Take Nigeria. The most populous country in Africa, half of its 180 million citizens presently lack access to electricity. As is common across the continent, the country is not only poor but experiencing a demographic boom, and some forecasts estimate that by the middle of this century it could have a population of more than 400 million people. What is more, tomorrow’s Nigerians will rightly expect a higher standard of living than their forebears of today. But with fossil fuels that wouldn’t just prove catastrophic, it likely isn’t possible.
Which means the only way Nigeria, by 2050 possessing a larger population than the United States, will be able to provide universal access to electricity is solar power. Such a transition ofers the opportunity to leapfrog some of the world’s wealthier countries, enjoying cheaper energy with barely any of the sunk costs associated with extensive national grids. The same holds true for other developing countries which will similarly see rapid population growth alongside rising energy demand.
Instructive of how renewable energy may difuse across presently low-income, energy-poor countries is the precedent set by the mobile phone. At the turn of the millennium there were a quarter of a million active mobile phone contracts in Nigeria, far fewer than the 600,000 landline connections. If you said then that access to a phone would be commonplace within two decades – in the absence of costly new infrastructure and with even the spread of electricity remaining mixed – you would have been laughed at.
And yet today Nigeria has 150 million mobile phone subscriptions – far exceeding the 200,000 fixed phone lines in active use. Meanwhile half the country has access to the internet. Importantly, this high level of connectivity has developed in a diferent manner to wealthier countries across Europe and North America. Rather than copying the sequence of infrastructure seen there – adopting the landline and then the mobile phone – Nigeria simply leapfrogged the former technology and adopted mobile internet en masse.
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