Climate Crisis Hinges on Green Power for the Poor, Rockefeller Study Shows

(Bloomberg) -- The world’s poorest nations need to triple power production by 2050 to prosper and will become the biggest emitters of climate-warming gases unless they are given assistance to build renewable energy facilities, the Rockefeller Foundation said in a new report. 

A study of the world’s 72 most energy-poor nations, of which 44 are in Africa, shows that they will need to deploy 8,700 terawatt hours of clean energy production a year, or twice the US’s current generation, to avoid accounting for three quarters of emissions by 2050. That would necessitate — depending on what technologies are used — the construction of about 5,000 gigawatts of generation capacity.

There are 3.8 billion people “living with insufficient electricity to access modern opportunity and prosperity,” the foundation, which was founded in 1913, and Catalyst Energy Advisors said in the report, “For those billions, and the good of everyone on the planet, we must plan for a future of energy abundance that avoids triggering a climate crisis.”

While most people in these countries, which range from India to Vanuatu and Liberia, use well under 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each a year, an 11th of the average American’s consumption, demand is expected to rise fast. Still, the group of countries have the world’s best solar energy potential and there’s an array of increasingly affordable green energy technology and equipment they could be given access to, the researchers wrote. 

“There are already signs they’re following the pathway emerging economies started out on half a century ago,” the researchers said in the study of the growth in energy consumption in the countries. “It is a clear challenge in the quest to reduce global emissions.”

The researchers didn’t estimate the amount of finance needed, saying that will be determined in later work. 

“It is an academic exercise up front to understand the opportunity,” said Ian Muir, head of insights at Catalyst Energy, on a media call.

The report comes ahead of the official January launch of Mission 300, a program announced in April by the World Bank to give at least 300 million Africans access to electricity by 2030. 

The World Bank will allocate $25 billion of concessional finance to the program while a further $5 billion will come from the African Development Bank, Rajiv Shah, president of the foundation, said on the call. Currently about 600 million Africans, or roughly half the population, have no electricity.

Four Pathways

Countries will be able to access funding by committing to reforms that allow the roll out of green energy and private investors could plow in two or three times the amount committed by the two banks, Shah said. About a third of the money could be spent in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

The researchers mapped out four pathways for energy poor countries to follow should they have sufficient access to finance:

• Gradual grid greening: Suitable for countries like India with developed grids and considerable fossil fuel assets
• Mixed grid renewable evolution: Countries like Nigeria with densely populated cities will need to rely on centralized grids that utilize on renewable energy and battery storage
• Decentralized solar storage: For countries with good solar radiation and undeveloped power grids decentralized mini-grids with batteries would be suitable. Burkina Faso is a candidate
• Decentralized renewable mix: Suitable for countries such the Democratic Republic of Congo with few transmission lines but a variety of potential renewable power sources including solar and mini-hydro power plants

“These are the countries that will determine whether the world” can keep the global average temperature from rising more than 1.75C, Shah said of the group of 72 nations. The world needs “very dramatic scaling up of high leveraged financing to support the green transition in places that don’t have the fiscal headroom” to pay for the energy generation capacity themselves, he said.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.