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

By Morgan D. Bazilian, Patrick Nussbaumer, H. Rogner, A. Brew-Hammond, Vivien Foster, S. Pachauri, E. Williams, M. Howells, Philippe Niyongabo, L. Musaba and 3 more. 2012

329 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 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%.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0b9ebe4a3e58035bc46b28e62d7b3cce77ab8ae

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Citations in the corpus

A cost optimal resolution for Sub-Saharan Africa powered by 100% renewables in 2030 (2018, background): “[5] Sub-Saharan Africa Reports on various levels of access and required installed capacities in Sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) by 2030.”
Financing energy access and off-grid electrification: A review of status, options and challenges (2013, unknown): “[19] reports an investment requirement of $3.”
Towards the achievement of SDG 7 in sub-Saharan Africa: Creating synergies between Power Africa, Sustainable Energy for All and climate finance in-order to achieve universal energy access before 2030 (2018, background): “[78] who considered that universal energy access was not constrained by technical obstacles but rather the lack of effective D.”
Access to electricity in the World Energy Council's global energy scenarios: An outlook for developing regions until 2030 (2016, methodology): “Top-down approaches have been used for electricity access scenarios for SubSaharan Africa [48] and for assessing the impacts of increased energy access on greenhouse gases emissions and global warming [49].”
Financial de-risking to unlock Africa's renewable energy potential (2019, background): “An estimated tenfold increase of the power sector in Africa would be necessary to reach the unlikely target of providing universal access to electricity by 2030 [7].”
Modeling sustainable long-term electricity supply-demand in Africa (2017, methodology): “…of the modeling techniques and tools, the methodologies and design parameters, and the research and model assumptions of the different studies, fails to provide clear estimates of the distribution of the current and future energy needs and to adequately inform policy makers (Bazilian et al. 2012).”
Energy poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation: is there a trade off? (2013, background): “However, the impacts might be substantial at the regional level: for example it has been estimated that power installed capacity in Africa 2030 would increase from 79 to 500 GW to provide full electricity access (Bazilian et al., 2012).”