Striking Lonmin mine workers living in shacks with no electricity sit outside on Aug. 28, 2012, in Marikana, South Africa, with some of the Lonmin electrical distribution system in the background. (RODGER BOSCH/AFP/GettyImages)
Summary
Much of Africa has the potential for great power production -- whether from hydropower at the Inga Dams, geothermal resources in East Africa, offshore hydrocarbon resources in the Gulf of Guinea or South Africa's coal. A number of internationally backed aid projects and programs are aiming to increase electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa. Rajiv Shah, head of USAID, announced in December 2013 that the United States would include parts of the Inga Dam scheme, two hydroelectric dams on the Congo River, as a part of President Barack Obama's $7 billion Power Africa program, an initiative aiming to double sub-Saharan Africa's access to electricity.
However, production centers are often geographically separated from demand centers, and many cities do not have sizable distribution networks. Sub-Saharan Africa will not be able to quickly build up the infrastructure needed to distribute the electricity generated at the most promising -- and remote -- projects. While many of the aid projects are meant to give more households access to electricity, these projects will require substantial infrastructural improvements and increased connectivity. Africa will remain constrained in its ability to metabolize its power generation capacity in order to build a strong industrial or manufacturing sector, except for in a few areas. Many African countries struggle to generate enough electricity to meet a minimum of the consumer demands, let alone generate electricity for commercial demands, but reliable electricity supplies are often a prerequisite for the construction of manufacturing facilities.
Analysis
Sub-Saharan Africa is blessed with numerous resources, including metals, gemstones and energy. However, few countries have been able to develop their own resources without assistance from international companies. Energy is the heart of a modern economy. Without it, countries have little need for their other resources, because they do not have the means to process raw materials or to use the refined products. A lack of energy also prevents countries from developing large manufacturing sectors. However, in order to justify massive investments into the infrastructure and projects needed to produce large amounts of power, someone has to buy the electricity. There have been some successful initiatives to have consumers pay for electricity supplied to them in some African countries, but gaps remain between populist demands for subsidized, if not free, electricity and governments' needs to raise significant amounts of money -- billions of dollars, in some cases -- to finance the construction of large power plants.
Current Obstacles to Electricity Development
As a continent, Africa consumes about as much electricity as Germany and Denmark combined, or about 700 terawatt hours, but most of this consumption is in two areas: South Africa and the countries on the Mediterranean. The rest of Africa consumes roughly 200 terawatt hours, less than 1 percent of the world's consumption. The dearth of infrastructure between the two demand centers means that transmission lines, substations and all of the other associated infrastructure needed to increase the capacity must be built, in addition to any power plants.
South Africa built its electricity capacity to power a widespread mining and industrial base. The country benefited from its bountiful supplies of coal and labor, political will and the economic incentive to use its own resources during the sanctions era of apartheid. Most other African countries have not had the same internal political will, and what demand there had been for large-scale electricity generation was driven by foreign mining interests. Local government support for greater electricity supplies was inconsistent or absent in these other countries. Thus, most of the infrastructure was created on a small scale for major cities and towns throughout the region and rarely with a unified structure. Even if the infrastructure exists, many African countries lack the resources to use thermal power, such as coal or gas, to power their plants in high quantities. The few exceptions, such as Nigeria, are countries that have used natural gas produced as a by-product of their oil production. Elsewhere the primary method of production is hydroelectricity and other renewables. All of this has given rise to unreliable power sectors that often have blackouts.
And yet, even if major electricity generation projects do not commence because their costs are too high, increased power capacity and related infrastructure will be required in sub-Saharan Africa in the coming years. Africa's urbanization drive will lead to even larger metropolitan areas for Nairobi, Kigali, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Lagos, Kano and other cities. For example, the population of Dar es Salaam is expected to eclipse 10 million people in the 2030s. While many African cities will develop large slums with limited services, much like Kampala, some African cities are hoping to attract low-end manufacturing as wages increase in China and companies look elsewhere for labor. With this in mind, there are many initiatives and programs aimed at building up the continent's electricity networks. However, these plans will still be subject to Africa's geography, which has been and will continue to be a limitation for electricity projects.
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Potential Options for New Sources
Africa has great potential for hydroelectric power. The Congo River alone has 100,000 megawatts of potential power generation capacity spread across its entire length, with about 44,000 MW of that concentrated in one location, the Inga Falls. To put this potential into perspective, as of 2010 the entire continent had an installed capacity of just 133,000 MW. Two small power plants were built at the Inga Falls three decades ago, and two more dams have long been proposed. The proposed $12 billion Inga III Dam would have 3,500 MW of installed capacity, and the proposed $80 billion Grand Inga Dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo would add 39,000 MW and surpass the Three Gorges Dam as the world's largest.
Aside from the problem of financing an $80 billion project for a country with a gross domestic product of $18 billion, the physical infrastructure needed to distribute 39,000 MW of power -- and the economic activity to justify it -- will emerge slowly over a couple of decades, if at all. Indeed, the 39,000 MW is roughly equivalent to sub-Saharan Africa's currently installed capacity excluding South Africa. Demand will build slowly as relatively low energy-intensive manufacturing plants are built and more Africans become able to access electricity in increasingly remote areas. This means that smaller-scale energy projects are more justifiable. Not only are they more adaptable to the continent's current needs, but also smaller projects typically cost much less. Expensive projects like the Grand Inga Dam will materialize only incrementally over a long period of time, if at all.
One of the more promising alternatives could be geothermal electricity in the Great Rift region. The rift, stretching from Djibouti down through Zambia, has an estimated 15,000 MW of geothermic potential. Unlike hydropower, geothermal energy projects can easily be made big or small, meaning that small -- and thus more economical -- geothermal power plants could be built in remote areas. Also, unlike almost all other forms of renewable energy, which are intermittent, geothermal power plants essentially can generate power nonstop. Finally -- and more importantly -- geothermal power plants do not consume large amounts of fuel once they are built. Kenya and Ethiopia have been at the forefront of geothermal energy development in Africa, but geothermal power remains nascent. Kenya's capacity right now is just 157 MW, but the country is constructing a 280 MW power plant and is trying to attract investors to build another 300 MW project anticipated to cost about $400 million.
Hydroelectricity and other non-geothermal renewable energy could expand in many African countries, but unlike geothermal, nuclear or thermal power plants, these electricity sources are intermittent. This means that in order to offset the intermittent renewable sources, countries would have to build thermal, nuclear or geothermal power plants (though battery technology could change this). Not doing so could cause frequent brownouts, and it is more difficult to justify building a large-scale manufacturing plant in a country where companies would need to use backup generators during periodic brownouts.
Manufacturing growth in Africa has been limited by the lack of physical infrastructure needed to set up manufacturing plants. Some countries, particularly in East Africa, have moved to improve their transportation and logistics infrastructure, but ultimately reliable sources of electricity will be needed in order to develop export-oriented manufacturing sectors. Geothermal energy and the use of natural gas from existing oil industries are suitable sources of electricity, but megaprojects such as the Grand Inga Dam will remain in the distant future until the manufacturing base needed to consume that amount of electricity is well developed.
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