Not a bad start. With DC all the way to Norway, they could of course play a colossal game of battery charging across the continent.

Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5b on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East. More than 100 of the generators, each fitted with 1000s of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.

2017-06-19: Off-grid solar is making inroads in Africa.

Many Western entrepreneurs see solar power in Africa as a chance to reach a large market and make a substantial profit. This is a nascent industry, which, at the moment, represents a small % of the electrification in the region, and is mostly in rural areas. There’s plenty of uncertainty about its future, and no guarantee that it will spread at the pace of cell phones. Still, in the past 18 months, these businesses have brought electricity to 100Ks of consumers—many of them in places that the grid failed to reach, despite a 100-year head start.

2018-09-10: It would also green the Sahara

Canada sized Solar and wind farms could make the Sahara Desert green again with 2x the rain. With enough solar panels, albedo increases enough to cause lots of extra rain.

2023-05-13: If solar is so cheap, why hasn’t it scaled in Sub-Saharan Africa? Because do-gooders are lying.

Scaling Solar continues to be paraded as an example that the MDBs can use billions of dollars of ODA to catalyze trillions of private sector investments needed to fund sustainability goals. The facts tell a different story. Every $1 of concessional financing catalyzed only 28 cents of private sector financing. Scaling Solar’s official messaging masqueraded a heavily subsidized development finance program as a private sector driven solution. Governments canceled existing solar contracts citing Zambia’s purportedly unsubsidized low tariffs. Developers left the space because the deal economics no longer made sense.Beyond distorting market signals, the messaging perpetuated the myth that solar can be funded by the private sector in lower-income countries. Solar isn’t scaling in poor countries. The cost of capital is too high.

The IFC could take 3 actionable steps to return to the original vision of the Scaling Solar initiative:

1. Acknowledge that expanding clean power access will continue to rely heavily on concessional DFI lending and guarantees to reduce the cost of capital.
2. Transparently report explicit and implicit subsidies.
3. Innovate to enhance power contract transparency, empowering market participants to scrutinize pricing drivers and prevent the accumulation of large undisclosed public debts.

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