PublicationJournal Article Energy Access Scenarios to 2030 for the Power Sector in Sub-​​Saharan Africa

Published:
June 9, 2012
Author(s):
Publication Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:

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%.

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