Energy Access Scenarios to 2030 for the Power Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

SummaryIn order to reach a goal of universal access to modern energy services in Africa by 2030, consideration of various electricity sector pathways is required to help inform policy-makers and investors, and help guide power system design. To that end, and building on existing tools and analysis, we present several 'high-level', transparent, and economy-wide scenarios for the sub-Saharan African power sector to 2030. We construct these simple scenarios against the backdrop of historical trends and various interpretations of universal access. They are designed to provide the international community with an indication of the overall scale of the effort required. We find that most existing projections, using typical long-term forecasting methods for power planning, show roughly a threefold increase in installed generation capacity occurring by 2030, but more than a tenfold increase would likely be required to provide for full access -even at relatively modest levels of electricity consumption. This equates to approximately a 13% average annual growth rate, compared to a historical one (in the last two decades) of 1.7%. Abstract: In order to reach a goal of universal access to modern energy services in Africa by 2030, consideration of various electricity sector pathways is required to help inform policy-makers and investors, and help guide power system design. To that end, and building on existing tools and analysis, we present several 'high-level', transparent, and economy-wide scenarios for the subSaharan African power sector to 2030. We construct these simple scenarios against the backdrop of historical trends and various interpretations of universal access. They are designed to provide the international community with an indication of the overall scale of the effort required. We find that most existing projections, using typical long-term forecasting methods for power planning, show roughly a threefold increase in installed generation capacity occurring by 2030, but more than a tenfold increase would likely be required to provide for full access -even at relatively modest levels of electricity consumption. This equates to approximately a 13% average annual growth rate, compared to a historical one (in the last two decades) of 1.7%. Keywords

A review on the recent progress made on solar photovoltaic in selected countries of sub-Saharan Africa

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Geospatial Analysis of Photovoltaic Mini-Grid System Performance

“…The motivation of this study originates from the evident potential of solar energy for African and South East Asia countries and the prospect of using distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems as an alternative approach to meet the objective of universal electrification [3,11,12]. Our previous studies already indicate that PV mini-grids are a viable solution to provide high quality access to electricity in Africa [9,10] and the same indications can be found in a very similar study [13].…”

“…More than 95% of those living without electricity are in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia, predominantly in rural areas [2][3][4]. In recognition of these facts, the United Nations Secretary General launched in 2012 the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) Initiative with an overarching objective of ensuring universal access to sustainable energy by 2030 [5,6].…”

What Explains the Allocation of Aid and Private Investment for Electrification?

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“…Albuquerque 2003;Asiedu 2002;Kim 2000;Kinda 2010;Noorbakhsh, Paloni and Youssef 2001), only a small number of studies specifically examine the electricity sector (e.g. Bazilian et al 2011;IEA 2014).…”