¦POWER
FROM IMPOVERISHED TO
EMPOWERED The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa, a multidonor fund administered by the African Development Bank Group, is making headway in effecting real socioeconomic change in sub-Saharan Africa—and biomass power is an integral component. BY RON KOTRBA
M
ore people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity than the entire population of North America. According to the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), 634 million people live without power on the continent of Africa—second in size and population only to Asia, covering 20 percent of the Earth’s total land area and home to more than 1.2 billion people. The vast majority of Africans with no access to electricity, 632 million, live in subSaharan Africa. The overall electricity-access rate in Africa is about 45 percent, and for subSaharan Africa this drops to 35 percent—up from 23 percent in 1990. To put this in perspective, per capita energy consumption in the U.S. is 13,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Excluding South Africa, per capita energy consumption in sub-Saharan Africa is just 180 kWh. And where access to electricity is available in Africa, the supply is often unreliable due to weak transmission and distribution infrastructure. These staggering statistics have led AfDB to develop what it calls a “New Deal on Energy for Africa.” The goal is to provide Africans universal access to electricity by 2025. Renewable energies, such as biomass power, are vital to this plan. “In itself, it is a business opportunity,” says Ousseynou Nakoulima, AfDB’s director of renewable energy, energy efficiency and clean cooking. “Sub-Saharan Africa is in the process of development, and energy and power are necessary to that end. Anyone engaging in this
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can see the upside. To us, renewables are the obvious choice. We want a clean development pathway, compared to the course the more advanced economies took. And although the continent does not contribute much to climate change, it certainly bears the brunt of it.” Estimates suggest desertification—the process by which a desert grows to encompass once-fertile land—is causing the Sahara Desert to expand southward 20 to 30 miles a year. “Our interest is in mitigation of, and adapting to, climate change,” Nakoulima says. He further stresses how biomass power technologies serve baseload power versus others that are variable and dependent on the weather. “Biomass—specifically agriculture residue—does not just provide a solution to the problems of energy access and renewable energy,” Nakoulima says, “but it drives business and the value chain all along the ag subsector. In nutshell, these are major advantages.” Biomass fuel is a major source of energy in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for about 80 percent of overall energy consumption, according to AfDB. Yet, investment in biomass energy makes up less than 4 percent. “If you look at the uses and sources of energy in subSaharan Africa, biomass for heating and cooking comprises the bulk of that,” Nakoulima says. “The 4 percent is formal investments in biomass energy, formalized biomass power or energy generation technologies.”
SEFA
The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa, a multidonor trust fund administered by AfDB, was established in 2012. “At that time, this activity—renewable energy and energy efficiency—was at the margin of support in Africa,” Nakoulima tells Biomass Magazine. SEFA is funded by four major donor governments: The U.S., the U.K., Italy and Denmark, the largest donor. “With their cooperation, we wanted to plant a seed for this activity to germinate and develop in the [AfDB],” he says. To demonstrate how fast renewables are moving from marginalization to mainstream in Africa, Nakoulima says just one year ago all energy activity at AfDB was housed in one department. “Now, we have one department for clean energy alone,” Nakoulima says. Three financing windows exist under SEFA: project preparation, equity investments and enabling environment. The project preparation window provides cost-sharing grants and technical assistance to private project developers or promoters to facilitate preinvestment activities for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. Grant funding tar-