A slam dunk in Washington: my week ahead of PAS27

By Damon Thompson, Commercial Director at EnergyNet

Every autumn I fly to Washington to catch up with the partners behind the Powering Africa Summit, and I came home from this year’s trip more certain than ever that our 12th edition next March is the place to be.

Never has there been a better time to be running PAS, and I say that as someone who has been making this trip since our very first summit in 2015. A year ago, with USAID and Power Africa gone, it was a tough time for all of us. PAS26 in March was a huge success, welcoming more than 400 attendees from 32 countries and 120 speakers, with far more of the private sector in the room than the year before.

“Money is starting to flow,” NRECA International told me, and they’re winning more work from USTDA to prove it. Everywhere I went the talk was of US agencies, from USTDA and MCC to DFC and US EXIM, putting more money into energy in Africa. Music to my ears.

With the Department of Energy firmly behind us, my meeting there took me through their priorities for the continent, a list that takes in clean cooking and LPG, energy access, nuclear, geothermal, transmission and distribution, and gas. What’s more, they’re working with us to bring Secretary of Energy Chris Wright back to our opening day after his turn as our Guest of Honour this spring, when he shared the stage with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Rajiv Shah. This time he hopes to tell us about his trip to Kenya for the IEA’s Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, and with clean cooking with LPG so firmly on the DoE’s agenda, I suspect he’ll have plenty to say.

This year I did something radical and changed hotels, swapping the corporate places in the centre for The Potomac Hotel on the Wharf, the old Salamander under a new name, with views over the Potomac River and not a whiff of the corporate about it. My taxi swept me past the monuments in glorious sunshine on the way to meetings every morning, and I never tired of it.

Kwame Onwuachi’s Dōgon, the restaurant in the hotel that honours Benjamin Banneker, the man who helped survey the boundaries of DC, was the one blot on the copybook, because even as a guest in the building I couldn’t get a table. You need to book at least three weeks ahead, it turns out. Consider yourselves warned.

Old friends seemed to be round every corner, with the Rockefeller Foundation and Mission 300, NRECA International and Tetra Tech all on my dance card, while DFC and MCC, both part of the US government line-up at PAS26, will be bringing senior speakers again. Our sponsors are coming back in force too, with Sun Africa, our Summit Sponsor at PAS26, already signed up for the same role next year, and Petrodex, our Lead Sponsor, returning alongside Genesis Energy, Alliant Insurance and Allied Talent Partners, as are Nant Power, with their gas project in Sierra Leone, and Endeavor Energy, with their gas power plant in Ghana.

Among the new faces were Mayer Brown, who told me they liked how focused the summit is, and White & Case, who bring a breadth of power project experience from right across Africa. Norton Rose Fulbright made for a lively meeting, as did TechMet, whose work in critical minerals could hardly suit us better after a summit that put the subject at the heart of the programme. I even got to talk PAS with GE Vernova, our sponsor partners at AEF for several years. Small world, the energy business.

One evening I had dinner with Michael Jordan, and before you ask, no, not that one, though this Michael Jordan, formerly of Power Africa and a good friend of EnergyNet ever since, made the evening every bit a slam dunk (forgive me, I couldn’t resist). We started with drinks on the Moonraker rooftop, looking across the river to the Jefferson Memorial, and moved on to Pink Tiger on the Wharf for excellent Asian food and a proper catch-up.

I kept my final day for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and three hours there vanished in what felt like thirty minutes. Chuck Berry’s Cadillac alone is worth the trip, and the P-Funk Mothership is worth a second one. The Green Book, the guide Black motorists relied on to travel safely through segregated America, was the sobering counterpoint, and I’d urge anyone coming to PAS to see it for themselves.

If you are serious about developing power and infrastructure projects in Africa and securing the funding to build them, PAS is a must-attend summit. See you in Washington next March. Just book Dōgon now.