An economic appraisal of solar versus combined cycle electricity generation for African countries that are capital constrained

Saule Baurzhan () and Glenn Jenkins ()

Energy & Environment, 2016, vol. 27, issue 2, 241-256

Abstract: Many public electric utilities in Africa are capital constrained. In this paper, an economic analysis is carried out to investigate the efficiency of investing in solar photovoltaic power plants, as an option for on-grid power generation. A comparison is made in terms of the economic net present value as well as greenhouse gases savings if the same amount were invested in a combined cycle thermal power generation. The results show that economic net present value is negative for solar photovoltaic plant, whereas it is a large positive value for the combined cycle plant. In addition, the combined cycle plant would be two times as effective in reducing greenhouse gases as the same value of investment in solar photovoltaic plant. Even with solar investment costs falling, it will take 9–18 years of continuous decline before solar generation technology will become cost-effective for most of Africa.

Keywords: Electricity generation; greenhouse gas mitigation; cost–benefit analysis; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0958305X15627546 (text/html)

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:sae:engenv:v:27:y:2016:i:2:p:241-256

DOI: 10.1177/0958305X15627546

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Energy & Environment
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().