid alone is not enough
In the author's view, extending the power grid to a settlement does not by itself overcome energy poverty. Electricity must be reliable, affordable and generated from clean sources in order to support productive economic activity. She warned that connecting households to a mini-grid they cannot use because of its cost does not ensure development.
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Olutay also believes that increasing demand for electricity should not be accompanied by greater dependence on volatile fossil fuels or costly and unviable infrastructure projects. She called for electrification to be combined with a significant expansion of renewable generation and local energy storage systems.
Renewable energy and local industry
According to Olutay's assessment, Africa has 60% of the world's best solar resources, as well as significant potential for hydropower, wind and geothermal energy. She stressed that international programmes should help create local industry, process critical minerals and create jobs, rather than leave the continent merely as a supplier of lithium, cobalt and copper for overseas green supply chains.
As an example, the author cited Ethiopia, where a ban on imports of petrol and diesel cars has contributed to the spread of electric vehicles. She also noted that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has reduced the cost of electricity and provides more than half of the country's renewable generation capacity.
