Policy Paper: How Nuclear, Hydropower and Rural Electrification Can Close Africa’s Electricity Gap by 2062
In 2022, the International Energy Agency reported that nearly 600 million people in Africa do not have access to electricity. For the same year, the World Bank Group reported that 51.5% of Sub-Saharan Africans did not have access to electricity. With Africa being touted as ‘the next frontier’ of global economic growth, access to electricity for the entire population is a prerequisite for achieving its true economic potential.
Small businesses and subsistence farmers cannot operate efficiently in areas without electricity, suppressing economic activities. Vaccines and some essential medicines require refrigeration, making healthcare systems in these areas inadequate. Households rely on inefficient and harmful energy sources like paraffin, charcoal, and firewood, leading to health issues and environmental degradation.
In 2022, the total installed power capacity in Africa was 245,000 MW, and the total population was 1,414,899,584. This means that roughly 639.72 kWh/person was generated in 2022. Since these figures represent 51.5% of the population having access to electricity, for the entire population to have had access to electricity, the total energy per capita needed to be 1,242 kWh/person with an installed capacity of 475,728 MW.
The potential to generate a high quantity of baseload energy exists in the form of nuclear and hydropower. The notion that nations such as Namibia with abundant uranium resources do not need to generate nuclear power is wrong and is often peddled by green investor activism. Nuclear power plants operate at the highest capacity factors, without emitting greenhouse gases. It is therefore senseless to exclude nuclear power from the solution mix to solve the electricity access gap.
In this paper, we will compute the electricity access gap with respect to population growth and propose large-scale production solutions.