Over the past two days, under the soft light of a chandelier located in the basement of Marriott, a block from the White House, energy ministers and high-tech founders from across Africa gathered to discuss how best to bring electricity to more than 600 million people on the continent.
Much of their hope comes from a whirlwind of change that President Trump has brought us to foreign policy, including the end of Power Africa, a major initiative that he has supported for a decade. Has Trump abandoned them? Or will the promise of “dominance of global energy” be a boon?
Participants got at least some of their answers on Friday morning. Chris Wright, energy secretary for the new administration, took the stage and gave a passionate speech about climate change concerns not preventing Africa from claiming for fossil fuel development.
“This government doesn't want to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It's a paternal colonial attitude that I can't stand.”
His remarks came weeks after closing Power Africa, which has funded tens of millions of power connections since it was launched under President Barack Obama in 2013.
Africa, like other parts of the world, faces a very important choice. We will utilize fossil fuels that contribute to global warming and build new paths with renewable energy. Wright said Africa simply needs all sorts of energy, including coal, one of the most polluted fossil fuels.
“We've been shamelessly telling Western countries that we don't develop coal, and we say coal is bad,” Wright said. “It's just nonsense, 100% nonsense. Coal has changed our world and improved it.”
And Wright said that climate change is a “real physical phenomenon,” but he won't make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world.
Wright's appearance on Friday was met with approval from the rooong. His comments were consistent with what many African energy developers have been urging for years. They say that sustained energy poverty is the devastation of continental development, and whether it is due to concerns about governance or greenhouse gas emissions, Western slippery to invest in energy projects is similar to suppressing Africa.
Africa's population is growing faster than its current electrification rate. Authorities often support the proposal that clean energy technologies should be chosen to combat climate change, rather than using fossil fuel supplies for their wealthy supplies. Other countries have used fossil fuels for generations to build prosperity.
Other US officials speaking at the summit said Trump is in office and the era of moving away from fossil fuel investments in favor of renewable energy is over.
“When we say 'all the above', you might ask, is that carbon code? And yes, that's the carbon code,” said Troy Phitrell, an official and former ambassador from Guinea's Senior Bureau. “There are no more restrictions on what kind of energy we can promote.”
African executives said in their own speech that they hope they will get more investment and reduce the regulatory hurdles. Akinwole Omoboriowo II, who heads Genesis Energy, a company focused on renewable energy, said that “we cannot wait three years, or even half of that time” to conduct an environmental or social impact assessment on the project.
“People are almost dying without the opportunity to watch TV,” he said. “I think we should think about that.”
Wright's comments left key questions unanswered and did not detail how much the US government will invest in or where it will invest in Africa's energy access. He tries to revive Power Africa, but will he try to change his mission? Can he bring that responsibility under his own division? (Previously, the Power African budget was under the US International Development Agency, which was largely excluded by the Trump administration.)
What he provided was the pro-African message when his boss was plaguing Africans. Trump froze aid to South Africa last month and accused the government of using new land laws to discriminate against white citizens. Many African officials fear that his administration will end Africa's growth and opportunity laws. This is a decades-old trade agreement that allowed 32 African countries to send billions of dollars of goods to the United States tax-free. And in a speech to Congress on Tuesday, Trump made negative references to Lesotho, saying, “No one has heard of it.”
The prominently missing person from the rally was a representative of the American agency that led the African energy initiative. USAID and the US International Development Finance Corporation.
However, the meeting rooms were full of former Power African officials, who questioned whether the Trump administration would convened a follow-through. “The biggest question is whether the US can become a reliable partner when it's just dismantling the main mechanisms for investing in Africa's energy,” said Katie Ody, former deputy director of Africa.
She and others have acknowledged that because of their focus on low-carbon energy, they have targeted what officials often call the “climate change warning industry” as hostile administrations.
But Auth also noted that Power Africa's investment in gas, as well as the sharp costs of renewable energy technologies made these forms of power the quickest and cheapest to deploy in many African countries.
“I don't think they realize that Power Africa is by any means a climate initiative,” Och said. “It was driven by economic viability and driven by US companies,” she said, “If there is, this is the kind of aid encapsulation that this administration would want to do.”
Aside from the planet-warming emissions, gas investments collide with an additional hurdle: a weak power grid. To build more gas-fired power plants, much more electrical transmission lines must be built. This is a key difference in solar that can be built locally on much smaller scales, so it does not necessarily require a vast network of power lines.
Rosemary O'Dour, the top employee of the domestically owned utility Kenya Power and Lighting Company, described the African grid as “old trees that grow heavily from fruit.” Without a major investment in modernisation, and without major subsidies, she said, bringing new power sources online could make them more likely to fail.
