Industry Insight: Hydropower: Building Sustainability into the East African Power Pool

In Africa, hydropow­er is one of the largest renew­able pow­er con­trib­u­tors to ener­gy gen­er­a­tion, how­ev­er with cli­mate change wreak­ing hav­oc across the con­ti­nent, water is becom­ing a scarce com­mod­i­ty in cer­tain areas.

Dr Daniel M. Kam­men, found­ing direc­tor of the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry (RAEL), and Inter­na­tion­al Rivers’ Lori Pot­tinger dis­cuss hydropow­er at length, iden­ti­fy­ing the cli­mate risks and the addi­tion of alter­na­tive renew­able tech­nolo­gies in the East Africa region.

The African ener­gy sec­tor is gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, under­fund­ed, under-capac­i­tat­ed and in some places embat­tled. An esti­mat­ed 70% of Africans have no access to grid-based electricity.

Black­outs and ener­gy short­falls are the norm in many places. Giv­en this dif­fi­cult land­scape, tak­ing advan­tage of oppor­tu­ni­ties to increase reli­a­bil­i­ty, devel­op local sus­tain­able resources, and sup­port both on- and off-grid users is a pow­er­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty not to be missed.

The East African Pow­er Pool (EAPP), which serves 10 coun­tries, is at a crit­i­cal junction.

It has the poten­tial to play a key role in dri­ving ener­gy invest­ments in the region for years to come but its heavy focus on cost­ly large dams – and the lack of analy­sis on the risks that cli­mate change brings to those invest­ments – puts the region at high risk.

The plen­ti­ful renew­able ener­gy resources avail­able to the region in the form of solar, wind, bio­mass and geot­her­mal ener­gy mean that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Hydropower faces climate risks

As cur­rent­ly con­fig­ured, the EAPP will rely heav­i­ly on some of Africa’s largest most con­tro­ver­sial hydropow­er dams, includ­ing Ethiopia’s Gibe III Dam on the Omo Riv­er, and Grand Ethiopi­an Renais­sance Dam on the Blue Nile.

Cur­rent­ly, about a quar­ter of elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed in EAPP coun­tries comes from hydropow­er (high­er than the glob­al aver­age but accept­able). Guture invest­ments will cre­ate a much greater depen­dence on hydropow­er at a time of chang­ing riv­er flows and oth­er cli­mate disruptions.

The EAPP has iden­ti­fied hydropow­er projects that will almost dou­ble the EAPP’s cur­rent installed capac­i­ty, which means that an esti­mat­ed 60% of the grid’s pow­er will come from Ethiopi­an hydropow­er gen­er­a­tion alone.

Risk analysis

Not enough infor­ma­tion exists about the risks involved in hydropow­er dams in East Africa to jus­ti­fy such heavy growth in hydropower.

The EAPP Mas­ter Plan does not include an analy­sis of the effects of cli­mate change on the region­al pow­er strat­e­gy. It makes no attempt to address the impacts of pos­si­ble droughts on the region’s economy.

The EAPP would be wise to shift its pri­or­i­ties to include a much greater pro­por­tion of renew­able ener­gy sources like solar, geot­her­mal and wind, and to take greater account of cli­mate risks to large hydropow­er projects.

Bridging the energy divide

Decen­tralised renew­able ener­gy sources are also more appro­pri­ate for bridg­ing East Africa’s large ener­gy divide.

Mini-grids and com­mu­ni­ty ener­gy pro­grammes can great­ly build local ener­gy access and eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty, which can be the ‘seeds’ of grow­ing region­al grids.

The clean, non-hydro ener­gy poten­tial of the East African region is vast and devel­op­ing it can lead to strong eco­nom­ic, social and envi­ron­men­tal­ly ben­e­fi­cial development.

A renew­ables based ener­gy sec­tor can meet the rapid­ly grow­ing ener­gy needs of the region, mak­ing addi­tion­al progress in increas­ing ener­gy access, in a way that achieves envi­ron­men­tal sustainability.

Innovative solutions

With so many peo­ple liv­ing off-grid in the region, a bal­anced focus on grid-con­nec­tiv­i­ty and on pay-as-you go and oth­er off-grid and mini-grid clean ener­gy solu­tions is a key step that gov­ern­ments in the region can enable, and that the inter­na­tion­al aid and busi­ness com­mu­ni­ties can support.

Our recent work on the ‘infor­ma­tion-ener­gy’ nexus[1] and the strong per­for­mance of pri­vate providers of off-grid solar-based ener­gy ser­vices (such as M‑KOPA and Sun­ny­Money) indi­cates that diver­si­fied strate­gies have the poten­tial to build capac­i­ty to serve all in the east African region.

It has been esti­mat­ed that the region’s solar resource alone is suf­fi­cient to pro­vide the need­ed ener­gy resources for each nation with­in the EAPP.

Avail­able non-hydro renew­able elec­tric­i­ty sources account for rough­ly 80% of the iden­ti­fied hydropow­er projects in the EAPP Mas­ter Plan.

Leapfrog­ging hydro to a broad base of renew­ables would be far less risky in a chang­ing climate.

Leading by example

A good exam­ple of an ener­gy sec­tor that is already plan­ning for cli­mate risks to hydropow­er is Kenya. The east African coun­try has increased its per­cent­age of cli­mate-safe geot­her­mal elec­tric­i­ty while reduc­ing its depen­dence on hydropower.

Kenya is on pace to expand its geot­her­mal pro­duc­tion from just over 500MW to over 3,000MW in just a few years.

Geot­her­mal is today the least-cost­ly form of on-grid gen­er­a­tion in Kenya, with costs as low at 8.5 cents/​kWh, one third of the fos­sil fuel costs.

The geot­her­mal sto­ry in Kenya is not unique. Wind could rival geot­her­mal as a growth indus­try. New dis­cov­er­ies (such as the incred­i­bly rich wind resource at Lake Turkana).

Chal­lenges do remain, with the off-grid pop­u­la­tion and expan­sion of ener­gy pro­grammes for the poor being key issues (but where efforts from the grow­ing pri­vate sec­tor pay-as-you-go pro­grammes of M‑KOPA, Sun­ny­Money and oth­ers are mak­ing progress).

At the indus­tri­al lev­el, how­ev­er, the expan­sion of clean, on-grid ener­gy can also bring about new indus­tri­al potential.

Even while tak­ing the pru­dent step to dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce the planned use of hydropow­er, Kenya is plan­ning a new indus­tri­al cor­ri­dor built around clean geot­her­mal, wind, and solar energy.

What is tak­ing place in Kenya can and should hap­pen else­where in the region.

About the authors:

This edi­to­r­i­al piece is based on the find­ings of “A Clean Ener­gy Vision for East Africa: Plan­ning for Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, Reduc­ing Cli­mate Risks and Increas­ing Ener­gy Access” (2015) by Daniel Kammen.

Dr Daniel M. Kam­men is the Class of 1935 Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor of Ener­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, with par­al­lel appoint­ments in the Ener­gy and Resources Group, the Gold­man School of Pub­lic Pol­i­cy, and the Depart­ment of Nuclear Engineering.

He was appoint­ed by then Sec­re­tary of State Hilary Clin­ton in April 2010 as the first ener­gy fel­low of the new Envi­ron­ment and Cli­mate Part­ner­ship for the Amer­i­c­as (ECPA) initiative.

Lori Pot­tinger, works on the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Africa Pro­gramme at Inter­na­tion­al Rivers. Pot­tinger has worked on Africa’s rivers since the 1990’s. “A healthy riv­er is such a remark­able thing, it gives so much to so many peo­ple; we’re work­ing across the con­ti­nent to keep Africa’s rivers healthy and flow­ing. If I was­n’t work­ing on rivers, I’d be doing what I can to save the world’s oceans and coral reefs.”

[1] Alstone, P., Ger­shen­son, D. and Kam­men, D. M. (2015) “Decen­tral­ized ener­gy sys­tems for clean elec­tric­i­ty access“, Nature Cli­mate Change, 5, 305 – 314.  DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE2512