The Regional Electricity Crisis Should Really Be Higher Up The Agenda For Southern African Heads of Government: Part 1

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There’s a huge Summit for the Southern African Growth Neighborhood (SADC) this weekend in Harare, Zimbabwe. It’s the 44^th version of this summit. Heads of state for all 16 members are anticipated to attend. The SADC website says: “The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is a Regional Economic Community comprising 16 Member States; Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The mission of SADC is to promote sustainable and equitable economic growth and socio-economic development through efficient, productive systems, deeper cooperation and integrationgood governance and durable peace and security; so that the region emerges as a competitive and effective player in international relations and the world economy.”

This imaginative and prescient of sustainable and equitable financial development will likely be hampered by the area’s dire electrical energy state of affairs. To begin with, allow us to have a look at the extent of electrical energy entry within the area:

Electrical energy Entry In SADC

From the desk, we are able to see that solely two member states (Mauritius and Seychelles) have achieved common entry to electrical energy. Simply 2 out of 16 is fairly unhealthy! We will additionally see that each of those counties have decrease populations than nearly all of the member states. We will see additionally that solely 3 extra international locations have achieved entry charges of over 80% — these are Comoros, Eswatini, and South Africa — whereas 9 international locations have entry to electrical energy charges sitting at 50% and beneath! Malawi and the Democratic Congo have the bottom with 14% and 22% entry, respectively. The equitable financial development and socio-economic improvement cited of their mission can’t be obtain with out decisive and accelerated efforts to extend entry to electrical energy to the lots of of hundreds of thousands of residents of member states that also lack entry to electrical energy.

If the area’s leaders have been taking note of international developments, they’d know that there has by no means been a greater time to do that. A variety of progress has been made within the photo voltaic and stationary vitality storage segments, with rising market shares in plenty of international locations within the developed world. The unimaginable ramp-up of manufacturing capability in these sectors in addition to technological developments over the previous decade helped unlock efficiencies in key areas, leading to unimaginable worth drops in the price of manufacturing of all of the important components. This has resulted in customers now getting access to photo voltaic panels, batteries, and EVs at costs decrease than ever. Photo voltaic panel costs are so low now that we hear experiences that it’s cheaper to buy solar panels and use them to construct fences in some places in Europe than to use traditional fencing material! A fence that additionally generates clear electrical energy — how cool is that? what could be cooler? Utilizing all this PV and battery storage to energy distributed microgrids in rural areas to speed up electrical energy entry within the member states. The drastic drop in costs of photo voltaic panels and batteries imply that lots much less cash is required to set all this up now in all these international locations than ever earlier than. Member states can absolutely discover the assets to get this program going.

It’s all about prioritisation of assets. Assets might be channelled to assist with this electrification drive, or no less than assist begin a seed fund and entice personal gamers to hitch in as properly, supplied an enabling setting for sustainable and viable tasks for buyers is created and supported.

For minigrids and microgrids, one of many main hurdles recognized by the Africa Minigrids Developers Association (AMDA) is round coverage and rules. Licensing remains a substantial hurdlewith tasks typically taking greater than a 12 months for approval because of advanced regulatory frameworks. There may be an pressing must create a regulatory construction that displays the decentralized nature of minigrids, that enables for bundling websites and bulk licensing of portfolios. Members of the SADC area may speed up the rollout of minigrids by reviewing these rules of their respective international locations, and have a look at methods to speed up development within the sector. One other manner of accelerating entry to electrical energy within the area is to speed up grid enlargement in these member states, however there are some critical points there as properly that want pressing consideration, and this will likely be mentioned partially 2.