The Clean Energy Hub of the Future | Rebekah Shirley | TED

Africa's Clean Energy Opportunity

In this section, the speaker discusses how Africa is a continent with abundant renewable energy resources and how it has become an intense international debate to dissuade the use of fossil fuels.

The Need for Clean Energy in Africa

• As the fastest-growing yet least-electrified continent on the globe, Africa needs power systems that can help fortify against climate shocks.

• Both abundant fossil and renewable energy resources are available in Africa to build clean energy systems.

• Sub-Saharan African countries already rely on low-carbon resources where they have power. For example, Kenya generates 90% of its power from renewables like geothermal and hydropower.

• Even in West Africa, countries like Ghana generate over a third of their power from renewable energy resources.

• Countries like Namibia are at the forefront of innovation on clean fuels like green hydrogen.

Challenges Facing Clean Energy Transition in Africa

• Despite having abundant renewable energy resources, financial flows to deliver that potential remain troublingly scarce due to hidden compounding costs and premiums such as risk perception premium or paying back US dollar loan in constantly depreciating local currency premium.

• International finance markets are not appetized by projects and businesses incurring these premiums leading to financial flows remaining a trickle despite a pipeline of ready projects.

• This prioritizes risk to capital over risk to human life effectively.

• Though 17% of the global population still without access to basic energy today, Africa accounts for only 2% of global clean energy finance.

The Missing Ingredient: International Cooperation

• International cooperation is needed to deliver the finance flows that Africa sorely needs because there’s so much potential waiting right at the cusp.

• If local enterprise had access to long-term, low-cost financing like their counterparts in other regions of the world can simply take for granted, then Africa's clean energy future would build itself.

African Communities' Actions

• African communities show us the kinds of futures they want by their actions.

• For example, Jeffrey runs a solar company that targets commercial and industrial customers, helping to kick-start what has become the fastest-growing wave of solar across the continent.

Clean Energy in Africa: A Real Wave of Local Enterprise

In this section, the speaker talks about how local entrepreneurs in Africa are revolutionizing the energy sector by providing sustainable alternatives to traditional energy sources.

Examples of Local Enterprise

• About 95% of farmers in Africa rely on increasingly erratic rains for irrigation, but Samir's solar irrigation company is changing that.

• Phoebe designs fuel-efficient cook stoves that provide sustainable alternatives to household cooking.

• Dozens of young Rwandan, Ugandan and Kenyan electric mobility start-ups are revolutionizing transit in East Africa.

The Potential of African Clean Energy Business

• Local enterprise represents a real wave of clean energy business potential in Africa.

• If these businesses can be invested in, there is no excuse for those with means and responsibility not to invest as well.

Partnership and Cooperation

• The stories of thousands of communities mobilizing features they want represent partnership and cooperation rather than charity or victimhood.

• Ambitious commitments to deliver long-term financing at scale from countries, banks, and development finance institutions can drive global capital to least-electrified communities.

• Increased concessional financing should target least-electrified communities rather than just profitable projects.

• Delivering accessible clean energy financing at scale will be a far more productive show of partnership and trust than debating what countries should do with their available resources.

Climate Justice

• Climate justice involves heavy emitters cooperating to realize clean energy futures for countries that have been denied their fair share of a global carbon budget.