The biggest producer of electricity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), namely South Africa, is in the midst of a supply crisis. Many of the existing generation plants are either coming to end-of-life or suffering from a lack of maintenance and excessive breakdowns. Of the installed capacity of 58,095MW, in real terms energy production has dropped 8.8% since 2010. This capacity gap has negatively impacted Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor, which fell from 71.9% in 2018 to 65% in 2021, and some 20% in total over the past 20 years. As a result, in 2020, the South African Government launched the Risk Mitigation Power Purchase Programme to close a supply gap of some 3,000MW. Across the remainder of SSA, installed capacity remains relatively low. After South Africa, the countries with the highest installed capacity are Nigeria with 12,522MW (although only around 3,000MW of this is dispatchable most days), Ghana with 4,399MW, Ethiopia at 4,244MW, Kenya with 2,819MW, DRC with 2,677MW, Zimbabwe with 2,240MW, Botswana with 920MW and Senegal with 864MW. On the other end of the scale, Chad has 125MW of installed capacity, Rwanda has 218MW, and South Sudan generates 130MW. As a result of the vast disparities between generation capacity across SSA and the largely rural nature of many communities, some 600 million people are without access to energy. Chief among these are South Sudan (5.1% access), Chad (6.4%) and Burundi (6.5%). As the world deals with the impact of COVID-19 and once COP26 negotiations conclude, the pressure on Africa to pursue a cleaner energy transition will become more targeted toward the installation of renewable energies and away from coal. The move to renewable energies will, of course, have an impact on transmission and distribution networks. The latest thinking in the design and future of the power sector in the US, Europe and parts of Asia is that distributed energy will start playing an ever more central role in the energy landscape.
Delivering generation to where it is most needed becomes easier as renewable energy technology becomes more efficient and price points fall. This is further driven by the fact that solar PV rooftop generation systems are increasingly popular with sectors of the consumer market that want to either take control of their energy security for themselves or view it as an opportunity to reduce their carbon emissions. In Africa, the element of distributed generation has been well established for many years by utilising solar home systems and pico solar systems for rural electrification. However, the concept is growing to include increased adoption of distributed energy (primarily solar PV) in urban centres. As more distributed energy resources are added to the grid, they are accompanied by a few ‘new’ technologies – battery storage and electric vehicles – and with these, multi-faceted challenges. Utilities have very little clear insight into the variety and number of distributed energy devices on the grid or the number of these that could assist with demand response or load balancing. While programmes are in place in the US and parts of Europe to encourage collaboration between utilities and consumers, such opportunities are not in place in Africa. This is partly due to the low level of prosumers, but it is also due to the threat they are perceived to pose to national utilities. Other concerns that utilities in SSA are grappling with include challenges of demand-side energy management and the use of energy-efficient appliances, environmental and GHG regulations and disruptive technologies. Externally, concerns for investors and multilateral agencies include a lack of clear policy or regulatory frameworks, uncertainty around political will and political risk, the precarious financial situation of many utilities across the continent and the general performance challenge of providing reliable, affordable quality power 24/7. Part of this digitalisation effort is the implementation of metering. Although smart metering is not always necessarily fit for purpose, it is an efficient and effective way to manage consumers of large loads in many cases. For other consumer classes, prepaid meters have proven to be highly successful at increasing revenue collection and reducing non-technical losses. Unless utilities get the metering and revenue management part of their business right, they will continue operating with insecure cash flows, drawing focus away from the business of providing safe, secure and affordable power to consumers.