Should Sudan turn to renewable energy?
After Sudan’s political struggle, the country’s infrastructure suffered greatly and was drawn into a debilitating dependency on diesel — is it time to implement renewable energy on a large scale?
by Cristina Conde
Last Tuesday, Sudan’s Minister for Higher Education and Scientific Research professor Sumaia Mohamed Ahmed Abu Kashawa announced that the government is actively working towards implementing clean and renewable energy.
The National Council for Energy Research has been carrying out local and regional projects to spread and support the implementation of policies, technologies and strategies towards renewable energies at lower costs.
After South Sudan became independent in 2011, a civil war broke out, which limited internal growth and subsequently affected infrastructure. Prior to the civil war, South Sudan had the lowest electricity consumption per capita in the world and ranked near the bottom in many global development indicators. Nonetheless, any developments that may have been made in the field during this time were immediately stopped in their tracks. Instead of a long-term electricity infrastructure, a heavy dependency on diesel generators was established. Insecurity and hyperinflation resulted in a significant shortage that led to exorbitant energy costs. The national consumer price index increased more than 2100 per cent between December 2015 and July 2017.
A solution that has been persistently suggested is turning to renewable energy. For one, it would remove the dependency on fossil fuels and secondly, renewable energy has become increasingly affordable. Solar power, for instance, is now cheaper and also more consistent. Another obvious advantage is the cleanliness of renewable energy, which would be particularly beneficial to the Sudan region. A report published in September 2016 revealed that diesel sold in Africa was the dirtiest in the world, with an average sulfur content at least four times higher than that found in any other region (and two hundred times higher than European levels).
This January, David Mozersky and Daniel Kammen published a paper on the United States Institute of Peace, titled ‘South Sudan’s Renewable Energy Potential: A Building Block for Peace’. Mozersky is the cofounder of Energy Peace Partners and the founding director of the Program of Conflict, Climate Change and Green Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Kammen is a professor and chair of the Energy and Resources Group and a professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
They suggested a number of contexts by which to start the transition:
- Individual nongovernmental organisation (NGO) compounds
- Health facilities, such as hospitals and clinics
- Humanitarian operations servicing internally displaced persons camps outside the destroyed regional capitals of Bentiu and Malakal
Humanitarian operations in Sudan have largely depended on diesel, and the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy would permit a focus to the longer-term and its benefits. However, one obstacle that Mozersky and Kammen identify is that international humanitarian fundings generally works on short-term cycles, therefore would not typically allow for large infrastructure purchases such as solar-and-storage systems.
To solve this, innovative financing mechanisms may be required to facilitate this transition. At the moment, international donor governments cover the high energy costs for individual NGO compounds and programs, UN agencia and peacekeeping bases, and POC camps. Installing renewable systems could deal with the high cost of diesel, once the immediate costs of installation were overcome.
The report also includes a number of recommendations intended to help international donors seize the opportunity and exploit it to its fullest. Firstly, it is recommended to assess current energy spending among UN and humanitarian grantees to create more transparency on energy costs and usage in South Sudan, and encourage relief organisations to publish their actual energy supply and maintenance costs on a standard, levelised cost-of-energy basis. Another recommendation is to begin donor-level discussions on existing or new mechanisms to pool funds to help finance renewable energy systems for humanitarian grantees with multiple donors. Additionally, implementing pilot projects to determine the relative economics and payback periods (length of time for diesel cost savings to equal cost of solar systems) for both small and large relief settings. A few others include commissioning independent groups to evaluate the planning issues involved in designing solar-plus-storage energy systems to become the new backbone of clean energy infrastructure as IDPs and refugees gradually move back to the towns.
Renewable Energy
The world now adds more renewable power capacity annually than it adds (net) capacity from all fossil fuels combined. Solar photovoltaics (PV), the most popular form of solar power, accounted for more than three-quarters of new energy installations globally in 2015.
Musadag El Zein’s thesis, from Uppsala Universitet, explores ‘Solar Energy potential in the Sudan’. Solar technology has been identified as the most viable source, despite the fact that hydropower currently dominates the country’s power supply sector with 70% share. Solar radiation is evidently abundant in the region (on average, there is a sunshine duration of about 9 hours per day), and is also free and requires no permission, unlike hydropower for example.
Some of the plans that have been initiated include the installation of 200 solar pumps in the rural areas every year to achieve self-satisfaction of drinking water in areas suitable for solar applications; the utilisation of solar energy in telecommunications to cover airports, railway stations and remote hospitals; the lighting of rural areas at a level of 2 MW every year; and to popularise the use of solar refrigerators by the installation of 300 units per year for vaccines and medicines preservation for human beings and animals.
In present global markets and shares of solar energy, installations of solar energy technologies have demonstrated exponential growth over the last decade. The World Bank states that between 2000 to 2010, there has been an average annual growth rate of around 49%.
At the moment, the Sudanese government allocates a limited budget for Science and Technology, which has had a negative impact on the country’s energy infrastructure. Solar energy, however, has a number of technologies within itself that, if invested into, could be implemented on a spectrum of sizes and costs. After losing the oil-rich South, the necessity to increase energy service levels while other sectors advance (like the industrialisation of agriculture), solar energy would be an adequate response.
Another paper published by the European Union Energy Initiative Partnership Dialogue Facility last year focused on the role of educational technology and its potential to enhance and strengthen higher education in the field of renewable energy in Africa. Notably, it points out that the development of this sector is also dependent on the availability of pertinent and capable human resources. As a result, education is vital to train individuals towards the field of energy.
Educational technology
The aforementioned study focuses on educational technology in the renewable energy field, aimed at higher education lecturers and managers seeking to use eLearning technologies to enhance their education programmes and courses.
This possibility has also been studied by Africa-EU Energy Partnership, titled ‘eLearning for Renewable Energy Higher Education in Africa: Role, Potential and Outlook’. Firstly, renewable energy markets in Africa are identified as being in their early stages; nonetheless, distance education has increased in popularity and accessibility in recent years, due to decreasing costs of technology and a quickly developing technology market.
The study was mainly targeted at higher education lecturers and managers seeking to implement eLearning technologies to enhance their programmes. There are some existing initiatives that could have particular relevance in these circumstances, one being the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), which encourages the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies throughout the Commonwealth’s 54 member states; and another being Pan African E-Network, which is an ICT cooperation platform between India and the African Union to enable access to and sharing of expertise between and India and African states in Tele-Education and Tele-Medicine. The African Virtual University (AVU) started in 1997, with the objective to assist institutions by identifying course demand, providing the technical infrastructure as well as matching students’ demands to the institutions’ offers.
There are some programmes relating to the specific field of renewable energy, albeit very few. These include ‘Renewable energy’ in Algeria’s CDER, ‘Short Courses in Renewable Energy ‘ in Ghana’s KNUST College of Engineering, ‘M.Sc in Sustainable Energy Engineering’ in Ethiopia’s Jimma University Institute of Technology, and ‘Bachelor Environmental Science and Resource Management (ESM)’ in Nigeria’s National Open University of Nigeria.
The study goes on to explore approaches, curricula, and technologies that could be implemented into a programme that utilises eLearning. Learning Management Systems like Moodle could be capitalised on, as well as online meeting systems between lecturers and students, eLecture systems to support the dissemination of video base lectures, and social software such as Dropbox for file management or SlideShare for online presentations.
Developing and implementing educational technologies could address one of the greatest obstacles that impedes the potential of renewable energy: the lack of skilled human capital.
The RECP study put together a set of recommendations of initiatives based on a workshop on eLearning for renewable energy higher education. In terms of content development, eCourses could be created and integrated in curricula, as well as a set of experiments using low cost hardware to support practical teaching through lab exercises, and making use of innovative technologies such as virtual and augmented reality to address the issue of missing renewable energy labs in African universities.
Other recommendations are grouped under infrastructure; awareness, change management and networking; quality and accreditation; eCompetences and skills; sustainability and ownership.
The current climate in Sudan would greatly benefit from the implementation of renewable energy in the country’s infrastructure, as it would remove the weighty dependency on diesel and would also allow the country to develop further in various sectors that are increasingly requiring more energy. By investing in solar energy, as well as recognising the advantages of education (and eLearning technology), Sudan could rapidly educate the human capital necessary to truly capitalise on this source of energy.
