Electrifying the Developing World Requires the Right Toolset
About half of the people living in Africa do not have access to electricity, and that 50% figure rises rapidly when we look outside the urban areas. This results in poor health, limited education, large, unplanned families, and low personal productivity which means perpetual cycles of poverty. In fact, experts say that the single most effective way to deal with all this is educating women, and power for lighting and computing is an absolute requirement.
The good news is that energy resources that are non-competitive in the developed world make a great deal of sense in places like rural Africa. Here’s an article that examines the possibility of run-of-river hydro.
Though I’d love to say otherwise, this resource is extremely difficult to implement in the U.S., where we have a huge grid, established fossil plants, ever-growing utility-scale solar and wind farms, nuclear power, and huge loads. The precise opposite is the case in most of Africa: no established grid and power plants, tiny loads dispersed over enormous expanses, and lots of hydro resources virtually everywhere outside of the Sahara and Kalahari. Run-of-river hydro and micro-grids are the perfect tools for the job.
Craig,
I to seem contrarian, but have you ever lived in Africa or experienced the problems of the nations on that continent?
Your American rosy enthusiasm for imposing these sort of impractical “solutions” is astonishingly insensitive and unhelpful.
The only thing that lifts poverty and disorder in Africa is large scale industrial electrification and economic reform.
fiddling around with silly little quaint technologies are neither wanted nor needed. People don’t actually like being poor subsistence farmers, they have no option!
Congolese children don’t like living short brutal lives just so you can enjoy the ideologically pleasing idea of Wind farms and lithium cobalt batteries.
They do so because there is no alternative.
Little village collectives are a poverty trap. Rich western aid workers may think there is something noble and picturesque about village life in Africa, but the local people don’t think so. Only the intellectual elite romanticizing about the “simple” life believe people actually enjoy living in a mud hut and eating mealy. For t he actual villagers, there is no attraction.
Perhaps that’s why the Chines are overcoming the African dislike of China and are finally aggressively pushing into the African continent with large scale power projects and development.