Why is Renewables a Great Solution to plug the Power Gap?

In a previous article that I strongly invite you to all to look at, we talked about the 3 main drivers of the Energy demand in Africa and what was very clear is that, this demand is only set to grow. To fill the gap, we will need altogether an energy mix and I strongly believe, Renewables should and will play a bigggg part of it. 

Renewable Energy is today a very trending topic with more and more investment flowing into the sector. If you make an exception for 2020 which was obviously impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, for the last 5 years or so, USD 600 billion per years have been invested into the sector. To give you a perspectives, this is 1.5 times size of Nigeria GDP.

What makes Renewables as attractive ? Just let me give you the 3 fundamental reasons.

It is Cost-competitive

Let’s start with the money. We’re better be honest with ourselves, the main reasons business and consumers will ever switch to renewables and investors will accept to inject their hard-earned cash into Clean energy projects is if they makes sense for them financially and fortunately, ….they do.

Not only do costs continue to decline for solar and wind power technologies, but new projects are increasingly being commissioned at very low absolute cost levels.

How does it compare with traditional power would you say? Right?

Well, In 2019, 56% of all newly commissioned utility-scale renewables power plants provided electricity at a lower cost than…. the cheapest new fossil fuel-fired option.

And That’s impressive, considering that in 2010, A solar power project cost was about 8x the cheapest fossil-fuel option. Now it is all reverse.

You’ll see on the figure, that solar projects to be commissioned in 2021 – could have an average price of just USD 0.039/kWh.

This represents a 42% reduction compared to the solar PV in 2019 and is more than 20% less than the cheapest fossil-fuel competitor, namely coal-fired plants.

Wind has a similar story.

And like Solar with the PV and CSP technologies, Wind also has two: Onshore and offshore. We’ll cover that in a future video.

For now, what we can retain is that Renewable Power Generation increasingly out-competes fossil fuels. 

It is Faster to build

The second reason is that Renewable Energy projects are faster to build. With technologies maturing and learning aggregated, construction times have been improving over the last decade.

A 10 MW Solar project, which could be enough to power a medium-size mine or maybe supply electricity to up to 40,000 families in Uganda for example could be built in less that 2 years.

Do look at the alternative for thermal power, that is to say your coal or gas-fired powerplants, you’ll have challenges in getting it done that quickly.

So when we talk about providing Power NOW as opposed to tomorrow to the continent… and the World, you know what the right choice is.

It is cleaner

I left the third reason in the end as it is kinda obvious. It says it in the tin. Renewable Energy is …CLEANER, hence Clean Energy.

But how clean? Very few actually know.

Check this picture

Solar produces 10x less carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per unit of electricity than natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel.

As for the other renewable energy sources, you can see they are actually producing even less CO2 than Solar, with Wind about 4 times less than Solar.

Yes, I agree they are not carbon-neutral as some may think and it is important to say that for intellectual honesty but they significantly reduce the amount of pollution.  

Now you understand why I’m so bullish about driving more Renewable Energy projects around the globe. And you should be too:-)