Africa is shifting its focus from building clean energy projects to building the institutions, markets, and regulatory systems needed to deliver them at scale, experts say. This challenge is emerging even as clean energy reaches a historic milestone globally, with renewables generating 34% of the world’s electricity in 2025, overtaking coal’s 33% share.
Building Stronger Institutions
The bottleneck in transitioning to cleaner energy has shifted from technology to the systems supporting it, including funding. Overcoming such obstacles is vital for securing access to power for the 600 million people in Africa who are yet to be connected. Former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, announced a new $285 million initiative to strengthen clean energy industries in emerging and developing economies.
The initiative will invest in strengthening market design, regulatory capacity, technical expertise, and industry institutions, areas increasingly viewed as essential for attracting private investment and accelerating the use of renewable energy. It reflects a growing consensus that Africa’s energy transition is constrained less by a lack of renewable resources or viable technologies than by the institutional capacity needed to turn those advantages into financially viable projects and electricity on the grid.
Many projects remain delayed by weak market design, limited grid planning, slow permitting processes, and fragmented regulatory systems. Experts say that what has been missing is not the potential, but the institutional infrastructure and capabilities to unlock it.
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
