Energy Poverty Impacts Three Billion People. Time to Think Big.

The electricity access deficit is more pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region globally, where despite recent progress in transmission and distribution capacities, around 580 million people still lacked access to electricity in 2019.1 And those that do have access are often burdened with poor reliability. As of April 2022, a survey found that 43% of Africans reported having access to a reliable supply of electricity, up by only three percentage points since 2015, and about 28% of connected households have power half the time, occasionally, or never.2 The latest World Bank Enterprise Surveys data suggests that customers across sub-Saharan Africa experienced an average of nine outages per month, each lasting an average of 5.7 hours.3 Yet, understanding the exact scale of energy poverty in the region remains elusive. Assessing the ‘unmet’ electricity demand A recent study by Garg, et al.

Summary: South Africa’s energy crisis has deepened but could still get worse. Delayed reforms and persistent allegations of corruption obscure a clear pathway forward. Relevance: Technically insolvent state-owned power company Eskom now implements rolling blackouts (known as ‘load-shedding’) on a daily basis, at a huge cost to the South African economy and society. The Eskom crisis has implications for the entire southern African region.

The positive relationship between energy and economic growth is clear: income and energy consumption are tightly correlated on every continent and across every time period for which data exists.

Large-scale clean energy projects are capital intensive, which makes them difficult to finance when project risk – real or perceived – is high.

Rose Mutiso joins the show to discuss the connection between access to affordable electricity and poverty and details a path forward for energy-poor countries in Africa.

This post is co-authored with Eric Hsu, Edward Miguel, and Catherine Wolfram. Governments and foreign aid institutions routinely finance large infrastructure construction projects in developing and emerging markets.

Demand for electricity across Africa will grow many times over by 2050. Nuclear power is a potential source of clean power to drive industrialization and grow incomes, especially with new smaller, safer, and more flexible designs expected to come to the market over the next decade.

Solar, hydro, wind, and gas are the most common options for African countries to meet their energy needs, yet several are increasingly interested in adding advanced nuclear power to their mix. South Africa already operates a nuclear power plant, and Ghana has recently signed nuclear cooperation agreements with the United States and Japan.

Entire countries use less electricity than some (pretty small) cities in the United States. Berea, Kentucky is a small college town of just 16 thousand and uses about the same amount of electricity as 5 million people in Liberia.

Originally published in Foreign Policy, February 1, 2023. Almost one year after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Moscow’s natural gas exports to Europe have declined by well over half due to sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, lower European purchases, and Moscow’s throttling of deliveries in retaliation for Western support of Ukraine.