16328421 – Victoria falls from the air in the afternoon Zimbabwe
Ellen Fungisai Chipango, University of Johannesburg
Zimbabwe is one of the African countries that hopes that renewable energy technologies will help address their energy problems. Around 42% of Zimbabwean households are connected to the electricity grid.
The country has huge and diverse potential for renewable energies. The sustainable energy portfolio could include solar, water, biomass and, to a limited extent, wind and geothermal energy. Zimbabwe presented a national renewable energy policy in 2019. The policy aims to obtain 16.5% of the total generation capacity (excluding large hydropower) from renewable sources by 2025. That number will rise to 26.5% by 2030. These are some of the goals that she presented to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and they are promoted in her climate policy.
Policy makers, NGOs, the private sector and some researchers take it for granted that renewable energy technologies are the answer. They could meet the growing energy needs of Zimbabwe and achieve universal access in the long term. At first glance, that’s appealing – but the devil is in the details.
My research explored how renewable energy technologies are understood and how they can alleviate energy poverty in Zimbabwe.
I found that they are only one piece of the puzzle and that other pieces are usually missing. Regardless of how well-designed and efficient technologies are, their effectiveness is related to the country’s political economy.
Socio-economic and political factors keep conventional energy inaccessible to the poor. My study shows that they can do the same with renewable energy. These factors can actually exacerbate inequality. Adding renewable energy technologies to existing structures in the energy sector is like pouring new wine into old wine bowls.
Research
I analyzed how policymakers and implementers have highlighted some aspects of energy poverty and not others. This has led to renewable energies being touted as an antidote to energy poverty.
The following political and economic factors emerged from the data. They explain why renewable energies are not a panacea for energy poverty:
The politics of energy and technological dependence: China has become a source of funding for major energy projects in Zimbabwe. This applies to both coal and renewable energy generation.
What is seldom recognized is the distorted nature of this relationship. China has a global dominance in renewable energy technologies. For example, the Chinese manufacturers of solar cells and modules quickly dominated global sales. And the country’s wind turbine manufacturers are facing significant exports.
The influx of cheap and inferior Chinese goods into Zimbabwe did not help. This includes electrical devices such as solar panels.
Energy as a tool of accumulation: For China, Zimbabwe’s energy poverty is an opportunity for its economic growth. The unequal distribution of economic power keeps energy in Zimbabwe poor. Accumulation occurs on one pole and energy poverty on another. To illustrate this, consider a poor rural household: would you risk investing in a solar panel and battery knowing the equipment might be of poor quality?
This applies not only to households, but also to countries. Since most of the technological resources and expertise in the renewable energy field are concentrated in China, they would have to be relocated from this region of technological dominance to Zimbabwe. This makes Zimbabwe more technologically dependent.
It is a vicious circle where the mighty country invests in these technologies, sells the product in the name of fighting fuel poverty, plows back the profit as a new investment, and starts accumulating again.
This is made possible by the close relative of accumulation: public-private partnerships. For example, national renewable energy policy promotes public-private partnership and private participation through tenders for off-grid technologies. With private sector interests at the center of infrastructure planning, public-private partnerships are likely to replicate the energy inequalities that served the powerful and ignored the economically weak.
Renewable energy technologies would work if somehow they did more for the poor than the mighty. In reality, the opposite is true.
First, the private partners (independent electricity producers) are not ordinary citizens, but the economically powerful and politically connected.
Second, the flawed nature of the tendering system cannot be overstated. It is usually associated with corruption and political interference.
In addition, this elite group tends to benefit from state intervention.
In order to meet the concerns of investors and developers, projects in the field of renewable energies are exempt from customs and general excise tax regulations. This is based on laws such as the Value Added Tax Act and its regulations. For investors and developers, the goal is to increase supply despite the resulting socio-economic problems and inequalities – and so that they benefit from it.
Go forward
Renewable energy technologies are politics in a different way. The way forward is to question the political and economic foundations of this technology.
Renewable energy technologies are not a completely independent variable in the development process – they depend on socio-economic and political relationships. If these are not addressed, universal access to energy through renewable energy technologies remains a dream.
Ellen Fungisai Chipango, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Johannesburg
This article is republished by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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