Electricity Stupid.

For 25 years, since I left MA DEP to start my own used electronics repair, export, and recycling company, there has been a blind spot in the entire environmental movement.

It has not been about waste.

It has not been about externalization.

It has been about electricity.

The growth in access to and consumption of electricity worldwide has been extremely well documented by GapMinder (Hans Rosling), the international monetary fund, carbon monitoring / clean energy, big petroleum, the airlines, USA AID, the State Department, and every industry that manufactures anything that consumes electricity. 

The screenshot above, from the World Bank Data page, is remarkable for two reasons. 

1. The percentage of the African population with access to electricity doubled from 25% to 50% in twenty years.

2. That population itself was doubling between 1960 and 1980, but mostly leveled off between 1990 and 2020. 

This was a matter of people moving to where the electricity is - urbanization - rather than wait for Africa's electric grid to come to them. And urban African families are smaller for reasons you can figure out on your own, especially if you pay urban rental rather than free farm.

In the early decades, most of the new electricity came from International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank (WB) loans, which had two low-growth slowdowns - countries not repaying interest (let alone principal) on the loans, and running out of low-hanging-fruit rivers which could feasibly become hydroelectric dams (not resulting in flooding of cities like Kumasi Ghana, for example). 

Every time a new hydroelectric dam came online, electricity demand would hockey-stick upward because people had ACCESS TO ELECTRICITY.

But what consumes electricity? It doesn't come out of a running faucet. If blackouts and brownouts today mean yesterday's investments cannot meet demand... that means people in places like Africa OWN and USE electrical appliances. Duh?

So given the population graphs and electric usage graphs above, and the slowdown of IMF and World Bank projects, how is the increasing demand for electricity being met?

Diesel Electric Generators, made in Chiiiiiina

I don't quite know how to cite the Google AI response to my question, but given all the IMF and WB data publicly available, my bet is that this is close.

So in the past, the hockey-stick increase in electricity consumption per household in Africa was fueled by IMF and WB hydroelectric dam loans, and today the same growth (top chart) is only explained by Chinese made diesel generators, what is the solution?

Secondhand solar panels. A very big "elective upgrade", similar in scale to CRT desktop monitor replacement and flip phone to smartphone upgrade, is around the short corner.

As of May 2021, there were 11.8 million generators in Sub-Saharan Africa, including 6.5 million diesel generators and 5.3 million generators in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2023, the Africa diesel generator market was valued at $6.49 billion and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.8%. 

Diesel generators are used in many industries, including:

• Mining
• Healthcare
• Commercial
• Oil and gas
• Construction
• Manufacturing
• Telecommunications and data centers
• Utilities 

In western Africa, generators account for over 40% of the electricity consumed annually, which requires considerable quantities of fossil fuel.