Access Post Summit Report

Harare requires exports of concentrate to stop on 1 January and has made written commitments on plant timelines a condition of trading until then. Two facilities are still under construction. Producers have asked for the date to move, and the answer will decide who is exporting in February.

Installed capacity now stands at 4,576MW, of which 841MW is solar, and Kariba's usable storage has roughly doubled in a year. Almost all of the additional units drawn last year went to the mines, and Open Access is now the mechanism deciding who is served first.

The national compact signed under Mission 300 commits Harare to reaching every household by 2030, and sets out how far the utility must move to do it. Private distribution and retail licences were due in the first quarter of this year, opening a market ZETDC has held alone.

Green Hybrid Power, a vehicle established by Zimbabwe's Intensive Energy Users Group, has taken preparatory work as far as a US$4.4 million Afreximbank facility allows. Energy minister July Moyo has said he hopes to close the financing by October, with panels floating on the reservoir alongside the hydro station rather than replacing it.

The Zambezi River Authority held a market sounding session for the 2,400MW scheme at the Africa Energy Forum in June, described as preparation for the formal procurement process. Zambia and Zimbabwe have each committed $220 million from their 2026 budgets, and a second Zambezi scheme is now in prefeasibility behind it.

The grids are synchronised, all fourteen continental countries are connected and two national utilities have already moved into surplus by buying across a border. What has not been tested is whether a market with no new generation behind it can keep clearing. The West African Power Pool and the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority now […]

Abuja has issued licences on the condition that the holder builds domestic processing capacity. Four ministries convene in November alongside investors who will want to know how many of those conditions have been met, and what happens to a licence where they have not. Nigeria issues no mining licence without a plan for a local […]

Accra has moved on the commitments in its national energy compact, and the African Development Bank now describes a pipeline of that scale gathering behind the reforms. The sequencing matters more than the total, because compact reforms are what convert a pipeline into projects that reach financial close.