Being Nigerian, I am not a fan of centralized electricity supply. Nigeria is a federation of 36 autonomous states with a population of over 200 million people. The autonomous states should exercise their constitutional prerogative to generate and supply electricity to their own inhabitants. Indeed, some states (and privately owned companies) already operate their own independent power plants, but they are required to submit the generated electricity to the dilapidated and creaking centralized national grid. That is the problem.
Instead of diverting electricity to the centralized national grid from their own power plants, the states of Nigeria should simply build parallel grids and supply only their own people. The federally-run national grid should simply augment electricity in places where there is a shortfall. Nothing wrong with having off-grid electricity in remote rural areas. Over-centralization is what caused temporary national grid collapse in Nigeria 13 times in the last decade.
> This means that in order to connect more Africans to electricity, urban power grids must be made to work in terms of reliability and affordability. There is no way around that.
Agreed.
> the foregrounding of distributed and off-grid renewables in M300 circles worries me a lot. Off-grid solutions should be limited to special cases.
BUT
>Countries like Tanzania already have grids that are facing specific challenges, and which are imposing enormous costs on their respective firms and households.
and
> in many countries energy sectors remain hostage to elite rent-seeking and inefficient distributive politics (e.g., subsidies) to address gaps caused by rent-seeking
So you suggest
> allocate as much as 40% of the resources behind M300 towards figuring out how to fix the economics and politics of power access in African countries
while you worry
>However, it’s important to ensure that M300 doesn’t reinvent the wheel or contribute to the creation of parallel power sectors within the participating countries.
To be honest, if the current grids are not technologically fit for purpose, and also politically hostage to elite rent-seeking, it sounds like the M300 idea of parrallel grids is precisely what might be needed, I'm not sure they should spend 40% of their budget rediscovering that; or hunting around for a possible national centralised institutional route that suits you politically.
There's an organisational pattern called the Strangler Fig. It's used in IT when an existing system is resistant to reform, so you grow a parallel system around it and eventually subsume it. This, I think (from 30,000 feet), is a reasonable plan.
I also challenge your CAPEX assumptions. I know every piece of critical infrastructure (schools, hospitals ect) in the UK has to maintain off-grid backup capability. I know a lot of high-capex industries like glass making also do that to avoid damage to their equipment from unexpected shutdown. In other words, for the same risk tolerance, that CAPEX is fixed, whether it's one of the world's most reliable grids or not. Back as a youth, I worked on the floor of a sheet steel manufactory. We used air-tools for a lot of things. They were powered by an air-battery that was charged up on cheap electricity. Back then, that was at night. Nowadays, it's midday. Similar tactics to suit similar problems.
It's been a long time since I worked on the UK-Bangladesh BD2050 project, which was in turn based on Mckay's Climate Change Without The Hot Air. I know we showed the extent of suppressed electrical demand based a couple of LED lights, a fridge and a tv, per already connected household. That gave certainty of sales to backup investment in new power plants. It can be hard to sell nascent industrial demand, but the human efficiency gain of 2 lightbulbs, a phone charger and a fridge is easy to show and well accepted. I think you are exactly on the right track when talking about cooking and the energy ladder there.
Would you be interested in reapplying the 2050 projects principles of simple, open calculations to current African data and politics?
Just to support what you are saying, I am aware that London Underground has its own separate off-grid power plant to serve as a backup system for its tube trains in case of an unexpected shutdown of electricity from the UK national grid
I was expecting the article to talk about solar and micro-grids, but it seems that the problem for Africa lies in its dysfunctional political institutions?
The one point I concede to Klein and Thompson in “Abundance” (a terrible book, which I have reviewed here on Substack) is that some initiatives (their example is programs to reduce homelessness in California) are too expensive or fail altogether is because they are too complicated: too many objectives, too many funders, too many implementing partners, too many intermediate goals, too many upstream and downstream reviews. What you have shown here is that the same will happen with the Africa electricity initiative. An example: I had a public argument with Peniel Lyimo (at the time he was Perm Sec in the PM’s office in Dar) about his insistence on receiving 50% of Tanzania’s IDA support as untied budget support. I said if you insist on this you will never provide water, sanitation, power or roads to your people because untied support will be frittered away on low quality spending.
Being Nigerian, I am not a fan of centralized electricity supply. Nigeria is a federation of 36 autonomous states with a population of over 200 million people. The autonomous states should exercise their constitutional prerogative to generate and supply electricity to their own inhabitants. Indeed, some states (and privately owned companies) already operate their own independent power plants, but they are required to submit the generated electricity to the dilapidated and creaking centralized national grid. That is the problem.
Instead of diverting electricity to the centralized national grid from their own power plants, the states of Nigeria should simply build parallel grids and supply only their own people. The federally-run national grid should simply augment electricity in places where there is a shortfall. Nothing wrong with having off-grid electricity in remote rural areas. Over-centralization is what caused temporary national grid collapse in Nigeria 13 times in the last decade.
> This means that in order to connect more Africans to electricity, urban power grids must be made to work in terms of reliability and affordability. There is no way around that.
Agreed.
> the foregrounding of distributed and off-grid renewables in M300 circles worries me a lot. Off-grid solutions should be limited to special cases.
BUT
>Countries like Tanzania already have grids that are facing specific challenges, and which are imposing enormous costs on their respective firms and households.
and
> in many countries energy sectors remain hostage to elite rent-seeking and inefficient distributive politics (e.g., subsidies) to address gaps caused by rent-seeking
So you suggest
> allocate as much as 40% of the resources behind M300 towards figuring out how to fix the economics and politics of power access in African countries
while you worry
>However, it’s important to ensure that M300 doesn’t reinvent the wheel or contribute to the creation of parallel power sectors within the participating countries.
To be honest, if the current grids are not technologically fit for purpose, and also politically hostage to elite rent-seeking, it sounds like the M300 idea of parrallel grids is precisely what might be needed, I'm not sure they should spend 40% of their budget rediscovering that; or hunting around for a possible national centralised institutional route that suits you politically.
There's an organisational pattern called the Strangler Fig. It's used in IT when an existing system is resistant to reform, so you grow a parallel system around it and eventually subsume it. This, I think (from 30,000 feet), is a reasonable plan.
I also challenge your CAPEX assumptions. I know every piece of critical infrastructure (schools, hospitals ect) in the UK has to maintain off-grid backup capability. I know a lot of high-capex industries like glass making also do that to avoid damage to their equipment from unexpected shutdown. In other words, for the same risk tolerance, that CAPEX is fixed, whether it's one of the world's most reliable grids or not. Back as a youth, I worked on the floor of a sheet steel manufactory. We used air-tools for a lot of things. They were powered by an air-battery that was charged up on cheap electricity. Back then, that was at night. Nowadays, it's midday. Similar tactics to suit similar problems.
It's been a long time since I worked on the UK-Bangladesh BD2050 project, which was in turn based on Mckay's Climate Change Without The Hot Air. I know we showed the extent of suppressed electrical demand based a couple of LED lights, a fridge and a tv, per already connected household. That gave certainty of sales to backup investment in new power plants. It can be hard to sell nascent industrial demand, but the human efficiency gain of 2 lightbulbs, a phone charger and a fridge is easy to show and well accepted. I think you are exactly on the right track when talking about cooking and the energy ladder there.
Would you be interested in reapplying the 2050 projects principles of simple, open calculations to current African data and politics?
Just to support what you are saying, I am aware that London Underground has its own separate off-grid power plant to serve as a backup system for its tube trains in case of an unexpected shutdown of electricity from the UK national grid
I was expecting the article to talk about solar and micro-grids, but it seems that the problem for Africa lies in its dysfunctional political institutions?
The one point I concede to Klein and Thompson in “Abundance” (a terrible book, which I have reviewed here on Substack) is that some initiatives (their example is programs to reduce homelessness in California) are too expensive or fail altogether is because they are too complicated: too many objectives, too many funders, too many implementing partners, too many intermediate goals, too many upstream and downstream reviews. What you have shown here is that the same will happen with the Africa electricity initiative. An example: I had a public argument with Peniel Lyimo (at the time he was Perm Sec in the PM’s office in Dar) about his insistence on receiving 50% of Tanzania’s IDA support as untied budget support. I said if you insist on this you will never provide water, sanitation, power or roads to your people because untied support will be frittered away on low quality spending.