Africa needs to use technology from both China and US and all work together, said Wangari Muchiri, the Africa director at the Global Renewables Alliance, speaking on the sidelines of the inaugural Investment Forum for Accelerated Partnership for Renewables in Africa (Apra) held in Nairobi, Kenya.
Muchiri - a visionary renewable energy engineer leading initiatives to advance wind power with several awards in her career under her belt, including being named a Global Climate Leader by Insider, African Power & Energy Elite, Obama Leader for Africa - renewed her call for global North-South and South-South collaboration on renewable energy amid global geopolitical volatility.
Earlier this month she first made this call at the SDG Media Zone held on the sidelines of the 79th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York.
She said yesterday that the world was too focused on the trade war between the US and China. Everyone was trying to protect their own markets or saying, “let’s keep China or America out”, essentially trying to choose between the two.
There was an African saying, “When two rhinos fight it is only the grass that gets hurt.”
“Africa already doesn’t have enough technology coming in, investment or the workforce. We are importing technology at 30% or more expensive than the rest of the world. We can’t afford to say we won’t take technology from one country or another when we are trying to get everybody electrified on the continent,” she said.
According to the International Energy Agency, in sub-Saharan Africa the number of people without electricity is almost back to historic highs, increasing from 580 million in 2019 to reach 600 million in 2022.
"People just want power. They don’t care if it is solar or wind or whatever.“
Muchiri, who also represents the Global Wind Energy Council, said as the renewable energy industry they wanted that power to be sustainable and cheapest.
“For us to deploy wind turbines and solar quickly we need to all work together. We need to collaborate. We can use Chinese technology, American financing, we have abundant resources on the continent to ensure that we deploy energy to people as quickly possible. If there is a way we can work faster and better to deploy technology that is the way to go,” she said.
South Africa as a crystal ball for rest of Africa
Muchiri, a renewable energy engineer and energy planning expert, earlier this month was in South Africa attending Windaba.
In response to Business Report queries around South Africa’s wind industry having trouble getting access to the grid, she said there was a lot of questions around this.
Muchiri said, “When I look at South Africa, I see it like a crystal ball of what is going to happen in the rest of the continent. South Africa is 3.5 gigawatts ahead of everybody else so. What does that mean?
“That means that the issues that you're going through now when you talk about grid, curtailment, supply chain, workforce and all the different challenges we're going to be facing these same challenges in Kenya in a few years, in Nigeria in a few years and in Egypt and in Morocco. So how do we start? To learn from the mistakes,” she said.
South Africa’s wind industry has more than 3.5 gigawatts of installed capacity and to date has 1.3 gigawatts of wind projects currently in construction.
This as the latest Global Wind Report, published in August by the Global Wind Energy Council, said the world installed 117 gigawatts of new wind power capacity in 2023, a 50% increase from the year before.
However, the wind industry must increase its annual growth to at least 320 gigawatts by 2030 in order to meet the COP28 pledge to triple the world’s installed renewable energy generation capacity by 2030, as well as to meet the Paris Agreement’s ambition of capping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Muchiri said, “How can we learn from South Africa’s (Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme) bid windows as they have all been very different?”
She said the renewable industry was taking lessons learnt in South Africa and taking “the good stuff not the bad stuff” to apply to the rest of Africa, for example, when designing renewable energy auctions in Kenya.
South Africa’s lifting of the 100 megawatt cap, private procurement was driving the wind industry in the country right now not public. “So how do we now design for that in other countries so that if I want to privately procure a wind farm in Kenya, I just learn from what South Africa did.”
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