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Zimbabwe provided one of the most impressive delegations to the 2019 Africa Energy Forum, where new energy and power development minister Fortune Chasi explained how a government committed to reform was working hard to reach its target of 11GW electricity generation capacity, from around 2GW now. After years of chaotic or no planning, Chasi reported that “an integrated resource plan is under way”, while licensing procedures were being eased for private power investors.

As Africa enters the 2020s, issues of climate change and sustainability have gained greater urgency even if not everyone agrees on the way ahead. With desertification and water shortages affecting many regions, Africa has joined the stop-start transition away from a carbon-based economy; the percentage of on- and off-grid renewables is growing in the energy mix, with solar, and to a lesser extent wind, taking a lead, promoted by large public procurement projects and ever more private initiatives.

The number of big multilateral financing facilities being put in place for electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) projects across Africa points to a recognition that, after decades when installing generation capacity was the central preoccupation of governments and donors, the infrastructure for delivering power to the people has often been ignored. Historically, large-scale T&D infrastructure has, of course, been put in place. But the momentum to modernise and expand grids has, in most jurisdictions, lagged in recent decades.

Find ways to store the electricity generated from solar, wind and other renewables, and these technologies may cease to be ‘intermittent’ sources of power – a game-changer that is expected to transform Africa’s electricity supply industry in the next decade or two. “Storage will make a lot of difference to the shape of the grid,” observed Gravitricity managing director and co-founder Charlie Blair, predicting that networks will emerge “without big spines and instead more of a nodal system”.

A significant market is emerging across the continent for renewables-based commercial and industrial (C&I) energy projects. In all but a handful of markets, the talk is of a potential that will soon be measured in gigawatts, rather than the usual dozens (at most) of megawatts of an established business. As Kenya-based Astonfield Solar’s chairman Ameet Shah puts it, the technology is still in its early days – as in some cases is the quality of its delivery to clients – but the C&I industry will reach lift-off even before the ‘transformational’ 24-hour storage becomes the norm.

South Africa needs coal as a major employer as well as an indispensable source of baseload, while Kenya’s leadership seems committed to installing 1.05GW at Lamu, and other projects are being developed from Morocco to Madagascar. Coal remains a key element in many countries’ energy mix, while generating levels of controversy only exceeded by nuclear as the world transitions to an eventual post-carbon economy. Thus probably the feistiest session at this year’s Africa Energy Forum debated the future of coal.

It may be symbolic that, beyond the state-run grid, Tanzania provides an enticing opportunity for innovative investors to build businesses in marginalised communities with aspirations to move beyond energy poverty. Tanzania has been a pioneer in the sub-Saharan off-grid revolution, where mini-grid operator Jumeme and other innovators have been able to build their businesses. Germany’s Redavia last year began operating its first two mini-grids, supported by InfraCo Africa.

Twenty years ago, a new publication was launched to fill a gap in FT Energy’s global map: African Energy created in April 1998 as a monthly report, meant the Financial Times subsidiary could claim to cover the world; previously, its stable of newsletters and online products had largely ignored Africa. African Energy opened its account with news that financing for the planned $3.5bn Chad-Cameroon pipeline was falling into place. That controversial project was eventually built, while others have taken longer to leave the drawing board.

Gas-fuelled power projects have an important role to play in Africa, according to African Energy Live Data’s figures. The Africa-wide database lists 313 operating gas-fired plants, with 84,226MW of installed capacity; another 39 plants are under construction (with total 32,933MW capacity) and 156 are planned (66,921MW). The majority are utility-scale facilities supplying national grids; Live Data records 206 of these as operational (75,487MW), 33 under construction (28,754MW) and 119 planned (58,061MW).

With all the talk about leapfrogging the grid, it is surprising how little the possible implications have filtered through to the debate about tariffs. The Africa Investment Exchange: Power and Renewables conference in London on 15-16 November saw a lively discussion about potential grid ‘disruptors’, in particular low-cost, small-scale renewable power sold directly to consumers. The technology has huge potential to provide clean power to households and industry at a fraction of the cost of the grid.

The global campaign to provide vulnerable and marginalised communities with sustainable and affordable energy has gained considerable momentum in the past decade. The Africa-EU Energy Partnership’s target of giving electricity access to 100m more Africans by 2020, set in 2010, was exceeded by mid-decade. The United Nations’ Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) initiative should achieve its target of pulling 1bn people worldwide out of energy poverty by 2030; some 500m of these people live in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Skype line to a group of power developers in Nairobi is cut abruptly. When it returns, African Energy asks whether the interruption was caused by political turbulence; it surely can’t be due to generation shortfalls? (Kenya is building up a surplus of generation capacity). Of course not, chorus participants at the Nairobi end: it’s down to transmission and distribution (T&D) problems. Across sub-Saharan Africa, investment in transmission – including modern high-voltage lines – has lagged as planners and investors have focused on generation.

Once the right economics and policies are put in place, the pace of advance made by the most successful renewable energy types, including wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV), can be exceptionally fast. Extrapolations of continent-wide trends by the new African Energy Live data (Live data) suggest that sustainable technologies can replace polluting (and, increasingly, often costlier) thermal solutions which include the diesel, heavy fuel oil and charcoal that hundreds of millions in sub-Saharan Africa have come to depend on.

Société Tunisienne de l’Electricité et du Gaz (Steg) has launched an international tender for the construction of a gas-fired power plant in Mornaguia in the northern governorate of Manouba, near Tunis. Bids for the project, which should comprise two industrial turbines with a gross capacity totalling 550-660MW at ISO baseload conditions, are due by 8 March. The power plant should be commissioned before the summer of 2020, according to the tender notice issued on 16 January. Steg seeks to sign a separate maintenance contract at the same time for 12 years from the expiry of the guarantee period of the equipment and infrastructure.

Some African governments specialise in grandiose statements about mega-projects that will drive the continent’s electrification or achieve some other transformational goal. In many cases little happens, but the mega-project provides a useful symbol of rapprochement between two states. The Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline (TSGP) planned by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo and Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika is one example still prominent on the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa project list.