President Joe Biden wants to build out the clean energy industry in Africa as part of a long-term strategy to help the region mitigate and adapt to the worst effects of climate change.
That is a pillar of the U.S.-Africa summit that started Tuesday in Washington. The event brought together leaders from 49 of Africa’s 54 countries to discuss climate, financial, health and political challenges faced by the region. Biden will host the group Wednesday at the White House.
The African continent is one of the most vulnerable regions in a warming world, even as it has contributed little to the carbon emissions driving climate change. The Biden administration is particularly focused on addressing food insecurity across the region — which is one of the most impoverished areas of the world — because it is being exacerbated by climate change.
“We’re dealing now with a massive food insecurity crisis; it’s the product of a lot of things,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told African leaders gathered at a convention center in downtown Washington on Tuesday. “As we all know, it’s the product of climate change … and so, we have an immediate emergency response, especially as we’re looking at historic droughts in different places, we’re looking at famine conditions in a number of countries.”
Biden has pledged $1.1 billion to support natural resource conservation, climate adaptation and a just energy transition in Africa since taking office.
That includes about $300 million through fiscal 2023 to support renewable energy projects. Some of the funding will be used to bolster a new U.S.-Africa Clean Energy Network to connect clean energy companies to market opportunities that will increase access to reliable clean electricity. On the first day of the summit, leaders announced a new $25 million loan to build the first solar power plant in sub-Saharan Africa, in Malawi.
The United States will support an effort to increase the number of women in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa participating in the green energy industry. It will give out more than $4 million in grants to support a number of clean energy projects, including a biomass power plant in Cote d’Ivoire, a clean hydroelectric power project in Sierra Leone and a battery energy storage technology project in Zambia.
About 600 million people in Africa don’t have access to electricity, and one of the African Union’s main priorities entering the summit is to accelerate efforts to meet growing energy demands without sacrificing economic growth. For some countries, that means tapping all forms of energy.
Africa is still at a pivotal energy moment, where many countries are just discovering the extent of their natural gas resources, Emmanuel Marfo, chair of the Environment, Science and Technology Committee in the Ghanaian Parliament, told E&E News in a briefing. So, if western nations want to encourage a shift away from fossil fuels, there also needs to be a conversation on how to compensate those countries for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, he said.
“It comes down to the discussion about stranded assets. If we really want to move away from the dependence on fossil fuel, then the question is what happens to the prosperity or the development and industrialization of these countries that could have depended on the exploitation of their fossil fuels.”
Not all African countries have fossil fuels to tap. But they do have great potential for building out solar and other renewables to power the continent’s development, according to the International Energy Agency.