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Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
But with mini grids you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind with nobody at all to sell the excess to
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you differentiate Africa from East Asia in those regards?
1) se asia is a much more densely populated region, making infrastructure cheaper per capita to produce (some things scale better, most do not) and 2) se asia has capital flowing through it at a far higher volume, mostly because of manufacturing. I can't speak to why there historically hasn't been as much manufacturing in Africa—I'm guessing it's just cheaper to colocate with others for lower costs across the board?…
Most of South East Asia has developmental indicators comparable to most of Sub Saharan Africa. Sub Saharan Africa has plenty of basket cases (DRC, CAR, Mozambique), but it also has plenty of countries on the same general trajectory as South East Asian countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal). "Africa" and "Asia" is broad and it's dumb ti compare the two.
> se asia has capital flowing through it at a far higher volume, mostly because of manufacturing
Not exactly. Much of South East Asia has strong capital market integrations with Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea which makes it easier for liquid capital to flow.
African nations that have integrated their capital markets with foreign markets open to taking risks in LDCs (UAE, China, India) have seen a leapfrogging in economic capabilities. You see this with Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda.
> se asia
What do you mean by SEA? And what do you mean by East Asia?
Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries, and does a disservice to the actual government institutions working on development. They should explicitly call out Nigeria instead of treating it as "Africa". Nigeria is unique in how they actually have a formal industrial strategy for mini-grids [0] thanks to World Bank support [1] It's a uniquely Nigerian program and Nige…
Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
But with mini grids you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind with nobody at all to sell the excess to
You will only need enough storage to cover 12-24 hours to reduce that a lot: Much of the surplus power can be put into vehicles when they're resting at home overnight, or for evening and next morning peak.
For the rest, well, so what? Temporary "oversupply" on days when there's lots of sun and no vehicle to charge up is not the worst problem to have - it won't kill anyone. The worst that you can say about it is that it's a misallocation of resources to sometimes have the power supply that you can't use or sell. But solar panels and batteries are becoming cheap. So the upside of having occasional surplus remains, the downside diminishes.
It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
Grids are better if you have the capital to build them. Most of arfica has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost. Of course with the large number of countries there, that generalization is false. But it is overall close a enough to true.
You can't view Africa with such broad strokes. A West African country with British administrative norms like Nigeria is going to have entirely different outcomes compared to a former Portuguese colony impacted by the Colonial Wars like Mozambique.
Reality is, plenty of African countries do have the right building blocks, and are seeing a significant amount of capital investment from the Gulf States, China, and India because their investors understand how to operate in similar conditions from 10-30 years ago.
Whenever an African country like Nigeria or Kenya does something good, it's positive attributes as masked as part of "Africa" so Western donor organizations can continue to justify spending in basket cases like Rwanda or Mozambique, which is what this article itself is doing.
The Mini-Grid project in the article is a program that private and public sector players in Nigeria worked on, and only succeeded because of Nigeria's administrative apparatus and 10 years of hard work (started back in 2015-16).
The only learning this provides is that
1. You need a relatively competent bureaucratic system in order to actually execute on initiatives
2. You need to have a robust domestic private sector that works closely with the public sector and foreign investors
3. This can only be done through a profit motivation, not a local or international non-profit boondoggle, as that's the only way to unlock the economies of scale needed and incentivize execution
It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
You are wrong, the capital IS there, Africa is rich, it's just the capitsl is leaving for US, Europe, and Asia, instead of staying in Africa because of colonial history.
Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Ghana are all building competitive local financial markets and private sector players.
There are plenty of Sub-Saharan states are remain perpetually underdeveloped, but that's ignoring plenty of foundational work happening in plenty of other African states.
The main difference is administrative capacity - some states have relatively decent bureaucracies and administrative norms, others don't.
It's up to individual countries political and economic leadership to decide which track they want to take.
It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
You are wrong, the capital IS there, Africa is rich, it's just the capitsl is leaving for US, Europe, and Asia, instead of staying in Africa because of colonial history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But with mini grids you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind with nobody at all to sell the excess to
> you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind You will only need enough storage to cover 12-24 hours to reduce that a lot: Much of the surplus power can be put into vehicles when they're resting at home overnight, or for evening and next morning peak. For the rest, well, so what? Temporary "oversupply" on days when there's lots of sun and no vehicle to charge up is not the worst problem to have - it won'…
So you need to store energy for more than a few hours or generate it from something else.
You then have the choice to use batteries(costly for megwatts as of now), things like hydrostorage, fossil fuels(gas/coal/oil) or hydrogen generated from renewable sources.
If you need big energy storages anyway, it makes more sense that communities pool their money together and invest in something like hydrostorage, but then you need a grid to connect the communities and if you do that, you might as well connect everything in the country so the grid is better at balancing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are wrong, the capital IS there, Africa is rich, it's just the capitsl is leaving for US, Europe, and Asia, instead of staying in Africa because of colonial history.
And how, pray tell, is the money being siphoned off to the evil colonial empires?
There are others, such as forced structural adjustments (e.g. privatisation) and currency control (in the case of the French and former West African colonies).