Africa is an emensly large continent. It is big enough that you could put China, India and the USA inside of it with room to spare for the most populous nations of Europe. It consists of 1.2 billion people, 55 countries, hundreds of languages and extreme variations in geography.
However it is not a rich continent. Sub-Saharan Africa has a poverty rate of 41% and 27 of the 28 poorest countries on Earth are there. This has a lot to do with energy poverty where they don’t have electricity in their homes and businesses and are constantly hunting for dry biomass to burn for cooking.
To alleviate these issues, researchers have proposed a transmission grid which stretches from Mali and Nigeria in western Africa, through Niger, Chad and Sudan to Ethiopia in eastern Africa, then through Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and Mozambique before terminating in South Africa at the southern tip of the continent. That is over 10,000 kilometers of transmission lines covering a lot of desert and crossing the Great Rift Valley at least once. That is 40% of the distance around the equator.
The researchers used the EnergyPLAN simulator, developed and maintained by the Sustainable Energy Planning Research Group at Aalborg University, Denmark. This simulates the operation of national energy systems on an hourly basis, including the electricity, heating, cooling, industry and transport sectors. The simulator had been used extensively across African countries and regions before this application, so it is a well tested model and a useful tool to simulate the massive proposal.
They considered several scenarios. It was an iterative process with electric vehicle demand, pumped hydro storage, onshore wind and solar power in varying proportions. Ther were six different scenarios modeled and analyzed between 2030 and 2040 as the targeted implementation years, and with varying mixes of the generation and storage capaciteis in different countries. Three scenarios were single-generation technologies only with onshore wind and concentrating solar power (CSP), while the other three were hybrids of the technologies.
Including battery powered electric vehicles, the study found the total electricity demand to be 700 TWh/yr and 800 TWh/yr for 2030 and 2040 respectively. On an hourly basis, that equates to a power demand renge from 40 GW to 120 GW at various troughs and peaks. The solution modeled all twelve countries for a year of power based on meteorological solar and wind records, and modeled energy storage and flows between countries.
The total cost for all this ranges broadly, from almost US$3 trillion for the CSP-only scenario, to the fully hybrid solution with fossil fuel plants at under US$500 billion. A renewables-only solution with low storage capacities was in the US$1 trillion range.
www.cleantechnica.com/2023/07/24/sub-saharan-12-country-supergrid-proposed-by-researchers