Europe Stores Electricity in Natural Gas Pipes

Power Grid Climate Resilience demands storm hardening, underground power lines, microgrids, batteries, and renewable energy as regulators and utilities confront climate change, sea level rise, and extreme weather to reduce outages and protect vulnerable communities.

Key Points

It is the grid capacity to resist and recover from climate hazards using buried lines, microgrids, and batteries.

✅ Underground lines reduce wind outages and wildfire ignition risk.

✅ Microgrids with solar and batteries sustain critical services.

✅ Regulators balance cost, resilience, equity, and reliability.

Every time a storm lashes the Carolina coast, the power lines on Tonye Gray’s street go down, cutting her lights and air conditioning. After Hurricane Florence in 2018, Gray went three days with no way to refrigerate medicine for her multiple sclerosis or pump the floodwater out of her basement.

What you need to know about the U.N. climate summit — and why it matters
“Florence was hell,” said Gray, 61, a marketing account manager and Wilmington native who finds herself increasingly frustrated by the city’s vulnerability.

“We’ve had storms long enough in Wilmington and this particular area that all power lines should have been underground by now. We know we’re going to get hit.”

Across the nation, severe weather fueled by climate change is pushing aging electrical systems past their limits, often with deadly results. Last year, amid increasing nationwide blackouts, the average American home endured more than eight hours without power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — more than double the outage time five years ago.

This year alone, a wave of abnormally severe winter storms caused a disastrous power failure in Texas, leaving millions of homes in the dark, sometimes for days, and at least 200 dead. Power outages caused by Hurricane Ida contributed to at least 14 deaths in Louisiana, as some of the poorest parts of the state suffered through weeks of 90-degree heat without air conditioning.

As storms grow fiercer and more frequent, environmental groups are pushing states to completely reimagine the electrical grid, incorporating more grid-scale batteries, renewable energy sources and localized systems known as “microgrids,” which they say could reduce the incidence of wide-scale outages. Utility companies have proposed their own storm-proofing measures, including burying power lines underground.

But state regulators largely have rejected these ideas, citing pressure to keep energy rates affordable. Of $15.7 billion in grid improvements under consideration last year, regulators approved only $3.4 billion, according to a national survey by the NC Clean Energy Technology Center — about one-fifth, highlighting persistent vulnerabilities in the grid nationwide.

After a weather disaster, “everybody’s standing around saying, ‘Why didn’t you spend more to keep the lights on?’ ” Ted Thomas, chairman of the Arkansas Public Service Commission, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But when you try to spend more when the system is working, it’s a tough sell.”

A major impediment is the failure by state regulators and the utility industry to consider the consequences of a more volatile climate — and to come up with better tools to prepare for it. For example, a Berkeley Lab study last year of outages caused by major weather events in six states found that neither state officials nor utility executives attempted to calculate the social and economic costs of longer and more frequent outages, such as food spoilage, business closures, supply chain disruptions and medical problems.

“There is no question that climatic changes are happening that directly affect the operation of the power grid,” said Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank at New York University Law School. “What you still haven’t seen … is a [state] commission saying: 'Isn’t climate the through line in all of this? Let’s examine it in an open-ended way. Let’s figure out where the information takes us and make some decisions.’ ”

In interviews, several state commissioners acknowledged that failure.

“Our electric grid was not built to handle the storms that are coming this next century,” said Tremaine L. Phillips, a commissioner on the Michigan Public Service Commission, which in August held an emergency meeting to discuss the problem of power outages. “We need to come up with a broader set of metrics in order to better understand the success of future improvements.”

Five disasters in four years
The need is especially urgent in North Carolina, where experts warn Atlantic grids and coastlines need a rethink as the state has declared a federal disaster from a hurricane or tropical storm five times in the past four years. Among them was Hurricane Florence, which brought torrential rain, catastrophic flooding and the state’s worst outage in over a decade in September 2018.

More than 1 million residents were left disconnected from refrigerators, air conditioners, ventilators and other essential machines, some for up to two weeks. Elderly residents dependent on oxygen were evacuated from nursing homes. Relief teams flew medical supplies to hospitals cut off by flooded roads. Desperate people facing closed stores and rotting food looted a Wilmington Family Dollar.

“I have PTSD from Hurricane Florence, not because of the actual storm but the aftermath,” said Evelyn Bryant, a community organizer who took part in the Wilmington response.

The storm reignited debate over a $13 billion proposal by Duke Energy, one of the largest power companies in the nation, to reinforce the state’s power grid. A few months earlier, the state had rejected Duke’s request for full repayment of those costs, determining that protecting the grid against weather is a normal part of doing business and not eligible for the type of reimbursement the company had sought.

After Florence, Duke offered a smaller, $2.5 billion plan, along with the argument that severe weather events are one of seven “megatrends” (including cyberthreats and population growth) that require greater investment, according to a PowerPoint presentation included in testimony to the state. The company owns the two largest utilities in North Carolina, Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress.

Vote Solar, a nonprofit climate advocacy group, objected to Duke’s plan, saying the utility had failed to study the risks of climate impacts. Duke’s flood maps, for example, had not been updated to reflect the latest projections for sea level rise, they said. In testimony, Vote Solar claimed Duke was using environmental trends to justify investments “it had already decided to pursue.”

The United States is one of the few countries where regulated utilities are usually guaranteed a rate of return on capital investments, even as studies show the U.S. experiences more blackouts than much of the developed world. That business model incentivizes spending regardless of how well it solves problems for customers and inspires skepticism. Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a nonprofit group that assists state and regional policymakers on electrical grid issues, said utilities in many states “are waving their hands and saying hurricanes” to justify spending that would do little to improve climate resilience.

In North Carolina, hurricanes convinced Republicans that climate change is real

Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks acknowledged that the company had not conducted a climate risk study but pointed out that this type of analysis is still relatively new for the industry. He said Duke’s grid improvement plan “inherently was designed to think about future needs,” including reinforced substations with walls that rise several feet above the previous high watermark for flooding, and partly relied on federal flood maps to determine which stations are at most risk.

Brooks said Duke is not using weather events to justify routine projects, noting that the company had spent more than a year meeting with community stakeholders and using their feedback to make significant changes to its grid improvement plan.

This year, the North Carolina Utilities Commission finally approved a set of grid improvements that will cost customers $1.2 billion. But the commission reserved the right to deny Duke reimbursement of those costs if it cannot prove they are prudent and reasonable. The commission’s general counsel, Sam Watson, declined to discuss the decision, saying the commission can comment on specific cases only in public orders.

The utility is now burying power lines in “several neighborhoods across the state” that are most vulnerable to wide-scale outages, Brooks said. It is also fitting aboveground power lines with “self-healing” technology, a network of sensors that diverts electricity away from equipment failures to minimize the number of customers affected by an outage.

As part of a settlement with Vote Solar, Duke Energy last year agreed to work with state officials and local leaders to further evaluate the potential impacts of climate change, a process that Brooks said is expected to take two to three years.

High costs create hurdles
The debate in North Carolina is being echoed in states across the nation, where burying power lines has emerged as one of the most common proposals for insulating the grid from high winds, fires and flooding. But opponents have balked at the cost, which can run in the millions of dollars per mile.

In California, for example, Pacific Gas & Electric wants to bury 10,000 miles of power lines, both to make the grid more resilient and to reduce the risk of sparking wildfires. Its power equipment has contributed to multiple deadly wildfires in the past decade, including the 2018 Camp Fire that killed at least 85 people.

PG&E’s proposal has drawn scorn from critics, including San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who say it would be too slow and expensive. But Patricia Poppe, the company’s CEO, told reporters that doing nothing would cost California even more in lost lives and property while struggling to keep the lights on during wildfires. The plan has yet to be submitted to the state, but Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the California Public Utilities Commission, said the commission has supported underground lines as a wildfire mitigation strategy.

Another oft-floated solution is microgrids, small electrical systems that provide power to a single neighborhood, university or medical center. Most of the time, they are connected to a larger utility system. But in the event of an outage, microgrids can operate on their own, with the aid of solar energy stored in batteries.

In Florida, regulators recently approved a four-year microgrid pilot project, but the technology remains expensive and unproven. In Maryland, regulators in 2016 rejected a plan to spend about $16 million for two microgrids in Baltimore, in part because the local utility made no attempt to quantify “the tangible benefits to its customer base.”

Amid shut-off woes, a beacon of energy

In Texas, where officials have largely abandoned state regulation in favor of the free market, the results have been no more encouraging. Without requirements, as exist elsewhere, for building extra capacity for times of high demand or stress, the state was ill-equipped to handle an abnormal deep freeze in February that knocked out power to 4 million customers for days.

Since then, Berkshire Hathaway Energy and Starwood Energy Group each proposed spending $8 billion to build new power plants to provide backup capacity, with guaranteed returns on the investment of 9 percent, but the Texas legislature has not acted on either plan.

New York is one of the few states where regulators have assessed the risks of climate change and pushed utilities to invest in solutions. After 800,000 New Yorkers lost power for 10 days in 2012 in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, state regulators ordered utility giant Con Edison to evaluate the state’s vulnerability to weather events.

The resulting report, which estimated climate risks could cost the company as much as $5.2 billion by 2050, gave ConEd data to inform its investments in storm hardening measures, including new storm walls and submersible equipment in areas at risk of flooding.

Meanwhile, the New York Public Service Commission has aggressively enforced requirements that utility companies keep the lights on during big storms, fining utility providers nearly $190 million for violations including inadequate staffing during Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020.

“At the end of the day, we do not want New Yorkers to be at the mercy of outdated infrastructure,” said Rory M. Christian, who last month was appointed chair of the New York commission.

The price of inaction
In North Carolina, as Duke Energy slowly works to harden the grid, some are pursuing other means of fostering climate-resilient communities.

Beth Schrader, the recovery and resilience director for New Hanover County, which includes Wilmington, said some of the people who went the longest without power after Florence had no vehicles, no access to nearby grocery stores and no means of getting to relief centers set up around the city.

For example, Quanesha Mullins, a 37-year-old mother of three, went eight days without power in her housing project on Wilmington’s east side. Her family got by on food from the Red Cross and walked a mile to charge their phones at McDonald’s. With no air conditioning, they slept with the windows open in a neighborhood with a history of violent crime.

Schrader is working with researchers at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte to estimate the cost of helping people like Mullins. The researchers estimate that it would have cost about $572,000 to provide shelter, meals and emergency food stamp benefits to 100 families for two weeks, said Robert Cox, an engineering professor who researches power systems at UNC-Charlotte.

Such calculations could help spur local governments to do more to help vulnerable communities, for example by providing “resilience outposts” with backup power generators, heating or cooling rooms, Internet access and other resources, Schrader said. But they also are intended to show the costs of failing to shore up the grid.

“The regulators need to be moved along,” Cox said.

In the meantime, Tonye Gray finds herself worrying about what happens when the next storm hits. While Duke Energy says it is burying power lines in the most outage-prone areas, she has yet to see its yellow-vested crews turn up in her neighborhood.

“We feel,” she said, “that we’re at the end of the line.”

Related News

• Electricity Forum News

• Grid Technologies News

Global Power Sector CO2 Surge 2021 shows electricity demand outpacing renewable energy, with coal and fossil fuels rebounding, undermining green recovery goals and climate change targets flagged by the IEA and IPCC.

Key Points

Record rise in power sector CO2 in 2021 as demand outpaced renewables and coal rebounded, undermining a green recovery.

✅ Electricity demand rose 5% above pre-pandemic levels

✅ Fossil fuels supplied 61% of power; coal led the rebound

✅ Wind and solar grew 15% but lagged demand

Carbon dioxide emissions from the global electric power sector surged past pre-pandemic levels to record highs in the first half of 2021, according to new research by London-based environmental think tank Ember.

Electricity demand and emissions are now 5% higher than where they were before the Covid-19 outbreak, which prompted worldwide lockdowns that led to a temporary drop in global greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity demand also surpassed the growth of renewable energy, and surging electricity demand is putting power systems under strain, the analysis found.

The findings signal a failure of countries to achieve a so-called “green recovery” that would entail shifting away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy, though European responses to Covid-19 have accelerated the electricity system transition by about a decade, to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

The report found that 61% of the world’s electricity still came from fossil fuels in 2020. Five G-20 countries had more than 75% of their electricity supplied from fossil fuels last year, with Saudi Arabia at 100%, South Africa at 89%, Indonesia at 83%, Mexico at 75% and Australia at 75%.

Coal generation did fall a record 4% in 2020, but overall coal supplied 43% of the additional energy demand between 2019 and 2020, with soaring electricity and coal use underscoring persistent demand pressures. Asia currently generates 77% of the world’s coal electricity and China alone generates 53%, up from 44% in 2015.

The world’s transition out of coal power, which contributes to roughly 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, is happening far too slowly to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the study warned. And the International Energy Agency forecasts coal generation will rebound in 2021 as electricity demand picks up again, even as renewables are poised to eclipse coal by 2025 according to other analyses.

“Progress is nowhere near fast enough. Despite coal’s record drop during the pandemic, it still fell short of what is needed,” Ember lead analyst Dave Jones said in a statement.

Jones said coal power usage must collapse by 80% by the end of the decade to avoid dangerous levels of global warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

“We need to build enough clean electricity to simultaneously replace coal and electrify the global economy,” Jones said. “World leaders have yet to wake up to the enormity of the challenge.”

The findings come ahead of a major U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, where negotiators will push for more ambitious climate action and emissions reduction pledges from nations.

Without immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions to global emissions, scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn that the average global temperature will likely cross the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold within 20 years.

The study also highlighted some upsides. Wind and solar generation, for instance, rose by 15% in 2020, and low-emissions sources are set to cover almost all the growth in global electricity demand in the next three years, producing nearly a tenth of the world’s electricity last year and doubling production since 2015.

Some countries now get about 10% of their electricity from wind and solar, including India, China, Japan, Brazil. The U.S. and Europe have experienced the biggest growth in wind and solar, and in the EU, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas last year, with Germany at 33% and the U.K. leads the G20 for wind power at 29%.

Related News

• Electricity Forum News

• Power Generation News

Puerto Rico Earthquakes continue as a seismic swarm with aftershocks, landslides near Pef1uelas, damage in Ponce and Guayanilla, grid outages from Costa Sur Plant, PREPA recovery, vulnerable buildings post-Hurricane Maria raising safety concerns.

Key Points

Recurring seismic events impacting Puerto Rico, causing damage, aftershocks, outages, and displacement.

✅ Seismic swarm with 6.4 and 5.9 magnitude quakes and ongoing aftershocks

✅ Costa Sur Plant offline; PREPA urges conservation amid grid repairs

✅ Older, code-deficient buildings and landslides raise safety risks

Some in Puerto Rico are beginning to fear the ground will never stop shaking. The island has been pummeled by hundreds of earthquakes in recent weeks, including the recent 5.9 magnitude temblor, where there were reports of landslides in the town of Peñuelas along the southern coast, rattling residents already on edge from the massive 6.4 magnitude quake, and raising wider concerns about climate risks to the grid in disaster-prone regions.

That was the largest to strike the island in more than a century causing hundreds of structures to crumble, forcing thousands from their homes and leaving millions without power, a scenario echoed by Texas power outages during winter storms too. One person was killed and several others injured.

Utility says 99% of customers have electricity

Puerto Rico's public utility, PREPA, tweeted some welcome news Monday: that nearly all of the homes and businesses it serves have had electric power restored. Still it is urging customers to conserve energy amid utility supply-chain shortages that can slow critical repairs.

Reporting from the port city of Ponce, NPR's Adrian Florido said the Costa Sur Plant, which produces more than 40% of Puerto Rico's electricity, was badly damaged in last week's quake. It remains offline indefinitely, even as grid operators elsewhere have faced California blackout warnings during extreme heat.

He also reports many residents are still reeling from the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria, a deadly Category 4 storm that battered the island in September 2017. The storm exposed the fact that buildings across the island were not up to code, similar to how aging systems have contributed to PG&E power line fires in California. The series of earthquakes are only amplifying fears that structures have been further weakened.

"People aren't coping terribly well," Florido said on NPR's Morning Edition Monday, noting that households elsewhere have endured pandemic power shutoffs and burdensome bills.

Many earthquake victims sleeping outdoors

Florido spoke to one displaced resident, Leticia Espada, who said more than 50 homes in her town of Guayanilla, about an hour drive east of the port city of Ponce, had collapsed.

After sleeping outside for days on her patio following Tuesday's quake, she eventually came to her town's baseball stadium where she's been sleeping on one of hundreds of government-issued cots.

She's like so many others sleeping in open-air shelters, many unwilling to go back to their homes until they've been deemed safe, while even far from disaster zones, brief events like a Northeast D.C. outage show how fragile service can be.

"Thousands of people across several towns sleeping in tents or under tarps, or out in the open, protected by nothing but the shade of a tree with no sense of when these quakes are going to stop," Florido reports.

Related News

• Electricity Forum News

• Energy Policy News

Airport City Solar Edmonton will deliver a 120-megawatt, 627-acre photovoltaic, utility-scale renewable energy project at EIA, creating jobs, attracting foreign investment, and supplying clean power to Fortis Alberta and airport distribution systems.

Key Points

A 120 MW, 627-acre photovoltaic solar farm at EIA supplying clean power to Fortis Alberta and airport systems.

✅ 120 MW utility-scale project over 627 acres at EIA

✅ Feeds Fortis Alberta and airport distribution networks

✅ Drives jobs, investment, and regional sustainability

A European-based company is proposing to build a solar farm bigger than 300 CFL football fields at Edmonton's international airport, aligning with Alberta's red-hot solar growth seen across the province.

Edmonton International Airport and Alpin Sun are working on an agreement that will see the company develop Airport City Solar, a 627-acre, 120-megawatt solar farm that reflects how renewable power developers combine resources for stronger projects on what is now a canola field on the west side of the airport lands.

The solar farm will be the largest at an airport anywhere in the world, EIA said in a news release Tuesday, in a region that also hosts the largest rooftop solar array at a local producer.

"It's a great opportunity to drive economic development as well as be better for the environment," Myron Keehn, vice-president, commercial development and air service at EIA, told CBC News, even as Alberta faces challenges with solar expansion that require careful planning.

"We're really excited that [Alpin Sun] has chosen Edmonton and the airport to do it. It's a great location. We've got lots of land, we're geographically located north, which is great for us, because it allows us to have great hours of sunlight.

"As everyone knows in Edmonton, you can golf early in the morning or golf late at night in the summertime here. And in wintertime it's great, because of the snow, and the reflective [sunlight] off the snow that creates power as well."

Airport official Myron Keehn says the field behind him will become home to the world's largest solar farm at an airport. (Scott Neufeld/CBC)

The project will "create jobs, provide sustainable solar power for our region and show our dedication to sustainability," Tom Ruth, EIA president and CEO, said in the news release, while complementing initiatives by Ermineskin First Nation to expand Indigenous participation in electricity generation.

Construction is expected to begin in early 2022, as new solar facilities in Alberta demonstrate lower costs than natural gas. The solar farm would be operational by the end of that year, the release said. 

Alpin Sun says the project will bring in $169 million in foreign investment to the Edmonton metro region amid federal green electricity contracts that are boosting market certainty. 

Power generated by Airport City Solar will feed into Fortis Alberta and airport distribution systems.

Related News

• Electricity Forum News

• Renewable Energy News

Global Electricity Demand Surge underscores rising coal generation, lagging renewables deployment, and escalating emissions, as nations prioritize reliable power; nuclear energy and grid decarbonization emerge as pivotal solutions to the electricity transition.

Key Points

A rapid post-lockdown rise in power consumption, outpacing renewables growth and driving higher coal use and emissions.

✅ Coal generation rises faster than wind and solar additions

✅ Emissions increase as economies prioritize reliable baseload power

✅ Nuclear power touted for rapid grid decarbonization

By Robert Bryce

As the Covid lockdowns are easing, the global economy is recovering and that recovery is fueling blistering growth in electricity use. The latest data from Ember, the London-based “climate and energy think tank focused on accelerating the global electricity transition,” show that global power demand soared by about 5% in the first half of 2021. That’s faster growth than was happening back in 2018 when electricity use was increasing by about 4% per year.

The numbers from Ember also show that despite lots of talk about the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, coal demand for power generation continues to grow and emissions from the electric sector continue to grow: up by 5% over the first half of 2019. In addition, they show that while about half of the growth in electricity demand was met by wind and solar, as low-emissions sources are set to cover almost all new demand over the next three years, overall growth in electricity use is still outstripping the growth in renewables. 

The soaring use of electricity, and increasing emissions from power generation confirm the sage wisdom of Rasheed Wallace, the volatile former power forward with the Detroit Pistons and other NBA teams, and now an assistant coach at the  University of Memphis, who coined the catchphrase: “Ball don’t lie.” If Wallace or one of his teammates was called for a foul during a basketball game that he thought was undeserved, and the opposing player missed the ensuing free throws, Wallace would often holler, “ball don’t lie,” as if the basketball itself was pronouncing judgment on the referee’s errant call. 

I often think about Wallace’s catchphrase while looking at global energy and power trends and substitute my own phrase: numbers don’t lie.

Over the past few weeks Ember, BP, and the International Energy Agency have all published reports which come to the same two conclusions: that countries all around the world — and China's electricity sector in particular — are doing whatever they need to do to get the electricity they need to grow their economies. Second, they are using lots of coal to get that juice. 

As I discuss in my recent book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, Electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy. The Ember data proves that. At a growth rate of 5%, global electricity use will double in about 14 years, and as surging electricity demand is putting power systems under strain around the world, the electricity sector also accounts for the biggest single share of global carbon dioxide emissions: about 25 percent. Thus, if we are to have any hope of cutting global emissions, the electricity sector is pivotal. Further, the soaring use of electricity shows that low-income people and countries around the world are not content to stay in the dark. They want to live high-energy lives with access to all the electronic riches that we take for granted.  

 Ember’s data clearly shows that decarbonizing the global electric grid will require finding a substitute for coal. Indeed, coal use may be plummeting in the U.S. and western Europe, where U.S. electricity consumption has been declining, but over the past two years, several developing countries including Mongolia, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and India, all boosted their use of coal. This was particularly obvious in China, where, between the first half of 2019 and the first half of 2021, electricity demand jumped by about 14%. Of that increase, coal-fired generation provided roughly twice as much new electricity as wind and solar combined. In Pakistan, electricity demand jumped by about 7%, and coal provided more than three times as much new electricity as nuclear and about three times as much as hydro. (Wind and solar did not grow at all in Pakistan over that period.) 

Hate coal all you like, but its century-long persistence in power generation proves its importance. That persistence proves that climate change concerns are not as important to most consumers and policymakers as reliable electricity. In 2010, Roger Pielke Jr. dubbed this the Iron Law of Climate Policy which says “When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time.” Pielke elaborated on that point, saying the Iron Law is a “boundary condition on policy design that is every bit as limiting as is the second law of thermodynamics, and it holds everywhere around the world, in rich and poor countries alike. It says that even if people are willing to bear some costs to reduce emissions (and experience shows that they are), they are willing to go only so far.”

Over the past five years, I’ve written a book about electricity, co-produced a feature-length documentary film about it (Juice: How Electricity Explains the World), and launched a podcast that focuses largely on energy and power. I’m convinced that Pielke’s claim is exactly right and should be extended to electricity and dubbed the Iron Law of Electricity which says, “when forced to choose between dirty electricity and no electricity, people will choose dirty electricity every time.” I saw this at work in electricity-poor places all over the world, including India, Lebanon, and Puerto Rico. 

Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado as well as a highly regarded author on the politics of climate change and sports governance, has since elaborated on the Iron Law. During an interview in Juice, he explained it thusly: “The Iron Law says we’re not going to reduce emissions by willingly getting poor. Rich people aren't going to want to get poorer, poor people aren't going to want to get poorer.” He continued, “If there is one thing that we can count on it is that policymakers will be rewarded by populations if they make people wealthier. We're doing everything we can to try to get richer as nations, as communities, as individuals. If we want to reduce emissions, we really have only one place to go and that's technology.”

Pielke’s point reminds me of another of my favorite energy analysts, Robert Rapier, who made a salient point in his Forbes column last week. He wrote, “Despite the blistering growth rate of renewables, it’s important to keep in mind that overall global energy consumption is growing. Even though global renewable energy consumption has increased by about 21 exajoules in the past decade, overall energy consumption has increased by 51 exajoules. Increased fossil fuel consumption made up most of this growth, with every category of fossil fuels showing increased consumption over the decade.” 

The punchline here – despite my tangential reference to Rasheed Wallace — is obvious: The claims that massive reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions must happen soon are being mocked by the numbers. Countries around the world are acting in their interest, particularly when it comes to their electricity needs and that is resulting in big increases in emissions. As Ember concludes in their report, wind and solar are growing, and some analyses suggest renewables could eclipse coal by 2025, but the “electricity transition” is “not happening fast enough.”

Ember explains that in the first half of 2021, wind and solar output exceeded the output of the world’s nuclear reactors for the first time. It also noted that over the past two years, “Nuclear generation fell by 2% compared to pre-pandemic levels, as closures at older plants across the OECD, especially amid debates over European nuclear trends, exceeded the new capacity in China.” While that may cheer anti-nuclear activists at groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the truth is obvious: the only way – repeat, the only way – the electric sector will achieve significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions is if we can replace lots of coal-fired generation with nuclear reactors and do so in relatively short order, meaning the next decade or so. Renewables are politically popular and they are growing, but they cannot, will not, be able to match the soaring demand for the electricity that is needed to sustain modern economies and bring developing countries out of the darkness and into modernity. 

Countries like China, Vietnam, India, and others need an alternative to coal for power generation. They need new nuclear reactors that are smaller, safer, and cheaper than the existing designs. And they need it soon. I will be writing about those reactors in future columns.

Related News

• Electricity Forum News

• Power Generation News

West and Central Africa Electricity Access hinges on utility reform, renewable energy, off-grid solar, mini-grids, battery storage, and regional grid integration, lowering costs, curbing energy poverty, and advancing SDG7 with sustainable, reliable power solutions.

Key Points

Expanding reliable power via renewables, grid trade, and off-grid systems to cut energy poverty and unlock inclusive growth.

✅ Utility reform lowers costs and improves service reliability

✅ Regional grid integration enables clean, least-cost power trade

✅ Off-grid solar and mini-grids electrify remote communities

As commodity prices soar and leaders around the world worry about energy shortages and prices of gasoline at the pump, millions of people in Africa still lack access to electricity.  One-half of the people on the continent cannot turn on a fan when temperatures go up, can’t keep food cool, or simply turn the lights on. This energy access crisis must be addressed urgently.

In West and Central Africa, only three countries are on track to give every one of their people access to electricity by 2030. At this slow pace, 263 million people in the region will be left without electricity in ten years.  West Africa has one of the lowest rates of electricity access in the world; only about 42% of the total population, and 8% of rural residents, have access to electricity.

These numbers, some far too big, others far too small, have grave consequences. Electricity is an important step toward enhancing people’s opportunities and choices. Access is key to boosting economic activity and contributes to improving human capital, which, in turn, is an investment in a country’s potential.  

Without electricity, children can’t do their schoolwork at night. Businesspeople can’t get information on markets or trade with each other. Worse, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown so starkly, limited access to energy constrains hospital and emergency services, further endangering patients and spoiling precious medicine.  

What will it take to power West and Central Africa?  
As the African continent recovers from COVID-19 impacts, now is the critical time to accelerate progress towards universal energy access to drive the region’s economic transformation, promote socio-economic inclusion, and unlock human capital growth. Without reliable access to electricity, the holes in a country’s social fabric can grow bigger, those without access growing disenchanted with inequality.  

Tackling the Africa region’s energy access crisis requires four bold approaches. 

First, this involves making utilities financially viable. Many power providers in the region are cash-strapped, operate dilapidated and aging generation fleet and infrastructure. Therefore, they can’t deliver reliable and affordable electricity to their customers, let alone deliver electricity to those that currently must rely on inadequate alternatives to electricity. Overall, fewer than half of the utilities in Sub-Saharan Africa recover their operating costs, resulting in GDP losses as high as four percent in some countries.

Improving the performance of national utilities and greening their power generation mix is a prerequisite to lowering the costs of supply, thus expanding electricity access to those currently unelectrified, usually lower-income and often remote households. 

In that effort — and this a critical second point — West and Central African countries need to look beyond their borders and further integrate their national utilities and grids to other systems in the region. The region has an abundance of affordable clean energy sources — hydropower in Guinea, Mali, and Cote d’Ivoire; high solar irradiation in the Sahel — but the regional energy market is fragmented. 

Without efficient regional trade, many countries are highly dependent on one or two energy resources and heavily reliant on inefficient, polluting generation sources, requiring fuel imports linked to volatile international oil prices.

The vision of an integrated regional power market in countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is coming a step closer to reality thanks to an ambitious program of cross-border interconnection projects. If countries take full advantage of this grid, the share of the region’s electricity consumption traded across borders would more than double from 8 percent today to about 17 percent by 2030. Overall, regional power trade could lower the lifecycle cost of West Africa’s power generation system by about 10 percent and provide greener energy by 2030. 

Third, electrification efforts need to be open to private sector investments and innovations, such as renewables like solar energy and battery storage, which have made a tremendous impact in enabling access for millions of poor and underserved households.  Specifically, off-grid solar systems and mini-grids have become a proven reliable way to provide affordable modern electricity services, powering homes in rural communities, healthcare facilities, and schools.

Burkina Faso, which enjoys one of the best solar radiation conditions in the region, is a successful example of leveraging the transformative impact of solar energy and battery storage. With support from the World Bank, the country is deploying solar energy to power its national grid, as well as mini-grids and individual household systems. Solar power with battery storage is competitive in Burkina Faso compared to other technologies and its government was successful in attracting private sector investments to support this technology.

Last, achieving universal electricity access will involve significant commitment from political leaders, especially developing policies and regulations that can attract high-quality investments.  

A significant step in that direction was achieved at the World Bank’s 2020 Annual Meetings with a commitment to set up the Powering Transformation Platform in each African country. Through the platform, each government will set their country-specific vision, goals and metrics, track progress, and explore and exchange innovative ideas and emerging best practices according to their own national energy needs and plans. 

This platform will bring together the elements needed to bring electricity to all in West and Central Africa and help attract new financing.

Over the last 3 years, the World Bank has doubled its investments to increase electricity access rates in Central and West Africa.  We have committed more than $7.8 billion to support 40 electricity access programs, of which more than half directly support new electricity connections. These operations are expected to provide access to 16 million people. The aim is to increase electricity access rates in West and Central Africa from 50 percent today to 64 percent by 2026.

However, World Bank’s financing alone is not enough. Our estimates show that nearly $20 billion are required for universal electrification across Sub-Saharan Africa, aligning with calls to quadruple power investment to meet demand, with about $10 billion annually needed for West and Central Africa. 

Closing the funding gap will require mobilizing traditional and new partners, especially the private sector, which is willing to invest if enabling conditions are in place, as well as philanthropic capital, that can fill in the space in areas not yet commercially attractive. The World Bank is ready to play a catalytical role in leveraging new investments. 

This is vital as less than a decade remains to reach the 2030 SDG7 goal of ensuring electricity for all through affordable, reliable, and modern energy services. As headlines worldwide focus on soaring energy prices in the developed world, we cannot lose sight of the vast populations in Africa that still cannot access basic energy services. This is the true global energy crisis.  

Related News

• Electricity Forum News

• Renewable Energy News