How Africa Can Help the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/climate/africa-renewable-energy.html

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Next week in Paris, a critical diplomatic meeting begins on how to enable low-income, climate-vulnerable countries to grow their economies while reducing their dependence on fossil fuels.

It reminds me of my recent conversation with Wanjira Mathai, managing director for Africa and global partnerships at the World Resources Institute, and Rebekah Shirley, the Africa deputy director.

“Can Africa leapfrog?” I asked them.

What they said edified my thinking on a difficult, unresolved subject that animates much of the global discussion on whether countries of the global south can prosper without using and burning the same polluting resources that countries of the industrialized world have for 150 years: namely, coal, oil and gas.

We spoke for two hours over lunch on the terrace of a restaurant in Nairobi as marabou storks squawked and flew across the sky. Our conversation made me think in fresh ways, which is what I hope Climate Forward occasionally does for you. So I want to share with you my takeaways from that conversation.

“Africa has more renewable energy potential than what the entire world needs, not just Africa itself,” Shirley said. “The theoretical potential to ‘leapfrog’ is there. The challenge is, that’s not at all how things work in reality.”

Kenya embodies that potential, and also some of that reality.

Kenya is blessed with geothermal energy, hydropower and a vast area in the north where a large wind farm is under construction.

The country currently has the capacity to generate more power than it consumes. Why? Because that power is still too expensive for many Kenyans to actually use.

Even more bewildering, as more renewable energy has come online, electricity prices have gone up. That’s because someone has to pay for the cost of all that new generation capacity, Shirley explained.

It’s more expensive to borrow money if you’re building a renewable energy project on the continent than, say, in the United States or Europe. The cost of capital is 14 percent in Nigeria, for instance, compared with 1 percent in the United States, and 15 percent in Pakistan, according to an analysis by the W.R.I. A small fraction of private climate investment goes to the 54 countries of the continent.

Plus the electricity grid is weak, in Kenya and much of the continent. So even where there is power, it’s not always reliable. “If we just plopped as much renewable onto them as we could, would they serve us?” Shirley said. “The answer is actually ‘No.’”

(I have since learned from the reporting of my colleagues Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich that the United States is in a similarly sorry situation.)

In Kenya, for a local factory, it can be cheaper to just operate on a diesel-run generator.

“We’re in this constant chicken-and-egg situation,” Shirley said.

Lots of power generation capacity. Not enough paying customers.

How do you expand renewable energy and make it affordable for African consumers?

Therein lies the opportunity for European, North American and Chinese industry, Shirley and Mathai say. If they can set up shop on the continent, use the renewable energy that powers African grids, they could clean up their supply chains and bring down the price of electricity, including for African consumers.

“If you brought your factories here, it would be green, because our grid is green, and actually the more that you bring, the cheaper it’s going to be for our people and the more we can expand access,” Shirley said. “So there’s a real win-win opportunity.”

“You, the global north, need to decarbonize your supply chains,” Mathai added. “You cannot address the climate question, meet your net-zero goals, without decarbonizing manufacturing. It’s not out of the niceness of your heart.”

We’ve been talking about electricity. But energy is more than electricity.

Cooking fuel, for instance. Across the continent, people use charcoal and firewood. Before they shift to an electric stove, they might have to switch to a gas stove.

“There’s more to leapfrogging than electricity,” Shirley said.

And anyway, Mathai said, it’s been very hard for people to change how they cook. It’s one of the hardest problems to solve. “You go to the countryside, you buy your grandmother a gas stove. The minute you leave the gate, they put it aside, they call it Wanjira’s stove, and go back to cooking how they’ve always cooked.”

So do African countries necessarily need to burn more coal, oil and gas to prosper?

“Not if you do all these things,” Shirley said.

Much of it requires the actions of policymakers, lenders and businesses outside Africa. It requires reducing the cost of getting capital to build renewable energy. It requires investment in the grid. It requires getting new customers who can pay the high prices.

It requires a fundamental reframing of the question.

“It’s such a well-meaning but overly reductive, and perhaps patronizing, narrative for Africa,” Shirley said. “We’re an entire continent; we deserve at least as much complexity as other individual countries, right?”

Turns out, I was asking the wrong question.

The better question would be: How can Africa help the world decarbonize?

That new way of framing the question, Shirley and Mathai said, requires not only a new mind-set, but also a new and more fair set of rules governing global finance and trade.

That is at the heart of the agenda at next week’s meeting in Paris, chaired by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados.

They are calling to revamp the rules of lending for multilateral development banks, like the World Bank, and to tackle the cycle of debt that many counties in the global south find themselves in.

The African Development Bank estimated recently that the 54 countries on the continent need $2.7 trillion to meet their climate goals. Only a small share of that has come in.

Mathai said there’s another way to think about the leapfrogging analogy: “Frogs leap. They have some strong muscles. We have no muscles,” she said. “Everything we’re talking about is the muscle you need — the money, the grid, you know, all the pieces.”

Related: Our colleagues at the Australia newsletter talked to the country’s former chief scientist about the transition to renewables.

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Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill, Chris Plourde and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward.