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Renewables, not coal, way out of energy poverty in Africa

Coal is “essential to meet the scale of Africa’s desperate need for electricity,” says Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest publicly traded coal company. However, a new analysis published by the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) challenges these claims, finding instead that the falling costs of renewable power is the way out of energypoverty in Africa.

It’s a good old-fashioned “he said/she said” debate, but one that is going to pop up more and more as we continue to divest ourselves from fossil fuels.
Coal’s Only Arguments

In a piece written in August on the Advanced Energy For Life website — a site sponsored by Peabody Energy — Frank Clemente, PhD, wrote that “coal is essential to meet the scale of Africa’s desperate need for electricity.” In the end, Mr Clemente could only resort to baselessly attacking renewable energy proponents, painting us as elitists who can’t see the real issue from our “well-lit and air-conditioned eyries in New York and London.”

“Despite these debilitating conditions, some in the developed world insist that Africa must focus on intermittent and expensive renewables like wind, essentially ignoring the plight of the current generation,” wrote Clemente, adding that “many Westerners criticized the World Bank’s $3.8 billion loan to help build a coal power plant in South Africa, even though the Medupi plant would help stabilize the electricity grid in poverty-stricken surrounding countries as well.”

In so painting us as liberal elitists, Clemente shows clearly coal’s only real argument — and it’s a poor one at that. Not only are renewables a cheaper, more efficient energy option than coal — an energy technology that would require phenomenal resources to get off the ground, compared to relatively simple solar and wind technologies — but they help “the current generation” as well as future generations. Mr Clemente seems to subconsciously realise the flaw in his argument when he writes that we are somehow ignoring the “plight of the current generation” of African citizens — how well he must know what coal will do to future generations of African citizens.

Source: Cleantechnica