In order to reach a goal of uni­ver­sal access to mod­ern ener­gy ser­vices in Africa by 2030, con­sid­er­a­tion of var­i­ous elec­tric­i­ty sec­tor path­ways is required to help inform pol­i­cy-mak­ers and investors, and help guide pow­er sys­tem design. To that end, and build­ing on exist­ing tools and analy­sis, we present sev­er­al ‘high-lev­el’, trans­par­ent, and econ­o­my-wide sce­nar­ios for the sub-Saha­ran African pow­er sec­tor to 2030. We con­struct these sim­ple sce­nar­ios against the back­drop of his­tor­i­cal trends and var­i­ous inter­pre­ta­tions of uni­ver­sal access. They are designed to pro­vide the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty with an indi­ca­tion of the over­all scale of the effort required. We find that most exist­ing pro­jec­tions, using typ­i­cal long-term fore­cast­ing meth­ods for pow­er plan­ning, show rough­ly a three­fold increase in installed gen­er­a­tion capac­i­ty occur­ring by 2030, but more than a ten­fold increase would like­ly be required to pro­vide for full access – even at rel­a­tive­ly mod­est lev­els of elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion. This equates to approx­i­mate­ly a 13% aver­age annu­al growth rate, com­pared to a his­tor­i­cal one (in the last two decades) of 1.7%.