Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Providing reliable electricity is complex and expensive: large power plants can be billion-dollar investments. As a result, a growing number of cash-strapped developing countries are signing power purchase agreements with electricity providers to shift investment costs to the private sector.
The US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is considering a change to its current ban on financing projects with a nuclear reactor, a relic holdover policy from its predecessor agency OPIC.
For the past 18 months, CGD has incubated the Energy for Growth Hub, a new initiative dedicated to the idea that energy should be an enabler, not a barrier, to human potential. The Hub is now ready to fly on its own.
Mobile phones provide a useful insight for energy: not that you can leapfrog a modern power system, but that most energy use happens out of sight. In fact, less than 1% of the energy needed for a smartphone is used by the phone.
While energy advocates have mostly focused on the 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa that lack access to electricity at home, the region’s power shortages are especially damaging to firms. Companies across the continent suffer from unreliable power supplies, affecting productivity, employment, and growth.
Eighteen months ago, we blogged here about Kenya’s superfast electricity connection rate. The country had grown from 27 percent to 55 percent access in just three years, putting themselves on a fast-track toward near universal access by 2020. While this lightning progress was exciting, new research suggests that aggressive expansion may come with downsides, too.
Anyone who follows this blog knows I’m a big fan of the US electrification initiative Power Africa because of its national security, economic, and developmental benefits.
Africa’s energy deficits are well known. But it’s very rare to hear policymakers talk openly about nuclear power on the continent.
In the push for electricity access in the developing world, many policymakers are trying to figure out where on-grid or off-grid solutions make the most sense. My new paper asks 39,000 consumers in 12 African countries about their energy use and demand. The big takeaway: African consumers don’t view grid versus off-grid as a binary question.
Fuel subsidies are bad for the planet, expensive, and often regressive. With new, high-frequency price data researchers explore why they’re also so hard to kill.
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