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AfrElec RENEWABLES AfrElec
UK makes green play in Africa
ASIA
THE UK is to continue providing development financing for African countries that extract and use oil and gas in cleaner ways, despite UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement that his government would no longer support coal min- ing anywhere.
Speaking at the UK-Africa investment sum- mit in London on January 20, Johnson said London would provide financing for “lower and zero-carbon alternatives” to support Africa’s transition away from fossil fuels.
Yet he also maintained that the UK would provide development financing to support oil and gas technology that reduces those sector’s emissions records.
“First by helping you to extract and use oil and gas in the cleanest, greenest way possible – and we are world leaders in that and have much to share – but also by turbocharging our support for solar, wind and hydro and all the other car- bon-free sources of energy that surround us,” he told the gathering of 16 African heads of state and business leaders.
Among those attending were Egyptian Pres- ident Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Kenya’s Uhuru Ken- yatta, Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari and Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
Johnson’s pledge to end support for coal involves stopping “new direct official develop- ment assistance” to thermal coal mining and coal power plants, including aid money and loan guarantees and support from the UK’s export credit agency.
“There is no point in the UK reducing the amount of coal we burn if we then trundle over to Africa and line our pockets by encouraging African states to use more of it,” he said.
Johnson’s new policy comes as China, Russia, Japan, France, Germany and other developed countries are all competing to invest in African energy.
The continent aims to provide universal power access by 2025, which will cost $60-90bn per year over the next five years, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB). This will require 160 GW of new capacity, 130mn new
on-grid connections and 75mn new off-grid connections.
Renewables is a key element of providing uni- versal access in less developed rural and urban areas, although fossil fuels, mainly coal and nat- ural gas, are set to continue to play a major role in providing power for industry in the continent’s industrial powerhouses of South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt.
Meanwhile, new oil and gas production sites in countries such as Mozambique, Ghana, Sen- egal and Tanzania all aim to divert fossil fuels to the domestic market to feed a new generation of fossil fuel power plants.
The UK’s development finance institutions (DFIs) already have considerable exposure to renewables across Africa.
CDC Group intends to invest $3.5bn between 2018 and 2022 in Africa, and in 2019 committed $300m to support private investment in Africa’s “challenging” transmission, distribution and off-grid sectors by launching its new investment vehicle Gridworks.
CDC has also supported private utilities such as Globeleq, Umeme (Uganda) and Eneo (Cam- eroon) to develop low-carbon generation.
Other projects include the GBP15.5mn ($20.2mn), UK-based Africa Clean Energy Technical Assistance Facility (ACE-TAF), which was launched in Nigeria in 2019 and aims to cat- alyse solar markets across Africa.
The UK’s DFID currently supports 136 devel- opment projects across Africa in all areas from health to civil society to the environment, with a budget of GBP412mn ($537mn).
In practice, very little of the UK’s develop- ment money has been used to support coal pro- jects overseas in recent years.
DFID said it had not supported coal-fired power plants abroad since 2012, although it did support decommissioning coal projects.
Claire O’Neill, the UK’s former clean growth minister and now COP26 president, told Parlia- ment in 2019 that the UK government’s export finance agency had “not funded any new coal- fired power plants overseas since 2002.”™
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w w w. N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 03 23•January•2020