Africa’s electricity capacity is expected to double by 2030 — and with the rapidly dropping cost of renewable energy technologies, the continent might seem poised to go green. But a new analysis suggests that fossil fuels will still dominate Africa’s energy mix over the next decade.
The scientists used a machine learning approach that analyzes what characteristics, such as fuel type and financing, controlled the past successes and failures of power plants across the continent. Their findings suggest that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power will make up less than 10 percent of Africa’s total electrical power generation by 2030, the team reports January 11 in Nature Energy.
In 2015, 195 nations pledged to reduce their fossil fuel emissions to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. To achieve that goal, the world would have to reduce its emissions by 2.7 percent each year from 2020 to 2030 — but current pledges are nowhere near enough to achieve that target (SN: 11/26/19). And the energy demand from developing economies, including many on the African continent, is expected to increase dramatically by 2030 — possibly leading to even more fossil fuel emissions over the next decades.
However, the price of renewable energy technologies, particularly wind and solar energy, has rapidly dropped over the last few years. So many scientists and activists have said they hope that African countries might be able to take advantage of these technologies, leapfrogging past carbon-intensive coal or oil-based energy growth and straight into building renewable energy plants.