Future power systems: how Africa’s grids test the WEF’s enablers framework
The World Economic Forum’s framework for future power systems sets out five enablers for grids that are flexible, secure, affordable and resilient. Set against the IEA’s latest forecast and what Africa’s financiers and mine operators have told ENN this year, the African test is whether new generation reaches the customers who pay for it.
Africa’s installed power capacity reached 260GW in 2024, 68.8GW of it clean energy and around three-quarters of it fossil-fired, according to Electricity Reinvented, the paper on future power systems that the World Economic Forum published with Accenture at its Davos meeting in January. The same paper puts Africa’s share of global clean energy investment at around 2%, against about a fifth of the world’s population, and states that “energy access remains the overriding priority in Africa”, where it counts 600 million people without electricity.
Electrification moved to the top of the agenda when COP31 opened in Antalya on 9 November, with Türkiye launching a non-binding 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge for electricity to make up at least 35% of global energy demand by 2035, against about a fifth today on IEA figures. The Forum’s Future of Power Systems initiative expects electricity demand to grow 2.5 times faster than overall energy demand through 2030, and its enablers framework sets out five interdependent enablers, each with its own building blocks, that it says power systems need in order to become flexible, secure, affordable and resilient.
Its October report with Accenture and the Clean Energy Ministerial, Powering Growth, turns that into conditions for investment, from credible tariffs and independent regulators to guarantees and blended finance that share the risks private investors struggle to carry, and counts more than 2,500GW of generation and storage waiting in connection queues, drawing its examples from the US, the EU, the UK, Australia and Uruguay.
Rooftop and off-grid solar bought by households and businesses is behind the IEA’s 54% upgrade to its sub-Saharan Africa renewables forecast in Renewables 2026, published on 6 November, which expects 42GW of distributed systems between 2026 and 2031 and attributes the shift to unreliable grid power and persistent shortages, while limited finance and insufficient grid infrastructure hold back utility-scale projects.
“Additional generation has limited value if the electricity does not reach customers reliably,” Marième Travaly, IFC’s Regional Industry Director for Infrastructure and Natural Resources in North, West and Central Africa, told ENN. In Zambia, where more than 90% of in-country generation sits in the south and most of the large mines that use it are in the north, First Quantum’s Country Director Anthony Mukutuma told ENN that “exploration decisions must not be made on the basis of proximity of the grid”.
Nigeria’s Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, said on 9 November that procurement has begun on a $2bn East-West Super Grid to complement a national grid in which some lines and facilities are more than 50 years old. In Tanzania, where installed capacity stood at 4,646MW against a 2,271MW peak when the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project was commissioned in August, President Samia Suluhu Hassan pointed to the newly energised 400kV Chalinze-Dodoma line as evidence of how quickly latent demand appears once power arrives.
Mukutuma sees the generation side in Zambia already moving ahead of the mines it serves. “The energy sector in Zambia is moving at a rate faster than the mining industry, in terms of increasing generation capacity,” he said.
Images: Kim Becker
