Africa's solar surge

 From The Energy Mix

The hrowth rate hasn't just been 60% per annum for the last year.  It's average 60% per annum since June 2021.

China’s export data suggest that Africa could soon see a spike in solar energy generation, with record imports of photovoltaic panels driving a 60% overall import increase across the continent.

“South Africa and Egypt are currently the only countries with installed solar capacity measured in gigawatts, rather than megawatts,” writes global energy think tank EMBER, in a new report.

“That could be about to change.”

EMBER tracked Chinese customs data for solar panels being exported to African countries. The data showed that exports could support record growth rates for 20 countries across the continent from June 2024 to June 2025. The rate for Algeria was stunning, with incoming solar gear increasing 33-fold during that time. Zambia, Botswana, and Sudan rose eightfold, sevenfold, and sixfold, respectively, while Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Benin, Angola, and Ethiopia all more than tripled.

Overall, Chinese exports to Africa rose 60% to deliver a potential capacity of 15,032 megawatts (MW). Solar panel imports across the continent—excluding South Africa—have now tripled over the past two years from 3,734 MW to 11,248 MW.

“These solar panels will provide a lot of electricity,” says EMBER. “The solar panels imported into Sierra Leone in the last 12 months, if installed, would generate electricity equivalent to 61% of the total reported 2023 electricity generation, significantly adding to electricity supply.”

The year’s imports to Chad could similarly generate 49% of that country’s total energy generation in 2023. Solar’s share of energy generation could increase by 10% in Liberia, Somalia, Eritrea, Togo, and Benin, and 5% in 16 other countries.

EMBER says these percentages may be inflated because total electricity generation is often underestimated in sub-Saharan Africa, and the think tank’s Electricity Data Explorer does not include non-grid generation sources like the diesel generators that are widely used in many of these countries.

The destinations for China’s increasing exports across Africa have changed since the continent’s last surge of solar imports in 2023, which was largely driven by South Africa. The rise in solar capacity could replace diesel generation, which in turn might reduce oil imports for many countries. EMBER estimates that a solar panel will pay itself off in savings from reduced oil spending within months.

For example, a 420-watt solar panel that sells for around US$60 in Nigeria would produce 550 kilowatt/hours (kWh) in a year at a cost of 14 cents/kWh. Compare that to spending $60 for diesel, at a price of 66 cents per litre (at the time of EMBER’s analysis), an expense that would yield only 275 kWh of electricity, “implying a payback time of just six months” for the solar panel.

“Even with the recent diesel price rises in Nigeria, diesel is twice as expensive in many other African countries, meaning an even shorter payback [in other African countries].”

A limitation in the analysis is that it’s based on Chinese customs data for solar panels exported to Africa, EMBER writes. Exports may not stay in the African country they are exported to if they are then reshipped to another country, perhaps to dodge tariffs. Even when panels stay in that country, their installation timeline is far from certain without clear data from the importing country. That information was often unavailable for the countries in the study.

However, similar exports to Pakistan were mostly installed and led to a recent surge in solar capacity in that country. With many similar drivers for solar uptake in the two regions, EMBER suggests Africa can look forward to similar results.

(Read EMBER's report here)

 

 The decline in solar panel costs has reached the point where even poor countries want it.  Solar is rising exponentially in Africa.   If you have diesel off-grid or substitute generators, solar fits in easily.  You only need to run the generators at night, instead of all the time.   Storage costs are falling faster than solar panel costs.  In a couple of years, Africa, and other developing areas, will be installing storage as well as solar.

China isn't just greening its own economy.  It's greening the world's.

 

A basic income in South Africa

From Resolve Global Health

The streets and even the highways are empty, except for the police and military patrols. An eerie stillness has engulfed South Africa’s economic heart, Johannesburg.

It is March 27, 2020, and the country has embarked on one of the world’s strictest covid-19 lockdowns, confining most people to their homes, initially for three weeks. The country, already under a national state of disaster because of the virus, deploys the army in residential areas to enforce the shelter-in-place order.

Under the country’s apartheid government, South Africans of colour were forcibly relocated to segregated and underdeveloped areas called townships. In Johannesburg’s largest Black township, Soweto, self-trained photographer Thando Makhubu had been running a small business. “All our money was from event photography, but then lockdown came, and there was no work,” he says.

Still, Makhubu believed then that covid-19 would pass. “I wasn’t really worried,” he remembers. “We were just watching the news and trying to understand what’s going on.”

Soon, the three weeks of lockdown turned into five. By May 2020, Makhubu had joined the ranks of the roughly three million South Africans who became unemployed within the first three months of the covid-19 epidemic, according to a national survey by local universities. The research found an almost 20% decrease in jobs during the first three months of the outbreak and nearly half of the respondents reported running out of food during the lockdown.

“My bank accounts were drying up,” Makhubu says. “That’s when I realised that life wasn’t the same anymore.”

Unemployment on the rise

The epidemic worsened an already fragile employment situation. South Africa’s mix of historical racial oppression and poorer-than-expected economic growth has fuelled increasing unemployment in the last three decades. In what the World Bank estimates is the most unequal country in its global poverty database, almost half of working-age South Africans are unemployed, government statistics show.

“We’re looking at [a lot of] people whose probability of getting a well-paid job is almost nothing,” explains Isobel Frye, the director of the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute, on a recent podcast.

The country runs an extensive social grant programme for at least 17 million children and caregivers, the elderly, veterans and the disabled. Still, without social security for the country’s 11.5 million otherwise healthy yet unemployed, these grants often subsidise entire households. Almost one third of the country experiences daily hunger.

Reviving a decades-old idea

In May 2020, South Africa’s hard lockdown eased, and the country—like more than 200 other nations—extended social security protections in response to covid-19. For the first time in South Africa’s democratic history, the unemployed became eligible for a R350 (US$24) monthly grant.

Nearly 10 million people applied for the money in the first six months. More than 90% of the recipients surveyed used the money to buy food, helping increase the number of families who could regularly afford food, according to a 2021 United Nations University working paper. It helped reduce inequality in the country.

“When they announced the grant, the government said you can apply via SMS, WhatsApp or email and said you must just apply once,” Makhubu remembers. “I applied on SMS, WhatsApp and email. I really wanted to get this money and do something with it because I wasn’t receiving anything.”

The grant, which will run until March 2023, has reignited a decades-old debate about whether South Africa can afford a permanent basic income grant. Some of the country’s best economic minds say it can, but it will almost assuredly mean raising taxes.

“We can afford it, but let’s not pretend we can afford it without making sacrifices,” says Michael Sachs, an economist and adjunct professor at the University of Witwatersrand.

At the very least, a monthly basic income grant of R595 ($US41) could halve the number of hungry people, Sachs and others argue in a recent analysis. At most, a cash transfer of R1,300 ($US88) could almost eliminate some forms of poverty while making modest reductions in inequality.

But could it also buy South Africa gains in reducing deadly epidemics of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes and depression? The answer lies buried in the many complicated and hidden ways poverty shapes our health and perhaps even our genes.

Hunger and an unfortunate inheritance

NCDs like type 2 diabetes and hypertension are often associated with lifestyle factors and overconsumption, but too few nutrients early on in life can also play a role.

The number of babies that die before their first birthday in South Africa is nearly five times that in the United States, 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) data shows. Dietitian and University of the Free State lecturer Chantell Witten has studied an important factor behind these deaths: the country’s abysmal rate for exclusive breastfeeding, which makes babies more vulnerable to die from conditions like diarrhoeal disease.

Babies who are not breastfed also have a higher risk of developing type 1 diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, which is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, the American Diabetes Association warns. For the mother, breastfeeding has been shown to lower the risk of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and breast or ovarian cancer.

Although it’s unclear how breast milk protects against NCDs, a 2014 research review posited that it could be epigenetic—meaning nutrition could influence how some genes behave and vice versa, leading to changes that could potentially be passed down through generations . In South Africa, this plays out in a broad context of increasing obesity driven partly by the rise of cheap, high-calorie and high-fat ultra-processed food.

Crucially, hunger may determine whether mothers feel able to breastfeed. As part of a 2020 study published in the International Breastfeeding Journal, Witten interviewed nearly 200 new mothers in poor townships. About 40% lived in households earning less than R2,900 (US$200) a month, and a similar proportion experienced signs of depression.

Witten found that hunger was physically and emotionally painful for these women—something they feared they could transmit to their children through their breast milk. “The minute the mother is aggravated, a baby can feel that—the mums in my study completely internalised this,” she says, describing what women in the study perceived as challenges to breastfeeding babies. “When they were breastfeeding, women would say, ‘I feel hungry. So I'm literally feeding my child my hunger’.”

In some ways, Witten says, the women are right. “Hunger is actually a trauma to the body—it elevates your cortisol, which is the stress hormone,” she explains. “Those stress hormones have been found in breastmilk.” But although cortisol levels in breastmilk can fluctuate depending on the mother’s stress, it is not known what, if any, impact this has on babies.

Still, for many women in Witten’s study, hunger—and their beliefs around it—played a role in their inability to exclusively breastfeed infants. Fewer than one in five women in her research exclusively breastfed their babies for the WHO-recommended six months.

"We live in a country where 95% of households access food through the formal, retail system," she says. "If they don't have money to buy food, we can't expect them to have good nutrition."

The poverty-depression link

By August 2020, Thando Makhubu had received three tranches of the covid-19 grant. The first bought family groceries, but the rest he used to open an ice cream shop out of the family home. The Soweto Creamery now employs five people, and its success garnered Makhubu a mention by name in the President’s February 2022 State of the Nation address.

In the public’s eye, Makhubu has come to represent what might be possible with a small amount of state-provided money in a country with widespread unemployment. “Unemployment isn’t really something I think about—it’s something I see,” he says, sitting at one of the many picnic tables for customers that now dot the family yard.

“Here in the ’hood, we're living in small spaces, we're malnourished, we don't have cars—it's depressing,” he explains. “Some people have lost hope.”

Living in poverty has been strongly linked to an increased risk of depression, says Crick Lund, a professor of global mental health and development at King’s College London. The link, he warns, is more complicated than it seems. The stress of poverty’s harsh realities—hunger, overcrowding, living in more dangerous communities—increases the risk of depression.

But the relationship also runs in the other direction. “If you’re living with depression, you’re more likely to drift into poverty,” Lund says. “You spend more on healthcare, and the disability associated with being depressed means it’s more difficult for you to generate income or maintain an occupation.”

He adds that people who are depressed are also more likely to have other conditions. People living with NCDs are also at an increased risk of depression, according to a 2007 research review in The Lancet.

Pairing cash with care

In South Africa, high unemployment triggers an ​​insidious chain reaction where poverty and hunger drive increased rates of NCDs like diabetes and hypertension. These conditions raise the risk of depression, which means people can struggle to earn an income and are therefore more likely to be depressed.

Still, as a recent review in Nature Human Behavior found, cash transfers like basic income grants improve mental health and wellbeing. Emerging research also suggests that pairing cash with a health intervention, like classes on coping skills, might make for an even more powerful tool for mental health, Lund says.

If this happened alongside a basic income grant in South Africa, it would allow health workers to finally reach a large population of men who might otherwise never set foot in a clinic, unlike women and children, who seek healthcare more frequently.

“There is emerging evidence to support pairing a mental health intervention with a cash transfer to yield interacting economic and mental health benefits, particularly for vulnerable populations like unemployed youth,” Lund says.

Economist Iraj Abedian is a former University of Cape Town professor and founder of Pan-African Investment and Research Services Group. He says the question is no longer if South Africa can afford a basic income grant.

"Often, I hear from different quarters: can South Africa afford this?” he says. “I'll flip it and ask: can we afford not to?”

 Even a very small basic income ($40/month) makes a difference.  Too often, basic income advocates ask for large basic incomes to be paid.  Of course, that would be the ideal.  But it makes paying basic incomes much more costly to the exchequer, which in turn means it isn't introduced.  

I've worked with poor people (I volunteer at an op shop (thrift store)) and I promise you that in Australia, even a few hundred dollars a month would make a significant difference to the real poverty I see every day.  It's time for a UBI, here in Australia and everywhere.  If South Africa can introduce a UBI, then very wealthy nations should be shamed into doing the same.

Omicron highly infectious but maybe safer

 From The Telegraph

The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild.

Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month with Covid-19 symptoms that did not make immediate sense.

They included young people of different backgrounds and ethnicities with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate, she said. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.

“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” said Dr Coetzee, a GP for 33 years who chairs the South African Medical Association alongside running her practice.

On November 18, when four family members all tested positive for Covid-19 with complete exhaustion, she informed the country’s vaccine advisory committee.

She said, in total, about two dozen of her patients have tested positive for Covid-19 with symptoms of the new variant. They were mostly healthy men who turned up “feeling so tired”. About half of them were unvaccinated.

“We had one very interesting case, a kid, about six years old, with a temperature and a very high pulse rate, and I wondered if I should admit her. But when I followed up two days later, she was so much better,” Dr Coetzee says.

Dr Coetzee, who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people – with co-morbidities such as diabetes or heart disease – much harder

“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said.

Jacaranda-lined street in Pretoria

Volunteers receive first doses of experimental vaccine

Covid-19 vaccine may not work for at-risk older people, say scientists

From The Guardian:

Volunteers in Brazil have begun to receive injections of an experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by researchers at Oxford University, AFP reports.

The vaccine, developed together with pharmaceuticals group AstraZeneca, is one of dozens that researchers worldwide are racing to test and bring to market.

Known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, it is already being tested in volunteers in Britain, and was due to start being administered this week in South Africa as well.

The Federal University of Sao Paulo (UNIFESP), which is coordinating the study in Brazil, said in a statement its researchers had begun issuing the first doses on Tuesday to health workers, including doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers, who were deemed to be likely to come into contact with the Sars-CoV-2 virus.

Researchers “began triaging volunteers [on] Saturday ... following the protocols established for the study. Participants must test negative for Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19,” the university said in a statement.

“Starting Tuesday, volunteers with a negative blood test were administered the vaccine.”

Volunteers must be between 18 and 55 years old and work “on the frontline” of the pandemic at the Sao Paulo-UNIFESP hospital, it said.

The vaccine will be administered to 2,000 volunteers in Brazil, while more than 4,000 participants are enrolled in the clinical trial in Britain, with another 10,000 due to be recruited, according to Oxford.

Brazil was selected because it is one of the countries where the virus is spreading fastest. It has the second-highest caseload and death toll worldwide after the United States, with more than 1.1 million people infected and 52,000 killed so far.

Brazil’s acting health minister, Eduardo Pazuello, said on Tuesday the country was close to signing a contract to produce the vaccine domestically.

The last Knysna elephant

The last Knysna elephant
Source: S A National Parks

The Knysna elephants in South Africa were all that survived of the giant herds which once roamed the temperate southern forests of the Outeniqua/Tsitsikamma area of the former Cape Province.

Now a recent report confirms that there is only one elephant left.

A sobering 15-month study on the declining population of the southernmost herd of African elephants has determined only one elephant, a mature female, is free-roaming in the Knysna forest in South Africa.

The analysis—titled And Then There Was One—was recently published in the African Journal of Wildlife Research.

For the study, researchers set up camera trap across the whole elephant range from July 2016 to October 2017 and concluded upon analysis that the female elephant, estimated at 45 years old, was by herself.

"Because elephants move along defined elephant pathways, we placed our cameras on these paths and covered the elephant range evenly, with spaces between camera traps no larger than the smallest range recorded for elephants," one of the study's authors Lizette Moolman, a South African National Parks scientist, explained in an article posted to the park's website.

"In other words, an elephant would not reside in a gap area, between camera trap locations, for the duration of the survey. The cameras were all active for 15 months, and during this time the same female elephant was identified in 140 capture events, always by herself. No other elephants were photographically captured."

Fellow researchers behind the study were shocked to find only one elephant left in Knysna, as the gentle giants historically roamed the area in the thousands.

"The brutal reality is there is no longer a population of Knysna elephants," study co-author Graham Kerley of the of Centre for African Conservation Ecology at Nelson Mandela University, told Business Day. "All the mystique of the Knysna elephant is reduced to a single elephant left in rather tragic circumstances."

While the solitary elephant appears in relatively good shape, Kerley explained to Business Day that she has swollen temporal glands with excessive temporal streaming, suggesting she might be stressed from being alone.

According to the National Elephant Center, female African elephants are social creatures and usually roam in herds with a number of related female adults and male and female offspring.

The maximum lifespan for females is more than 65 years, so the lone Knysna elephant could be by herself for two more decades.

As for capturing her and moving her to other elephant populations, Kerley noted that "would be dangerous for her and we don't know if it would even be of any value to her as she knows the forest and she might not be able to settle into another area with other elephants."

Images of her show that her breasts are undeveloped and her mammary glands are shriveled, meaning she has likely never been pregnant or has not given birth in a long time, according to Business Day. Artificially inseminating her would be too risky to attempt, Kerley said.

"Considering all these factors, the debate about how we have allowed this population to go functionally extinct and how to manage the last elephant is very emotional and very serious as she is a symbol of how we are treating biodiversity as a whole," Kerley told the publication.

[Read more here]

When I read a report like this, it is impossible to contain my contempt for mankind.  If we destroy ourselves and our civilisation via global warming or through the destruction of insect life, our fate will be richly deserved.  Greed, selfishness and folly.  Do we even deserve to survive? 

Renewables just keep on getting cheaper

(Source; click to enlarge)

In Mexico:

Twice in 2016 Mexico held two renewable power auctions that raised significant investor participation. 

The most recent, in September, saw 23 winning bids out of a pool of 57 to build renewable projects worth $4 billion for 2,871 megawatts of new capacity. More important, the average price at the auctions was US$33.47 per megawatt hour, (MWh) 30 percent less than prices from a previous auction in March. In the September auction, 54 percent of the supply was awarded to solar projects and 43 percent to wind farms. 

The March auction drew 69 prequalified bidders and awarded 18 projects with a total of 1,691 megawatts for solar and 394 for wind. The a average contract price was $47.60/MWh

(Source)

In Chile:

According to media reports, Mainstream Renewable Power Ltd. and Empresa Nacional de Electricidad/Chile SA won more than two-thirds of the electricity supply auction in Chile. 

Meanwhile, Solarpack set a new record-low solar bid at 2.91¢/kWh ($29.1/MWh). That beats the 2.99¢/kWh bid a Masdar Consortium provided for an 800 MW solar power project in Dubai earlier this year. 

Mainstream has won rights to supply 3.7 TWh of electricity every year (30% of the auctioned electricity), while Endesa, a subsidiary of Enel, will supply 4.9 TWh (40% of the auctioned electricity). There was a significant correction in tariff in this auction compared to previous one. The average tariff bid in the auction declined 40% to US$47.59 per MWh compared to the previous auction. 

To supply the contracted electricity Mainstream will develop 7 wind energy projects with a total capacity of 985 MW. To achieve this capacity, the company is expected to invest $1.65 billion over the next 5 years. Electricity generated from these projects will be sold at tariffs between $38.8 per MWh and $47.2 per MWh.

(Source)

In Abu Dhabi:

The United Arab Emirates has seen yet another record-breaking solar power tariff bid. Abu Dhabi received the lowest-ever bid for a solar PV project at a shocking 2.42¢/kWh, taking back the title of cheapest solar power project from Chile. 

Abu Dhabi Electricity and Water Authority received a total of 6 bids for the proposed 350 MW solar PV project planned to be built in the town of Swaihan, Abu Dhabi. Out of 6 bids, the lowest ever bid of 2.42¢/kWh has been submitted by the JinkoSolar–Marubeni consortium. The results of the tender are not out yet, as authorities will now evaluate the proposals for technical and economic viability. 

The current bid of 2.42¢/kWh is the lowest so far globally, and by quite a bit — it is shockingly low. This bid is 20% lower than the previous record bid of 2.91¢/kWh submitted at an auction in Chile last month. 

The second-lowest bid in the Abu Dhabi tender was reportedly not much higher, at 2.53¢/kWh, and was submitted by a local firm. These bids also beat the 2.99¢/kWh bid (shocking at the time … and still to some extent) submitted by a Masdar-led consortium for an 800 MW solar PV project in Dubai. 

The Abu Dhabi solar park was initially planned for 350 MW. However, media reports state a possible increase in project size, as bidders were allowed to bid for larger capacities. The final capacity of the solar power park may well increase to 1 GW.

(Source)


Some points:

• These, like South Africa, are mid-ranking developing countries.  Their electricity demand, contrasting with the situation in developed countries, is still growing.
• Solar costs have more than halved in two years.  More than halved.  In two years.
• These prices are already irresistibly cheap.  And they're going to get cheaper.  If electricity demand is expanding, the new generators built are not going to be coal-fired.  They're going to be wind and solar.  In developed countries, it's harder.  Even though renewables are cheaper than new coal, often much cheaper, existing coal power stations look cheap, because they're fully depreciated.  So the switch to renewables is constrained, though it is happening, especially where generation is highly competitive, for example in the USA.  The good news is that most of the coal generating fleet in developed countries is past its design life, and major refurbishment is not worth it.  New capacity (as it already is in the US) will be renewables plus gas, and coal-fired power stations will be progressively retired.
• This means that coal demand has peaked, and that emissions from burning coal have peaked too.  Coal is the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions.  It's very likely that within 20 years there will be no coal-fired power stations.  Anywhere.  And that's without a carbon tax.  Introduce a $30 per tonne carbon tax and coal generators are toast.
• It also means that despite Trump and his gang of climate-denying, oil- and coal-loving cabinet, despite the Republican cognitive dissonance about global warming, the renewables revolution is irreversible.  For a start, it's happening now in developing countries including China, not just rich developed countries.  Second, even in the USA, the switch to renewables is being driven not just by regulation, but by price.  And the states in the "wind corridor" might vote Republican but they're also very fond of their wind turbines and the cheap power they generate.
• These developing countries and the US are installing both wind and solar, even though solar is cheaper, because the two together minimise the storage needed.  For now, the variability of renewables supply will be compensated for by gas.  In future, storage (CSP and batteries) will take the place of gas peaking power plants.  So demand for natural gas prolly hasn't peaked.  Yet.
• The reverse auction (i.e., targeting the lowest not the highest price) is an extremely effective method to slash renewables costs. Are you listening Australia?  Germany?
• I keep on saying this, so I'm beginning to sound like a record (remember them?) with a scratch.  But there are now no technical nor economic reasons  why we cannot aggressively switch electricity generation to renewables.   Global temps are rising by 0.2 deg C per decade.  Even though global CO2 emissions have probably peaked, they're not falling fast enough. We need to stop making excuses, stop listening to the lies of the denialists, and move.

Wind and solar half the cost of coal

From RenewEconomy:

The cost of wind and solar energy has fallen so dramatically that wind and solar plants can now be built in South Africa at nearly half the cost of new coal, according to the country’s principal research organisation.

I've replotted the data on a log scale, to give you a better idea of the trends.  The prices are in constant 2015 Rands.  Note (a) that there is no sign that the percentage trend declines are slowing, (b) that wind which used to be much cheaper than solar now costs the same and is falling more slowly in cost (though still falling) and (c) coal is outclassed.  That disparity in favour of renewables can only increase.

South Africa is not an advanced economy like Germany or the U.S.   We know that wind is under US$30/MWh is the US, with its excellent access to capital, and its longer learning curve.  Yet, even in SA, renewables are substantially cheaper than coal.

Coal is finished.