Why Africa Hasn t Kickstarted Its Renewable Energy Boom zerohedge.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from zerohedge.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Why Africa Hasn’t Kickstarted Its Renewable Energy Boom Africa has a solar energy potential of as much as 1,000 GW and wind potential of 110 GW, not to mention 350 GW in hydropower potential and 15 GW of geothermal potential. And yet, all this huge potential remains largely untapped, even though solar and wind farms are getting so cheap, they are said to be on par with coal in some parts of the world. The situation will likely be surprising for those who only follow upbeat headlines, but people with some knowledge of how renewables actually work and how businesses in general work will not be surprised by the state of affairs in Africa and other developing regions of the world.
Africa’s massive renewable energy potential is often hailed as a solution to the world’s energy problem, but the continent lacks the most important ingredient of all: infrastructure
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The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables By Irina Slav - Mar 03, 2021, 4:00 PM CST
The blame game for the massive power outages in Texas last month continues. The dominant argument is that renewables had an ignorable part to play in the crisis, with natural gas and coal the indirect culprits due to their reduced availability resulting from infrastructure freezing and diverting supplies for heating purposes.
Yet what the real problem actually lies in, not just in Texas but everywhere where energy demand is growing, is grid reliability and resiliency. When it comes to the U.S. electrical grid, it is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses, Westhaven Power, a California utility, told Oilprice.