Hydropower, traditionally one of Africa's most important sources of electricity, will rapidly fade in importance and cede its position to solar power. The attractiveness of new hydropower is decreasing fast, both due to the increasing economic competitiveness of solar panels and to the increasingly uncertain effects of climate change on river flows. The majority of new dams proposed across Africa should, therefore, probably never be built, suggests a new study published in Science.
One of the most encouraging stories of the last 15 years has been the dramatic fall in cost of renewable energy and its emergence as a real competitor to existing non-renewable energy sources.
Wind and Solar power are obviously not without their own problems, the largest is that they are intermittent power sources and there is a need to store the energy for days which are cloudy or windless; there is ongoing research in improving battery storage technology for grid-level use and creating carbon-neutral fuels that can be made using renewable energy to meet this need.
But the fact that solar and wind power are so cheap and easily scalable, especially compared to other methods of generating power, is a positive development in the ongoing effort to de-carbonize the energy sector worldwide, although there is still a long way to go before we as a species are truly finished with our dependency on non-renewable energy.