Africa desperately needs access to energy. You have close to 1 billion people living across the continent, out of whom more than 600 million do not have access to power. For them, I would say, the environmental aspects come last. First they want to get power, and get it cheap, even if they are the most vulnerable to climate change.
These are countries that are growing very fast – both economically and in terms of their populations. If Africa powers itself with fossil fuel, an environmental time-bomb would begin ticking. There is a lot of debate about how we can help the continent to develop its energy at a competitive cost with clean sources.
Solar is an obvious solution. Solar power stations can be built more quickly, with fewer logistical challenges than wind ones, and are suited to a wider range of climates than hydro-power.
Solar power is fast, scalable and technically very simple to put into use.
At GreenWish, our aim is to plug Africa’s energy gap by investing in energy production, and working with local businesses, governments and others to spread the word about the benefits of solar.
The challenge runs much deeper than simply providing electricity to the homes of a growing population. It is also about supporting the needs of the whole economy, from banking to telecoms. The World Bank reckons that regular power outages cost the African economy as a whole between 1 and 4 percentage points of GDP.
In Africa, you have 200,000 telecom towers that consume a lot of power. Soon, there will be 300,000. Today, they rely on generators powered by diesel. Diesel is dangerous: more polluting, less reliable. Imagine, for example, in the North of Nigeria having to bring fuel on trucks to refuel telecom towers. There are a lot of challenges and, for towers that need to be operational 99 per cent of the time, there are major reliability issues.
By investing in solar battery solutions and outsourcing the power from the telecom operators, we can reduce telecom operators’ costs by 30 per cent, reduce their diesel consumption by 80 per cent and improve their EBITDA1 margin by 30-50 per cent, as well as improvising their enterprise value. Within four or five years I expect that half of these towers will have outsourced and converted to solar battery power.
But the renewable revolution will not come if the economics don’t make sense. Often, an innovative approach is required to make the numbers stack up, particularly for smaller scale projects.
GreenWish is working with other companies, such as bottling giant Coca Cola Hellenic, to set up a network of kiosks which can distribute solar power and offer access to digital networks as well as selling solar kits. This will help broaden their traditional convenience shop assortment to include things that need refrigeration, such as certain medicines.
Energy is the number one bottleneck for the development of the continent and Africa can become a huge market
We have come up with a solution which bundles power access with connectivity access to fast track the digitalisation of those without access to the Internet.
Energy is the number one bottleneck for the development of the continent and Africa can become a huge market.
1 Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation
