NEWS New report on green jobs in Africa from UNIDO, LNBL, and RAELMarch 7, 2017

Down­load the report from UNIDO, LBNL, and RAEL here and access the larg­er Green Jobs research pro­gram here.

Abstract:

The ongo­ing debate over the cost-effec­tive­ness of renew­able ener­gy (RE) and ener­gy efficiency

(EE) deploy­ment often hinges on the cur­rent cost of incum­bent fos­sil-fuel tech­nolo­gies versus

the long-term ben­e­fit of clean ener­gy alter­na­tives. This debate is often focused on mature or

‘indus­tri­al­ized’ economies and exter­nal­i­ties such as job cre­ation. In many ways, how­ev­er, the

sit­u­a­tion in devel­op­ing economies is at least as or even more inter­est­ing due to the generally

faster cur­rent rate of eco­nom­ic growth and of infra­struc­ture deploy­ment. On the one hand, RE

and EE could help decar­bonize economies in devel­op­ing coun­tries, but on the oth­er hand, higher

upfront costs of RE and EE could ham­per short-term growth. The method­ol­o­gy devel­oped in

this paper con­firms the exis­tence of this trade-off for some sce­nar­ios, yet at the same time

pro­vides con­sid­er­able evi­dence about the pos­i­tive impact of EE and RE from a job cre­ation and

employ­ment per­spec­tive. By extend­ing and adopt­ing a method­ol­o­gy for Africa designed to

cal­cu­late employ­ment from elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion in the U.S., this study finds that ener­gy savings

and the con­ver­sion of the elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply mix to renew­able ener­gy gen­er­ates employment

com­pared to a ref­er­ence sce­nario. It also con­cludes that the costs per addi­tion­al job cre­at­ed tend

to decrease with increas­ing lev­els of both EE adop­tion and RE shares.

Project part­ners:

Cli­mate Pol­i­cy and Net­works Divi­sion, Unit­ed Nations Indus­tri­al Devel­op­ment Organization

UNIDO,

Ener­gy Tech­nolo­gies Area, Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Laboratory