For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids
67 comments
·March 15, 2025breakyerself
conradev
Yes, and in many cases it's the same companies enabling both:
Over 1 million solar home systems sold, avoiding 2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions
Over 1 million individuals access high-quality smartphones, enabling access to information and earning opportunities online
$600 million of credit unlocked for customers
bluGill
Grids are better if you have the capital to build them. Most of arfica has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost.
Of course with the large number of countries there, that generalization is false. But it is overall close a enough to true.
alephnerd
> Most of arfica (sic) has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost
You can't view Africa with such broad strokes. A West African country with British administrative norms like Nigeria is going to have entirely different outcomes compared to a former Portuguese colony impacted by the Colonial Wars like Mozambique.
Reality is, plenty of African countries do have the right building blocks, and are seeing a significant amount of capital investment from the Gulf States, China, and India because their investors understand how to operate in similar conditions from 10-30 years ago.
Whenever an African country like Nigeria or Kenya does something good, it's positive attributes as masked as part of "Africa" so Western donor organizations can continue to justify spending in basket cases like Rwanda or Mozambique, which is what this article itself is doing.
The Mini-Grid project in the article is a program that private and public sector players in Nigeria worked on, and only succeeded because of Nigeria's administrative apparatus and 10 years of hard work (started back in 2015-16).
The only learning this provides is that
1. You need a relatively competent bureaucratic system in order to actually execute on initiatives
2. You need to have a robust domestic private sector that works closely with the public sector and foreign investors
3. This can only be done through a profit motivation, not a local or international non-profit boondoggle, as that's the only way to unlock the economies of scale needed and incentivize execution
decimalenough
Are you really characterizing Nigeria's notoriously kleptocratic bureaucratic system as "relatively competent", while self-styled Singapore of Africa Rwanda is a "basket case"? Most observers would reverse those labels.
viktour19
The world’s first hydrogen exploration company was founded in Mali. No one knows for a fact what the development pathway is. Solar might turn out to be inconsequential.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/iwnetim-abate-aims-extract-hydroge...
> In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity in the nearby village.
> Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The company is drilling wells near the original site that have yielded high concentrations of the gas.
throwaway4220
Promising but how do pipelines deal with hydrogen?
bsder
> The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.
It doesn't help that Africa is huge and the population density of most of it is damn near zero. Grids of any form make very little sense given those constraints.
tpm
Nigeria has higher population density than the US.
mempko
You are wrong, the capital IS there, Africa is rich, it's just the capitsl is leaving for US, Europe, and Asia, instead of staying in Africa because of colonial history.
victorbjorklund
Why does africans send their capital to US, Europe and Asia?
alephnerd
Stop saying "Africans".
Each African country has a different context, and it does a disservice to laggards and over performers to club everyone as "African".
There are unique administrative hurdles and innovations that African countries have to either spark industries or smother them.
Humans are the same irrespective of our country of origin - the main difference is how public and private institutions manage humans.
alephnerd
Plenty of African nations are building strong private sector players.
Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Ghana are all building competitive local financial markets and private sector players.
There are plenty of Sub-Saharan states are remain perpetually underdeveloped, but that's ignoring plenty of foundational work happening in plenty of other African states.
The main difference is administrative capacity - some states have relatively decent bureaucracies and administrative norms, others don't.
It's up to individual countries political and economic leadership to decide which track they want to take.
jisnsm
And how, pray tell, is the money being siphoned off to the evil colonial empires?
tmnvix
I think the usual explanation involves debt repayments.
There are others, such as forced structural adjustments (e.g. privatisation) and currency control (in the case of the French and former West African colonies).
johnohara
To get a good insight into the problems faced by nations in West Africa and Southwest Africa as they try to implement electricity-based technologies to their populations, I highly recommend watching Season 7 of Itchy Boots on YouTube [0].
Her experiences as she "adventure rides" through this region tacitly documents the true nature of "life as it is lived" by the millions and millions of human beings residing there.
It is stunning to consider and is an Africa I never knew existed.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8M9dV_BySaXNvQ_V1q4U...
alephnerd
Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries, and does a disservice to the actual government institutions working on development.
They should explicitly call out Nigeria instead of treating it as "Africa". Nigeria is unique in how they actually have a formal industrial strategy for mini-grids [0] thanks to World Bank support [1]
It's a uniquely Nigerian program and Nigeria's Rural Electrification Administration (REA) should be given it's due credit. When Boko Haram does something bad it's "Nigeria", but when Abuja does something good it's "Africa".
Finally, what works for a federal state with a relatively strong civil service like Nigeria cannot be replicated in every "African" country, due to entirely different administrative and bureaucratic norms and capacity.
[0] - https://rea.gov.ng/minigrids/
[1] - https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/1ea...
scns
> Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries
And in one of those 54, Cameroon to be exact, there are over 300 languages spoken.
mmooss
That was my first thought.
Let's say you are an editor: You can be accurate and write 'Nigeria' in the headline, but you realize that most people have no idea where or what Nigeria is - that's a bad thing, but true. If you write 'Africa', then many more people will learn about Nigeria.
I don't have a good answer. Maybe they should squeeze both into the headline: 'For African climate and livelihoods, Nigeria bets big ...'
alephnerd
> Maybe they should squeeze both into the headline: 'For African climate and livelihoods, Nigeria bets big ...'
Yep! That's what I feel is much more constructive as a title, because it both gives credit to the originator of a success AND makes it potentially generalizable.
Btw, the proposed title you mentioned is the norm for reporting on the minigrid project in business news.
frereubu
This gets my goat as well, particularly given how vast Africa is (the Mercator projection does it no favours in that regard) and the diversity of cultures.
alephnerd
Amen to all of that. It feels like all discourse about Africa is either super negative ("heart of darkness") or super paternalistic ("white/outsider [asian and middle eastern countries use the same discourse] savior complex").
It's similar to the discourse I'd see about Asia as a kid 20-30 years ago, and ignores a lot of the tangible on the ground innovations happening.
NullPrefix
Why are solar panels subject to VAT? If it's the way of the future and we want everyone to buy and use them then why are there taxes on them?
postepowanieadm
Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
shawabawa3
But with mini grids you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind with nobody at all to sell the excess to
adrianN
In the near future most cars could be happy to accept a charge
manmal
That’s a problem big grids also share. It‘s probably easier to buffer power for a small neighborhood, than for a city.
SideburnsOfDoom
> you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind
You will only need enough storage to cover 12-24 hours to reduce that a lot: Much of the surplus power can be put into vehicles when they're resting at home overnight, or for evening and next morning peak.
For the rest, well, so what? Temporary "oversupply" on days when there's lots of sun and no vehicle to charge up is not the worst problem to have - it won't kill anyone. The worst that you can say about it is that it's a misallocation of resources to sometimes have the power supply that you can't use or sell. But solar panels and batteries are becoming cheap. So the upside of having occasional surplus remains, the downside diminishes.
bpfrh
The problem is not necessarily day/night but summer with solar+and possible wind and winter with less solar and possible no wind.
So you need to store energy for more than a few hours or generate it from something else.
You then have the choice to use batteries(costly for megwatts as of now), things like hydrostorage, fossil fuels(gas/coal/oil) or hydrogen generated from renewable sources.
If you need big energy storages anyway, it makes more sense that communities pool their money together and invest in something like hydrostorage, but then you need a grid to connect the communities and if you do that, you might as well connect everything in the country so the grid is better at balancing.
dehrmann
> Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
Electricity is fungible (ignoring transmission losses), so what's the difference?
victorbjorklund
taxes and fees. But yea it would not be allowed on a real scale without new taxes and fees and then that benefit is removed.
Etheryte
I think transmission losses are exactly the point? Locally, the losses are practically zero, the further you need to push it, the more significant various losses become. If you could line up someone's production to someone else nearby who needs to consume, as a whole the system would incur considerably less losses, no?
dehrmann
US grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5%. You'd come out ahead pretty quickly if your neighbors can't use your surplus.
marcosdumay
> I think transmission losses are exactly the point?
That can't be, your panel is charging up your neighbor's car in exactly the same way independently of you being connected to outside of your neighborhood.
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_zoltan_
instead of innovation or investment the only thing the EU does is legislation and policy. it's really sad. :(
jpm_sd
OnePower is another organization doing this very successfully in Lesotho
Filligree
Because they failed to maintain or invest in a regular grid. Off-grid, battery-backed is far more expensive than generator-backed at scale… at least for now. And you still need generators for poor weather.
toomuchtodo
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://developmentreimagined.com/infographic-exploring-afri...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly (center map on Africa)
Africa is leapfrogging legacy electrical infra models, and likely has no need for the legacy model of centralized generation and long haul transmission to load centers.
(the battery costs in the Our World in Data citation are already out of date, and as of 2023, the average global price of batteries was $95/kWh, see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA for more)
astral_drama
I recently bought 4 lifepo4 12v 100ah ~1200 wh for $159 off Amazon as a retail customer. Battery storage is indeed cheap and accessible to the average person. Pair it with new 24% efficient solar panels and you can see why there's little to be gained by running expensive lines to distribute power when it can be sent everywhere wirelessly.
It's not too different to how developing counties rolled out wireless Internet and gained a huge benefit without much infrastructure investment.
toomuchtodo
Indeed, and that is current state; renewables and battery manufacturing continues to ramp, which will encourage further cost declines. This is objectively good, it democratizes low carbon, cheap energy.
thinkingkong
Youre also forgetting another component which is that the instrastructure gets torn down or stolen because it has market value. The replacement, maintenance, and security of wired grids is likely higher.
curiousmind96
Why would infrastructure get torn down once it’s in place?
zdragnar
The local militia or government wants money and doesn't care overmuch about the locals themselves, presumably.
dgacmu
Copper wire has high resale value. So do solar panels. Copper theft is a problem worldwide, including the US.
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soulofmischief
You seem to have conveniently forgotten about centuries of colonialism, resource exploitation and state-sponsored regime changes, which still plague Africa today.
twoodfin
How would you differentiate Africa from East Asia in those regards?
lurk2
Most colonization in Asia occurred in the South and Southeastern regions.
ForTheKidz
1) se asia is a much more densely populated region, making infrastructure cheaper per capita to produce (some things scale better, most do not) and 2) se asia has capital flowing through it at a far higher volume, mostly because of manufacturing.
I can't speak to why there historically hasn't been as much manufacturing in Africa—I'm guessing it's just cheaper to colocate with others for lower costs across the board?
Regardless, (neo)colonialism does dominate both regions—it's a hard state to avoid if you want to interact with a global economy at a deep financial disadvantage.
mmooss
Let's look at the successful economies of East Asia:
Japan was a first world country, an economic success before WWII, and then had the US occupation after the war to rebuild it economically and politically as a hedge against future Japanese threats and against Russia and China.
South Korea never suffered Western colonialism (?) but did suffer under Japan. After that and the Korean War, iirc it was one of the poorest places on Earth. Now they are among the wealthiest and most free, maybe the greatest such accomplishment ever. They also benefitted from direct US support, as a counter-balance to the neighboring communist states.
Taiwan has direct US support to contain the communist regime in mainland China, first as a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship and then as a democracy.
China suffered 50-150 years of Western colonialsm, depending on how you measure it (the UK still controlled Hong Kong until the late 1990s). They were very poor into the 1990s. Then, opening their economy to investment (a project begun in the late 1970s), and with major manufacturing economies as neighbors (Japan, Taiwan, S Korea, etc.), they became the center of global manufacturing and trade and reaped the financial benefits.
By comparison, how will African countries attract investment? They are geopolitically located in a place that matters, and are not the global center of population nor many of the other Chinese advantages such as a massive single market that complied with Western requirements, proximity to wealthy neighbors such as Japan, Taiwan, etc.
curiousmind96
[dead]
null
It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.