Why Does the Media Ignore Grid-Scale Solar?
Last month, I went to a talk by someone I surprisingly hadn’t heard of before. Yosef Abramowitz is an entrepreneur whose company, Gigawatt Global, just constructed and commissioned the largest solar power plant in East Africa. The 8.5 MW solar PV plant is 60 kilometers east of Kigali, Rwanda. It came online in February 2015 in record time – just one year after the power purchase agreement was finalized – and at its $24 million budget.
Yosef is a fascinating, driven entrepreneur. But, through my usual perusing of the energy trade press, I hadn’t come across him. I had heard vague references to a solar plant in East Africa from conversations, but quick Internet searches hadn’t turned anything up.
I just did a slightly more systematic search and confirmed that Abramowitz’s story hasn’t been widely covered.
For example, if I search on “Rwanda solar” on Greentech Media – my go-to site for industry news – I turn up three stories about off-grid solar. One focuses on Ignite Power and two on Off-Grid Electric (here and here). Greentech Media (GTM to insiders) has only an oblique mention of Gigawatt Global’s project with a link to a story in the Guardian.
When I searched on “Rwanda solar” at the Wall Street Journal I was told, “Sorry, no results found.” The New York Times has two hits since Gigawatt Global’s installation came online, but one describes solar dryers and pumps for farmers and the other discusses solar lamps. No mention of Gigawatt Global.
In general, my read of the energy press is that it’s disproportionately focused on the off-grid sector in the developing world. Why aren’t projects like Gigawatt Global’s getting more coverage?
Here are some possible explanations:
- It’s only 8.5 MW. True, this is a pretty small plant relative to other grid-scale solar projects. For example, South Africa has a 175 MW plant, and the US has 17 grid-scale solar PV plants over 100 MW.
But, I don’t think that explanation works for two reasons:
- Gigawatt Global is delivering orders of magnitude more solar power compared to the off-grid solar companies. For example, Ignite Power, which netted an entire article from GTM, provided 1,000 households with solar systems in 2015. I could not find any discussion of how big these systems are, but they’re described as powering, “some lights, a radio and a television, and cell phones.” Generously, let’s assume this is a 100W system. This means that Ignite has installed .1 MW, less than 1/50th of Gigawatt Global.
Powerhive, a company that installs solar mini-grid systems in rural Kenya, and has been in three GTM articles in the past three months, currently has installations in four villages amounting to 80 kW. That’s 1/100th the size of Gigawatt Global, and Powerhive has been around for several years.
These comparisons are based on capacity, not energy. I’m guessing that central stations deliver more energy per watt, since they don’t rely on individuals keeping the panels in good repair or putting them out when the sun is shining. A former Berkeley PhD student has found that some solar home systems aren’t outside in the middle of the day because farmers don’t want them stolen while they’re in the fields.
Sure, these companies are projected to grow, but Gigawatt Global should as well.
- 8.5 MW is a huge plant for Rwanda. Total installed generating capacity in Rwanda was less than 150MW in 2015, and Gigawatt Global’s installation increased it by more than five percent. This is like increasing the US’s solar capacity by a factor of 13.
It’s in Rwanda. This might explain why the Wall Street Journal isn’t covering the sector in general, but the other outlets reported on the off-grid sectors there.
- It’s not a Silicon Valley company. Abramowitz is Israeli and his company is based in the Netherlands. It may simply be easier for reporters to bump into people who work at local companies, so this might explain a US-centric focus. If this is true, grid-scale solar in Sub-Saharan Africa will get more attention as US-based companies expand in the region.
- It’s grid-scale solar, not distributed. I think this is the most likely answer, but it’s useful to reflect on why this preference might exist. I can think of two reasons:
- It’s more exciting to report on a new kind of electricity system.
I could have asked the question why Kenya’s proposed Lamu coal power plant, which is poised to nearly double the country’s existing generating capacity, hasn’t been covered. But, fossil fuel plants have been built for decades, and, if we’re serious about addressing climate change, we can’t continue building them in the same way.
But, the leap from a fossil fuel driven grid to off-grid solar may be too far.
Projections suggest that only 10 percent of the growth in residential electricity consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa over the coming decades will be driven by off-grid consumers. The majority of new demand will come from existing users in grid-connected areas as well as migration to these areas and grid extensions. If we bring in commercial and industrial, this share goes up considerably.
- The poor, rural consumers targeted by off-grid solutions are seen as more deserving than the beneficiaries of the grid.
This is misleading for several reasons, which I’ve written about before (here, here and here). For one, we are likely wrong if we think that the only way to use electricity to help the people who currently don’t have it in their homes is by putting a solar panel on their roof. The rural poor need a lot of things, like good jobs, good health care and good education for their kids. Electricity is an important input into many of these things and doesn’t necessarily have to be at someone’s home to provide those benefits. As I argue here, things like solar lanterns and solar home systems don’t currently provide even the services households seem to want, let alone support a robust commercial and industrial sector.
There are certainly examples of the press covering the benefits of the grid. For example, The Economist had a recent piece that was largely about grid electricity. But, the coverage is disproportionately of the off-grid sector.
I’m not against solar home systems or solar lanterns. My concern is that those technologies are getting a disproportionate share of the media coverage relative to the potential benefits they can provide. If policymakers follow the media’s lead and emphasize off-grid solutions, we’re overlooking much higher impact on-grid solutions. And, if the ambitious entrepreneurs and funding follow the media, we’re ignoring the most important part of the picture.
To my mind, this is a huge omission. I hope we see more coverage of companies working on grid-scale solutions in the months to come.
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Catherine Wolfram View All
Catherine Wolfram is the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley. Before leaving for government service, she was the Program Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environment and Energy Economics Program, Faculty Affiliate of the Energy Institute at Haas from 2000 to 2023, as well as Faculty Director of the Energy Institute from 2009 to 2018. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard. Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and restructuring in the US and UK. She is currently working on several projects at the intersection of climate and trade. She received a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989.
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There’s certainly regional biases–just look at the difference in coverage of terrorism in Europe vs. Africa. On the other hand, the story isn’t about “grid” vs “non-grid.” The scale of the technology matters. 8.5 MW isn’t 300 MW. Such a project can be connected at lower non transmission voltages. Look at the discussion about the IDSO vs ISO–the scale of grid control matters. The ability of consumers to invest in smaller scale “grid” projects makes a big difference in how these are perceived.
Your post figures that the “most likely answer” is that “it’s grid-scale solar, not distributed”. Distributed solar fits more neatly with a “small is beautiful” and “act locally” ethos. But more important keep in mind that this is Africa and news coming from Africa is going to be filtered through readers’ and editors’ preconceptions about Africa.
When people think about electricity in Africa they are going to be thinking about USAID’s PowerAfrica program and its prominent statement “Two out of three people in sub‑Saharan Africa lack access to electricity.” And they are going to think about Africa’s reputation for weak, corrupt governments and institutions, that must be circumvented — mobile phones rather than landlines, M-Pesa rather than ATMs and credit cards, microfinance rather than banking (even though microfinance was invented in Bangladesh). That part of Africa’s reputation may be unfair or incorrect, but IEA’s 2015 World Energy Outlook still cites an electrification rate of only 32% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
I guess it just seems easier to connect individuals to solar generators than to connect the individuals and the generators each to the grid.
The author could have added to the title the following: “…and developing countries.” U.S. environmental/renewable energy reporting is:
1. U.S. centric (and Germany gets thrown in)
2. Is technologically focused and biased with limited attention to policy); and
3. demonstrated no experience with or interest in developing country circumstances or issues (China and India excluded and there one sees little on the key issue: setting the enabling policy, regulatory and investment environment necessary for major scaling of clean energy investment)
The real issues that merit reporting are not so much an 8.5 MW technical system but the investment environment and all that was done to get it in place. It is much more than a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). It requires macro-level investment arrangements (foreign exchange repatriation, legal recourse, dispute resolution processes) and electricity sector reforms (incumbent utility reforms, regulatory stability, assurance of payment for power, e.g., can the utility collect from customers including government state owned institutions when it is grid connected), etc.
See Power Africa to learn about the underlying work facilitating such projects: https://www.usaid.gov/powerafrica/rwanda
These are the very difficult issues that drive the penetration of any new technology and rarely are they recognized, understood and reported. Developing countries. Policies. The phantoms of climate change/renewable energy reporting.
A rapid increase in awareness is sorely needed if critical reporting is going to emerge on the most significant policy issue over the next three years: which carbon pricing policy will be emerge among major developing countries–carbon tax or cap and trade? Which “fits” better in an environment of weak institutions and corruption.
Has a grid-scale solar company ever bought advertising from a mainstream media outlet? That might explain the relative lack of attention it receives in the mainstream press. Too cynical?
Catherine,
Have you seen this report from Brattle on the relative efficiency of grid-scale solar compared to rooftop?
http://www.brattle.com/system/publications/pdfs/000/005/188/original/Comparative_Generation_Costs_of_Utility-Scale_and_Residential-Scale_PV_in_Xcel_Energy_Colorado's_Service_Area.pdf?1436797265
Tim
Another nice post. Here is an example from DTE.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/03/27/dte-plans-10-acre-solar-array-detroit/82251592/