Africa’s Renewable Leapfrog Is a Dangerous Mirage

Africa's renewable “leapfrogging” is a dangerous myth that ignores the continent’s urgent need for reliable fossil-fuel energy to drive development.

A report titled ‘African Energy Leadership: The Case for 100% Renewable Energy’ was published last week, claiming that “Africa could save between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by transitioning to a fully renewable energy system by 2050”. This shift, it asserted, would also create up to 5.4 million new energy sector jobs, significantly more than the 3.2 million jobs projected “under current fossil fuel trajectories”. This report by the environmental NGO (ENGO) Power Shift Africa in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS-ISF) was launched at the Bonn Climate Conference (SB62).

In recent years, the concept of “leapfrogging” over fossil fuel development to craft a 100 % renewable energy system in Africa has gained traction: bypass oil, gas and coal, build “clean” solar and wind farms instead and align with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C global warming target. Proponents point to “dramatic cost reductions” in solar and wind, enormous “theoretical potential” and massive economic benefits with “millions of new green jobs”.

And yet for all these glossy numbers, the physics, economics and on-the-ground realities tell a far more sobering story. The leapfrog narrative is less a roadmap to prosperity than a vapid fig leaf for Western moral satisfaction, an exercise in a hypocritical carbon colonialism.

Leapfrogging is an Empty Notion

The concept of Africa leapfrogging to a 100% renewable energy system, bypassing conventional fossil fuels, defies the fundamental constraints of physics and economics. This has been incisively outlined by Mark P. Mills in his paper on “magical thinking” among promoters of renewable energy. Mills argues that renewables like solar and wind, despite cost declines, are inherently limited by their low energy density and intermittency, requiring vast land areas and expensive storage solutions to achieve reliability – challenges magnified in Africa’s context, where industrial-scale energy demand is critical for modern economic growth.

Solar and wind’s capacity factors (20–30% in optimal conditions) cannot match the consistent, high-density output of fossil fuels, which are essential for powering heavy industry, urban infrastructure, hospitals, water treatment plants and the like. Economically, the massive capital required for grid upgrades, battery storage and transmission interconnectors – estimated at $100 billion annually for universal energy access by 2030 – far exceeds Africa’s current 2-3% share of global renewable investments. Expecting renewables alone to meet Africa’s energy needs ignores the physical reality of energy density and the economic impracticality of scaling intermittent sources without reliable backups. These facts render leapfrogging a fantastical notion detached from the continent’s developmental imperatives.

Environmental zealots in the West would deny Africa the very infrastructure that historically lifted their own societies out of poverty. For instance, a major pollution problem afflicting developing countries is the domestic combustion of solid (bio)fuels. According to the World Health Organisation, 4.3 million deaths annually are directly attributable to indoor air pollution. If poor Africans remain stuck on traditional biomass cookstoves instead of gaining access to cheap propane gas or cheap and reliable grid electricity (fuelled by natural gas or coal), this annual toll will only rise. In rich countries, households moved from dung, wood and crop residue fires to coal, to oil, to gas and electricity – each step up the energy ladder improving wellbeing.

Today, those building blocks are blocked or actively removed by the climate zealots working via ENGOs and captive institutions of the climate industrial complex like the World Bank and the IMF. Instead of reliable electric grids, Africa is offered solar cookstoves and humanitarian sentiment – an insult in the guise of charity. As Vaclav Smil has conclusively demonstrated, no country in the world has developed without the dense energy available from fossil fuels. Coal, oil and natural gas have powered urbanisation, industrialisation and agricultural productivity.

What do African Leaders Want?

It is not possible to generalise across the vast continent, but some facts stand out. Africa is the world’s second largest and second-most populous continent (after Asia in both aspects). Unlike Asia, Africa remains largely mired in poverty and much of the population has limited access to energy. Africa’s 54 countries, three dependencies and one disputed territory (Western Sahara) accounted for just over 18% of the world’s population in 2020 but its share of global primary energy consumption amounted to only 3.4% in 2022. Poverty and poor access to energy, one suspects, are not just coincidences but reflective of a more general malaise. But what are its governments doing about it?

The African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change was established as an alliance of African member states to represent the interests of the region in international climate change negotiations with “a common and unified voice”. In an interview in June 2022, the Chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) on climate change, Mr Ephraim Mwepya Shitima of Zambia, said that “COP27 should be about advancing implementation of the [UN IPCC’s] National Determined Contributions (NDCs), including adaptation and mitigation efforts and delivery of finance to enhance implementation.”

In short, Mr Shitima seemed to represent Africa as a supplicant for climate finance:

Africa is poor and responsible for a relatively small share of global carbon dioxide emissions yet suffers from the effects of climate change. Surely the developed countries, who are responsible for most of the historical emissions, need to financially assist Africa in adapting to climate change in any equitable outcome. For its part, Africa will pursue a “low carbon” and “sustainable” development trajectory.

This position, however, is far from representing a common and unified voice for the continent. In the lead up to COP27 (held in Egypt in 2023), Amani Abou-Zeid, the African Union Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, said that African countries advocated for “a common energy position that sees fossil fuels as necessary to expanding economies and electricity access”. N.J. Ayuk, Executive Chairman at the African Energy Chamber, is even more forthright:

Africans don’t hate oil and gas companies. We love oil and today we love gas even more because we know gas will give us a chance to industrialise. No country has ever been developed by fancy wind and green hydrogen. Africans see oil and gas as a path to success and a solution to their problems. The demonisation of oil and gas companies will not work.

Younger, more dynamic African leaders such as Abou-Zeid, Ayuk and Jusper Machogu find it not only infeasible but immoral for their governments to leave their fossil fuels resources in the ground in return for “climate finance” from virtue-signaling Western governments and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank to invest on unreliable solar and wind. Africa needs all the coal, oil and gas it can exploit, to achieve rapid economic development for their aspiring populations. Asia, and now President Trump’s American “energy dominance”, are their models for fossil fuel-based economic development, not a hypocritical, deluded EU that has begun backpedalling from the costly “energy transition” that their own citizens are rebelling against.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright believes that fossil fuels are the solution to the widespread lack of energy access in Africa, dismissing the challenge posed by climate change and calling too much emphasis on addressing it “destructive”. Speaking to a roomful of African officials and business people at a Powering Africa summit in Washington earlier this year, Secretary Wright said Western countries such as the United States have for years been “shamelessly” telling Africa that coal is bad and not to develop it. He said:

That’s just nonsense, 100% nonsense… Coal transformed our world and made it better, extended life expectancy and grew opportunities, and coal globally will be the largest source of electricity for decades to come. That’s not a policy, that’s not a desire, that’s just a reality.

As the Net Zero and “energy transition” narratives get increasingly threadbare, global investments into fossil fuel projects are surging. Global banks significantly increased their financing for coal, oil and gas projects last year, according to a new report by climate advocacy groups including the Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club, marking a reversal at a time when lenders are backtracking on climate pledges. According to the recently published report, banks fossil fuel financing was 23% higher than the previous year.

A spate of oil and gas projects are now being financed in Niger, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Uganda and Kenya. In March, under Secretary Wright’s watch, the US Export-Import Bank (Exim) approved a direct loan of up to $4.7 billion to support the world-class Mozambique LNG project in Cabo Delgado, marking a significant milestone in the project’s revival after years of uncertainty.

Enough With the Technobabble

What is it about Africa that attracts Western climate zealots to offer policy advice on energy and environment? Is it that the West suffers from a Rousseau-esque angst over modern life and hankers after a mythological state of nature in Africa? Does the myth of the noble savage compel Westerners who regret their modern industrial norms to practice carbon imperialism over the world’s least developed continent? The “do as I say, not as I did” syndrome which afflicts Western intelligentsia is applied with particular insistence to African policymakers, given that the major Asian developing countries depend less on international development aid and finance for their domestic investments.

Africa is not an anthropological museum for Western virtue, and the energy “leapfrogging” myth is a neo-colonial fable dressed in technobabble. Africa should climb the same energy ladder that raised the West out of an energy-starved, perennial poverty of the pre-industrial era.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.