At the 2023 Africa Climate Summit, a coalition of 500 activist groups called for an immediate global fossil fuel phaseout and demanded a “new 100% renewable energy system” capable of meeting “all African energy needs with renewable, socially and environmentally sound, people-centred renewable energy.”
The view that all sectors—electricity, transportation, industry, and agriculture—can rapidly and feasibly shift to an energy system that is fully powered by 100-percent renewable electricity and fuels has become commonplace among climate advocates, often coupled with the claim that renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. As early as 2017, various academics and nongovernmental organizations declared that all regions of the world are poised to decarbonize electricity by 2050 “for lower system cost than today.” The global energy transition, they say, “is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will.”
A new solar farm may indeed be cheaper than a new gas turbine power plant today, when viewed in isolation. But that does not make renewables more affordable in the real world. That’s because energy costs depend on the entire system supplying fuel and electricity around the clock, including the backup power plants required when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. Operating on 100 percent renewable energy requires energy to be stored, transmitted across regions, and converted to hydrogen and other fuels, using costly early-stage technologies such as long-duration batteries, hydrogen electrolyzers, home battery systems, or direct carbon capture from air.
No matter what advocates and policymakers say, these cheap, renewables-only scenarios remain theoretical and unproven even for wealthy countries, apart from a lucky few already blessed with bountiful hydroelectric or geothermal resources. It is even more difficult for poor countries, where big claims about renewables’ affordability (and the idea that poor countries can simply leapfrog from energy poverty to a 100-percent renewable system) reflect neither real-world costs nor the availability of technology.
Too often, climate advocates claim a consensus on the feasibility and affordability of 100-percent renewable power globally when such a consensus simply does not exist—certainly not among energy systems experts, when they consider real-world constraints. On top of that, most 100 percent-renewables studies simply do not acknowledge the additional challenges faced by poor countries. In these optimistic models, it is simply assumed that continent-spanning power lines will spring into existence. Clean technology costs are assumed to decline quickly and steadily. Vast battery networks appear, as do hydrogen and other renewable fuels sourced from excess electricity, making it possible to easily manage intermittent wind and solar generation. Solar farms and hydrogen hubs—a complex, high-cost technology—multiply across poor countries without any consideration for limited capital, missing infrastructure, or the absence of a large construction and engineering workforce.
In practice, all of these factors remain daunting constraints.
Explorations of the feasibility of 100 percent renewable energy in Africa are not just limited in their methodology, but also in number. A recent review paper lists only 54 research articles—out of 750 total—that look at fully renewable energy pathways for Africa, with the authors urgently calling for more Africa-focused work. Many existing papers are often limited in scope or sophistication and/or use generic cost and financing assumptions, making this sparse literature even less useful to planners in practice.
Only recently has some of this work included assumptions based on the realistic constraints facing poor countries. Even then, pie-in-the-sky assumptions about technology, finance, and other real-world factors are legion.
In particular, claims that it will be cheaper for African countries to use only renewable energy to grow their economies rather than a mix of fuels are unrealistic. Sophisticated research reports assessing future clean energy systems for Europe, Japan, and the United States find that fighting climate change will require significant spending on new clean energy systems to replace fossil fuel infrastructure—with 100-percent renewable systems frequently ranked as the most expensive scenario of all. For these systems, costs are driven up by investments in infrastructure, storage, and transportation fuel technologies, most of which have yet to be demonstrated at scale. Papers claiming that an all-renewables future is a least-cost option for Africa generally ignore or downplay these costs or make other unrealistic assumptions.
Notably, many studies design scenarios whereby African countries decarbonize their entire energy systems by 2050, the very same net-zero target year that far richer countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan have set for themselves. Some analyses went even further by postulating 2030 as the target year for zero-carbon electricity systems in Sub-Saharan Africa or India. These papers are based on the notion that poor countries must commit to the same pace of climate action as the wealthy world. While at least 12 African countries aim for net-zero electricity systems by midcentury, these targets remain highly aspirational given limited capacity and financial resources, as well as technological constraints. Even if it were technologically feasible, there is also a demonstrated lack of interest from advanced economies in helping to bridge the financing gap.
Studies modeling 100 percent renewable scenarios can read like science fiction. For example, one paper modeling a renewables-only future for Africa by 2050—the sole study looking at the entire continent, according to a recent literature review—envisions that by 2035, the continent will operate enough renewables-powered carbon capture equipment to extract 38 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air per year and convert it into carbon-neutral methane and other fuels.
That would give the continent barely a decade to make revolutionary progress, not just in solar and batteries but also in many early-stage technologies such as renewable synthetic fuels, green hydrogen, and exotic energy storage systems—all relative to today’s starting point of 600 million Africans still lacking access to electricity.
Imagining such a far-fetched scenario is attractive. It would be one of the most significant success stories in human progress, delivering modern energy abundance and eliminating extreme poverty while producing vast societal dividends from eliminating pollution deaths and illness from dirty cookstoves and wood burning.
But given real-world challenges—not just in Africa—the renewables-only vision remains far from the most likely pathway. A quick look at the news should serve as a reality check: In West Africa, Nigeria has restricted electricity exports to Niger in response to a military coup. On Sept. 14, Nigeria’s electricity network suffered a complete collapse following a transmission line failure, leaving the entire country without electricity.
For a fully renewable future to become reality by 2050, everything would have to go perfectly, including the availability of cheap clean technology, a continentwide acceleration of infrastructure construction, more abundant sources of finance, and a perfect regulatory environment. It is irresponsible for climate advocates and rich-country policymakers to represent such a highly optimistic scenario as the assured or even likely outcome, and then use that assumption to argue that poor countries, therefore, no longer have any need to pursue technologies that these rich-country voices disapprove of, such as natural gas, carbon capture, large hydropower, or nuclear power.
False optimism about renewables is particularly devastating for the 600 million people in Africa who do not have access to a reliable source of energy. African policymakers have repeatedly stated that their highest priorities include universal electrification to raise living standards and increase economic growth, a prerequisite to making Africa more resilient to climate change. Africans need air conditioning to protect people from high heat, chemical fertilizers to raise yields and feed their populations, refrigerated storage for food and medicines, irrigation pumps for farmlands, and mechanized farm equipment to modernize the continent’s food systems. Plentiful energy is also essential for building new industries that will not only provide jobs, but also help countries such as Zambia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo escape the cycle of exporting raw materials to the world and importing all finished products.
African governments need more tools to improve energy access for their citizens, not fewer. Activists have interpreted claims about the feasibility of a 100-percent renewables future to justify immediate blanket bans on gas projects in Africa, when the reality is that Africans need more energy now, not tomorrow. Downstream investments in gas could serve as an important source of energy for homes and businesses, and generate foreign exchange as well.
Few can doubt that solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and storage technology will eventually be successful in Africa as they will be elsewhere. Clean energy sources are likely to form a significant part of Africa’s energy future, and they will probably succeed well beyond what skeptics might predict today. But this expectation is entirely different from the argument that African countries, starting today, no longer need anything other than solar, wind, and storage—that they do not need any large hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, gas-fired power plants, or post-combustion carbon-capture technologies.
Rich-world advocates and policymakers should realize that their demands for immediate fossil-fuel abstinence are very likely to perpetuate the extreme poverty that many Africans face—and they should reflect more thoughtfully on the limitations of what energy research can and cannot say about our collective energy future.
