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

Adequately tracking progress against energy poverty requires a metric that is more closely tied to income and employment than the commonly-used household access rate.

Danger and possibility under Lake Kivu Beneath the surface of the lake lies 60 billion cubic meters (bcm) of methane gas and 300 bcm of carbon dioxide originating from local volcanic activity.1 Without intervention, a gas eruption could occur within the next century.2 Located between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, over 2 million people live on the shores of the lake.

High power generation costs in Sub-Saharan Africa are driven by stark imbalances in supply and demand, poor utility performance, and constraints on independent power producers.

Modern life is amazingly energy intensive. All those computers, data servers, and air conditioners devour a lot of electricity. In fact, virtually everything about how we live, move around, communicate, and work is embedded with immense quantities of energy. It’s now even in our money.

Dramatic cost reductions in wind and especially solar power seem to promise a distributed energy future. Grid-connected rooftop solar lets any home or industrial facility become a “prosumer” that produces electricity as well as consuming it.

Power Africa is a multi-agency US government initiative that aims to increase generation capacity and expand access to energy in Africa. The USAID-coordinated program aligns its support and activities by tackling the most pressing obstacles to power projects and private investment in each market.

Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned power company, is in an existential crisis. Problems at Eskom have regional reverberations because it is the continent’s largest utility and trades power with seven countries. More than a decade of mismanagement, governance failure, spiralling costs, and the accumulation of unmanageable debt has put Eskom into a death spiral.

The availability and reliability of electricity services is crucial for economic development because of electricity’s role as a powerful engine of social and economic change.

Africa is rural. Or that’s what senior Western officials envision when they talk about the continent. America’s top diplomat for the region, Tibor Nagy, recently said that Africa is “by and large an agricultural society.” He isn’t alone: Germany’s recent Marshall Plan with Africa insists that “rural areas will determine Africa’s future.” This is wrong.

Will Bitcoin cook the planet? A great Axios piece “No, Bitcoin won't destroy our climate by 2033” argues that carbon emissions from the substantial energy consumption of bitcoin mining isn’t likely to significantly contribute to global warming.