Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The planned construction of 2,500 new power plants, most of which are fossil fuels, has dashed hopes that Africa would skip the fossil fuel dependency of developed countries by switching directly to renewable energy.
Climate change: Africa’s green energy transition is “unlikely” this decade
Matt McGrath – environmental correspondent
Tue, January 12, 2021, 2:03 a.m. AEST
According to a new study, fossil fuels will remain the dominant power source across Africa for the next decade.
The researchers found that around 2,500 power plants are planned, which is enough to double electricity generation by 2030.
However, the authors say that less than 10% of the newly generated electricity will come from wind or sun.
The authors say that Africa is now at risk of being tied to carbon-rich energy for decades.
They argue that a quick decarbonization shock is required to demolish many of the plants currently planned.
Until now, there has been a widespread belief that African countries would “jump” straight to renewable energy sources and away from the old world coal, oil and gas.
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55620848
The abstract of the study;
A machine learning approach to predicting the African electricity mix based on planned power plants and their chances of success
Galina Alova, Philipp A. Trotter and Alex Money
Published: January 11, 2021
Energy scenarios based on far-reaching assumptions about the future do not always adequately reflect the lock-in risks caused by planned electricity generation projects and the uncertainty about their chances of realization. In this study, we created a machine learning model that demonstrates high accuracy in predicting the failure and success of power generation projects using the largest data set of historical and planned power plants for Africa combined with country-level characteristics. We have found that the most important factors in successful commissioning of previous projects are at the plant level: capacity, fuel, owner and connection type. We applied the trained model to predict the realization of the current project pipeline. In contrast to quick transition scenarios, our results show that the share of nonrenewable renewables in electricity generation is likely to remain below 10% in 2030, although total generation has more than doubled. These results suggest a high risk of carbon sequestration for Africa, unless a rapid decarbonization shock occurs, leading to large-scale decommissioning of fossil fuel facilities currently in the pipeline.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00755-9
African nations will undoubtedly come to their senses when they realize that renewable energies are the cheapest form of energy (do I need the / sarc?).
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