A recent FT article argued the importance of electric vehicles in Africa, as an essential component of a global strategy to limit emissions and combat climate change. A predictable response from readers was that this was wholly impractical on the grounds of both affordability and the current inadequacy of African power systems. Healthy scepticism is fine but it should not obscure the fact that it is in an African and global interest to leapfrog to an electricity based transport technology. Electric vehicles can be part of the solution for Africa’s power systems, not just another problem.
Vome Aghoghovbia-Gafaar writes[1]
on “Why Sub-Saharan Africa’s teeming cities need electric vehicles.” The
response from FT readers was sceptical, making the seemingly obvious points
that Africans will not be able to afford expensive Teslas, that even developed
countries are struggling with the infrastructure electric vehicles (EVs)
require, that Africa largely lacks adequate power supplies, and that better
mass transit systems are perhaps a more immediate transport priority for Africa’s
mega-cities like Lagos or Dar-es-Salaam.
Healthy scepticism is fine,
but there is a wider case for EVs in Africa, and it builds on the almost
universal imperative to move rapidly towards low carbon sources of electricity
as a substitute for fossil fuel use. The big issues for this target in Africa
are first the absence of affordable electricity, and second the unsustainability
of clean economic development without it.
The global imperative is that
unless we can achieve a transformation of the power sector in Africa, which
enables both economic development and a switch to low carbon fuel sources, then
the chances of meeting global emissions and climate targets are very low indeed.
That reality should condition our judgements on the realism of prospects for
overcoming the undoubted obstacles
From my experience the
biggest single barrier to resolve the first issue – affordability – is likely
to be the very high component of fixed cost, which especially in poor
communities has to be spread over a small number of kWh. The only way to get
the unit cost down is by much higher volumes, but these are often hard to
achieve.
Africa has some of the
highest unit costs and prices for power in the world, as well as many of the poorest
people. This combination makes it particularly difficult to build the volumes,
and the economies of scale, which are ultimately the only ways of bringing
these costs down.
For rural electrification, involving some of the poorest communities, the World Bank has estimated kWh costs could be brought down to about 22c per kWh with the achievement of reasonable load volumes and a 40% load factor. Neither of these conditions is easily met, however. Moreover much of Africa is well endowed with solar power, but the management, even of small systems with intermittent energy, is problematic in the absence of storage or back-up. And similar issues can be expected in urban systems.
Electric vehicles help with
both problems. It is intrinsically a large load, and with a high percentage of
EV batteries connected to the grid when the vehicle is not in use, eg in the
evening, this creates significant opportunities to improve load factor,
substantially reducing the unit costs to other productive uses of electricity,
and to cooking. The latter in particular offers a big environmental benefit. Electricity can substitute for firewood or charcoal, whose continued use has
disastrous consequences for deforestation as well as a large carbon
footprint. The scale of emissions from these unsustainable sources is comparable to that of diesel used as a transport fuel.
As an idealised solution,
therefore, promotion of electric vehicles in Africa can provide a classic
synergy in terms of reducing emissions, providing clean energy and assisting economic
development. In itself it reduces harmful emissions, a global CO2
benefit, as well as localised city pollution. The key to the economics is that if
the vehicles and their batteries are already there, some of the essential but
very expensive storage requirement of renewable power systems is already in
place.
The additional load permits
more effective management of renewable systems and much higher load factors. Both
these gains would have a big impact in reducing unit costs, and this in itself
could create a virtuous circle of more affordable power, more productive use of
that power, higher incomes and improved affordability, feeding back into further
economies of scale, cheaper power, and less polluted cities.
Measuring the benefits
In an earlier
post[2],
I discussed the benefits of eliminating traditional and unsustainable use of
firewood or charcoal for domestic cooking. The potential reduction in CO2 emissions
is huge. Charcoal use is widespread in the developing world and its elimination
for a billion people (a conservative estimate of potential) could reduce global
emissions by as much as 700 million tonnes or about 3 % of the total. The
nature of the emissions externality is that the benefit accrues to the global
community as a whole, not just to Africa. But the scale, with any reasonable
valuation of carbon, is huge
The contribution from
eliminating oil dependent road transport in Africa could be of a similar order
of magnitude, with a similar global benefit.
How realistic is all this?
As electric vehicles take an
increasing market share, some of the barriers are likely to fade away. Scale
economies will bring down manufacturing costs and prices to consumers, along
with a new generation of vehicles made in China or India, probably with more
basic specifications but significantly lower costs. Electric vehicles combined
with electric cooking could, as suggested above, mitigate the technical and economic
problems in developing the power sector
The biggest barrier remains the
quantum leap required of African power sectors, partly in terms of governance
but even more in terms of the sheer amount of capital required. Help from
development aid budgets will be a necessity. But, as I have suggested above,
failure in this task should not be considered an option. The global economic cost
of climate catastrophe, or the cost of expensive carbon extraction from the atmosphere
(which we shall almost certainly be forced to adopt) could make African electrification
a bargain form of carbon reduction for wealthier nations.
…………..
References
Energy
and Transport in Africa and South Asia. Katherine A. Collett, Maximus
Byamukama, Constance Crozier, Malcolm McCulloch February 2020
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