Claims that Asia and Africa can easily achieve a clean energy transition at low cost using renewables and storage alone are bunk
di Seaver Wang
“A global transition to 100% renewable electricity is feasible at every hour throughout the year and is more cost-effective than the existing system… Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will.”
So goes a mantra common to much of the environmental Ngo and advocacy community, particularly in Europe and the Anglosphere. It’s half true: recent years have seen remarkable cost improvements for wind and solar energy and battery storage, and these technologies will undoubtedly supply large shares of future electricity generation. Policymakers, especially in Europe and North America, now possess many potent clean energy options to deploy in support of climate efforts.
But often, advocates take recent cost improvements for wind, solar, and batteries to ideological extremes, seeking to frame renewables and storage as the only permissible technology options for future energy systems. Furthermore, they frequently extrapolate these preferences to distant corners of the world.
Some argue renewables and storage are already sufficiently cheap to enable poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve their economic development goals while leapfrogging any further use of fossil fuels. Others go so far as to assert that countries like South Korea or Japan ought to phase out their substantial domestic clean nuclear generation capacity and focus future energy policies exclusively on new wind, solar, and storage technologies. To support these claims, advocates often cite a group of academic energy system modeling papers that appear to tell them exactly what they want to hear: that humans across the globe can begin affordably transitioning to electricity systems that use renewables and storage alone.
For countries like Norway, Iceland, or New Zealand, blessed with small, wealthy populations and an abundance of hydropower or geothermal energy, transitioning to fully renewable electricity systems may be both feasible and cost-optimal. But many countries—especially densely populated and/or developing nations in Africa and Asia—are not so fortunate. Based on first principles alone, the claim that most of these countries can easily achieve a clean energy transition at low cost using renewables and storage alone deserves rigorous scrutiny.
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