Power Africa

The mobile phone revolution is allowing countries to skip landlines, prompting many observers to assume countries might also skip building an electricity grid and jump right to distributed home energy systems (e.g., here and here). New disruptive technologies are exciting and alluring, especially in sub-Saharan markets where the unmet infrastructure needs are huge. After all, if you can charge your smartphone with a rooftop solar kit, then who needs power plants and a grid?

To meet clean energy and energy access goals, we need to rapidly scale electricity through transparent, competitive power…

Reliability-adjusted cost of electricity (RACE) estimates the cost of industrial tariffs for grid power plus the additional cost…