Power infrastructure developments dominate project activity across Africa, representing the lion’s share of a pie chart shown to a gathering of business representatives at the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry earlier this week.
At 20% of more than 8 000 projects recorded since 2017, these developments are closely followed by oil and gas extractive exercises making up 18% of project activity, altogether supporting the notion that the continent’s future is in energy.
Speaking on the eve of the announcement that South Africa would soon have an electricity minister to hopefully sort out its load-shedding woes, Africa House director Duncan Bonnett said there could be no mistaking the centre-stage position of power.
“It’s the big story of our time at the moment, how energy is driving change in Africa,” the consultancy’s head of market access and research said.
With regard to international momentum driving developments around renewables and clean energy transitions, Africa could be a big player, Bonnett said.
“But we need a lot more independent voices than we have at the moment. Often we just get dragged along with what the rest of the world needs and it’s not what we need in Africa.”
Referring to a ski resort that Saudi Arabia plans to build in the Sararwat mountains at a cost of about $500 billion, Bonnett said it didn’t fit in with a just energy transition in keeping with current global transitions towards renewable and clean energy.
“One of the negatives is the insistence that Africa, which produces 3% of global greenhouse emissions, can all of its fossil fuel projects. The total value of new fossil fuel projects in Africa today is less than 10% of what Saudi Arabia is going to spend on a ski resort in the desert.”
Looking at the scale of energy developments across the continent, he said it was not just happening at utility level.
“Almost every company that I speak to, whether large or small, is trying to move onto some kind of renewable energy and battery storage system. Whether it’s 20% or more of their consumption, that’s where things are starting to happen.”
Talking about energy minerals, Bonnett said: “Things like electric vehicles (EV), mobile phones, and the increasing demand for energy, minerals are becoming a global hot potato as well, with China accounting for 65% of production and about 85% of consumption.”
He said it was the reason why we were seeing a desire for other sources of those minerals.
Bonnett added that an interesting development was the emergence of the US as a potential developer of EV batteries in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – close to the source of Africa’s highest copper concentrates.
