About a decade ago, looking around Zimbabwe and a lot of other African countries, I used to see a lot of barriers holding back large-scale adoption of rooftop solar for most homes and small businesses. The key barriers were: High upfront costs of hybrid solar plants, as the cost of … [continued]
Access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa has improved tremendously over the last decade, reaching 49.4% of the population in 2022, up from 33% in 2010. Yet, while electricity access has grown, electricity consumption has not. While this would be considered a good thing in much of the world, for Africa, it is a discouraging indicator of … [continued]
Originally published by UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy To meet the development needs of a growing population, Africa’s electricity sector requires a major transformation. Despite important changes over the past decade, efforts to expand and modernize the sector need to be redoubled. Indeed, current electrification rates, generation-capacity levels, … [continued]
Driving electric in many African countries is a whole lot cheaper than driving ICE. Ghana, like many other African countries, has a very low motorization rate compared to most parts of the developed world. This presents a huge opportunity for another leapfrog moment where consumers can jump straight into the world of EVs, bypassing the ICE Age.
There was plenty of positive solar energy news this month. Aside from the 63 solar stories we’ve published so far, below are 10 more stories that seem worth looking at even though we didn’t take time to explore them in detail.
We recently looked at how distributed solar systems are enabling electromobility in rural Zimbabwe. Electric motorcycles and three-wheelers will transform rural communities and improve the lives of women and children in these communities.
Mobility For Africa (MFA) has just completed the first of a two-part pilot phase which we covered here recently. MFA has now started the second phase of the pilot. MFA tested several models which included exploring agricultural produce transport services as well as general taxi services. It also used the pilot to measure the financial viability of the project as well as identifying solutions for different business models.
In April 2014, Kenya connected its first solar project to its grid. This was done at Strathmore University in Nairobi. Even though it was very small at 600 kilowatts, it produced exciting headlines in the news. Why has Kenya been so slow with larger scale solar projects? It is not … [continued]
A new study from German Solar Association and the Becquerel Institute has concluded that with the right policies and support, Africa could be adding as much as 29 gigawatts (GW) of new annual solar capacity in 2030.
CleanTechnica has had numerous articles on companies and organizations that are supplying off-grid electricity to consumers in Africa. Since I live in western Kenya where many people I know have these systems, this article is to report on these developments from the Kenyan consumer’s point of view.
