The costs of providing access to electricity in selected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and policy implications

Petra Valickova and Nicholas Elms

Energy Policy, 2021, vol. 148, issue PA

Abstract: Access to reliable energy is recognised as a key driver of human and economic development. Despite this, today only 45% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa has access to electricity. Sustainable Development Goal number 7 calls for ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for everyone. Yet, at the current rate of progress, less than 60% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa will have access to electricity by 2030. In view of the urgent need to accelerate the rate at which electricity access is provided, we developed a detailed least-cost optimisation model to identify the incremental costs of providing access for the group of 12 countries in the Southern African Power Pool. Our analysis shows that achieving universal access by 2030 in the region, would lead to an incremental generation cost of between 5.2 and 11.4 US$2018 billion, depending on the consumption of newly connected households. This corresponds to an increase of system generation costs by 4–8% and the levelized incremental cost of supply to the customer of 108–116 US$2018 per megawatt hour. This is lower than what a typical household pays for poor alternatives to electricity, such as kerosene for lighting, implying that policy makers should accelerate access.

Keywords: Electricity access; Power sector modelling; Development; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 O55 Q40 Q41 Q47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421520306467
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:148:y:2021:i:pa:s0301421520306467

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111935

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().