Alex Rose-Innes
The global pandemic had proved that the need for affordable, reliable and sustainable electricity supply was now more urgent than ever. The pandemic with its concomitant service delivery challenges had, especially on the African continent, impacted already rural and poor communities, even more.
With the irregular supply of electricity and in some areas none at all, in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), innovation and digitisation are desperately needed to unlock the continent’s energy and economic potential to benefit its residents.
A recent webinar hosted by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI) showed that Africa could meet its power generation needs from existing indigenous and renewable (green) innovation within this decade. This would also meet the 2063 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and the African Agenda.
The IRENA report on Global Renewables further showed that transformation from carbon-dioxide electricity generation to those lessening climate changes could mean an additional two (2) million environmentally-friendly jobs across SSA.
Safiatou Alzouma Nouhou, Director of the Independent Delivery Unit at AREI, said that governments should use the COVID-19 crisis to make relevant policy changes, maintaining focus on the deployment of renewable energy solutions in addressing the energy challenges on the continent.
Dr Maged Mahmoud, Acting Executive Director of the Regional Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, called for swift and decisive policy interventions and an accelerated renewable energy deployment in Africa.
IRENA’s Director of Country Engagement and Partnerships, Gurbuz Gonul, maintained that stimulus and recovery measures for the post-pandemic period provided a unique opportunity for SSA to address short-term and long-term priorities.
With the digital revolution and mobile banking already completely changing the business model of access to electricity with, more innovations would definitely follow suit as IRENA’s recently published innovation solutions briefs showed.
Digital innovations such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), block chain, smart mini-grids and associated flexibility solutions were already making a significantly impact on African power systems and digitalisation would be another part of the broader structural transformation across SSA.
