Energy Transition in Africa & its Climate Dilemma with Dr. Rose Mutiso

David & Ed chat with Dr. Rose Mutiso about the tension between energy, climate, and economic development in Africa and the global south. 

They touch on many topics to do with sub-Saharan Africa, including energy production & consumption, electricity and power grids, and the vast economic inequity that still exists between the global north & south.

About Our Guest:

Dr. Rose M. Mutiso is a Kenyan scientist, thought leader, and social entrepreneur. She is the Founder & Executive Director of the African Tech Futures Lab (ATFL), a new institute helping decision-makers across the continent navigate emerging science and technology in energy, climate, AI and digital systems—with clarity, agency, and long-term vision. Previously, she was Research Director at the global think tank Energy for Growth Hub. Rose is also the co-founder and former CEO of the Nairobi-based nonprofit Mawazo (“Ideas”) Institute, which supports early-career African women scientists through doctoral research funding and professional development. Prior to this, she served as a Senior Fellow on energy and innovation policy in the U.S. Department of Energy and Senate. She also writes Kibao, a Substack focused on energy, climate, tech, and Africa.

Show Notes:

(00:15) Dr. Mutiso, Energy for Growth Hub

(00:15) Office of International Climate & Clean Energy - US Department of Energy

(00:15) The Mawazo Institute

(02:17) High Energy Planet podcast co-hosted by Dr. Mutiso

(02:58) Kibao, Substack newsletter by Dr. Mutiso

(09:54) The Economist: Nigeria has more people without electricity than any other country

(15:04) D. Kammen, UC Berkeley professor, energy expert

(24:51) O. Okunbor, former Shell Nigeria country chair

(30:00) TED Talk: The energy Africa needs to develop - and fight climate change

(38:56) High Energy Planet Ep.31-Katie & Rose on the Future of Foreign Aid

(43:36) Degrees Forum (Conference on solar geoengineering)

(47:06) African Tech Futures Lab

Produced by Amit Tandon

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ed Whittingham: Hi, I am Ed Whittingham and you're listening to Energy Versus Climate, the show where my co-host, David Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon, and I debate today's climate and energy challenges. On June 2nd, David and I recorded a live webinar with Dr. Rose Mutiso. Research director at the Energy for Growth Hub. We talked about energy production and consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The first time we've done so in a meaningful way on EVC, though I expect not the last rose. David and I covered a range of topics with a particular focus on electricity and power grids, one of rose's areas of expertise. I really enjoyed the conversation. And found it both encouraging but also difficult given the vast economic inequity that still exists between the global North and South.

Now, here's the show.

Hello everyone and welcome to season six, episode 13 of Energy Versus Climate. My name is Ed Whittingham and I'm joined by my co-host David Keith. Today we have a very special guest to chat with David and me about the tension between energy, climate and economic development with a particular focus in Africa and more broadly the global south.

And we're gonna talk about Africa's energy transition. We're going to talk about equity and justice and ways to mitigate the compounding effects of climate change. And ongoing economic marginalization and inequity, and now to a special guest. So Dr. Rose Mutiso is the research director for the Energy for Growth Hub, and her research interests are, are particularly focused on energy transition and emerging energy technologies in Africa, in the African context.

Previously, rose was a senior officer in the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy at the US Department of Energy. Where she led the DOE'S engagement on tech and policy dimensions of energy access in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, as she also co-founded and previously served as CEO of the Mawazo Institute, which is a nonprofit research institute based in Nairobi that supports the next generation of female scholars and thought leaders in Africa.

He's also, uh, in the process of forming a new institute, which we'll talk about. And lastly, uh, she's the co-host of a great podcast that I've just started listening to Rose called High Energy Planet, and we're really grateful to have her join us today. So welcome Rose. 

[00:02:24] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Thanks. Thanks, thanks for having me, ed, and thanks for listening to our podcast.

[00:02:28] Ed Whittingham: Oh, it's great. It's great. Well, I, this is one of the wonderful things about energy versus climate where we have guests on. Often guests have podcasts and I get to, to listen to new podcasts as a result. Uh, but before we get in, David, anything that you want to add off the top? 

[00:02:44] David Keith: Particularly, I had a wonderful conversation with Rose in South Africa a couple weeks ago on, on climate engineering topics.

And um, I'm really fascinated to focus this on really understanding more about energy in Africa. 

[00:02:57] Ed Whittingham: So let's start Rose. You've got a Substack as well. It's called Kibao. I assume that's Swahili, but what does that word mean and and how does that relate to your work? 

[00:03:07] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Really, really good question. Actually, nobody has asked me this before.

I mean, I haven't had a substack for that long, so I guess it's still pretty fresh. So please, listeners subscribe. It's a lot of fun. Um, I try to make you think and also kind of, take interesting takes, uh, and expand the aperture for how people think about different issues.

Issues in African energy, climate and tech. So, yeah, so Kiba is, uh, has dual meaning. Um, so in que Swahili, it literally is like a board, so like a notice board. It's a kiba, it's, it's like a, a piece of wood, almost like a plank of wood would be a kiba. But also in this sense, I mean, in terms of a board, like a notice board, if you like, you put a notice on a ki.

Kiba in slang. So I grew up in Nairobi in the eighties and nineties and we are, you know, we pretty much originated a a a a slang, which is kind of English and Kili mixed up, plus other stuff thrown in. And Kiba when out like in the nineties was like a lot. So if you're like a rapper, you'd be like, I have fans, Kiba, like I have a lot of fans.

And so I put these two meanings together because I think of the substack as where I post my thoughts. Um, and then I have a lot of thoughts on many different topics. And so, you know, it's, it's working on those two parallel meanings, both the parch sw meaning and the slang meaning, 

[00:04:21] Ed Whittingham: I, I love that. And people can go to your Substack and get that content and learn a lot more about what you're thinking and, and more about the African context and all the work that you do. And hopefully you get that question more often. Now, you've spoken about growing up in Nairobi in the 1990s. And doing that, you experienced power rationing.

You experienced the concept that, uh, not everyone is always familiar with energy poverty. We'll talk about that. And I experienced the same, I was in Guinea and Sierra Leone in, in 2000. I. For not that long, but I, I recall, you know, when the power would go out and unexpectedly or, you know, timed intervals and all the workarounds and some of these Sierra Leonian kids would be out and studying by candlelight trying to keep up on their work or they would find some light that's running and crowd around that.

But going back to your experience growing up in the nineties in Nairobi, how, how did that personal experience shape. Your understanding of energy poverty and, and yeah. If, if you could just maybe define, I think most people are familiar with it, but define energy poverty as well. 

[00:05:27] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Yeah. So yeah. Energy poverty is, yeah.

Basically many people in the world live without either fully lacking access to modern energy or suffer with very unreliable energy. The energy poverty problem, uh, actually has two main dimensions. One is an electricity problem, and the other is actually like a. Cooking fuels problem. And I focus more on the electricity problem in terms of the kind of power sector and the black house, the shortages and reliable power, the expensive power, the lack of power.

But I just want to bookmark for the listener that there's, uh, another really big and important part of the problem, which is many people in the world cook with traditional fuels, charcoal, and it has huge implications for health, and that's. A big part of the challenge, but I'll just bookmark that because that's like, not really the focus of my work.

So electricity access is, yeah, basically globally, like almost several hundred million people live without access to electricity. Um, that means you don't have light thing at home, you just, you use kerosene lamps, or, candles, um, you know, so this is people literally, literally living like a century behind the rest of the world.

So that's kind of the what. The most kind of vis early visible part of the problem. Um, there's another problem, which is what Ed you were describing, which is, you know, when you expand the problem to your living with expensive, unreliable power, then it's, we go up to billions of people in the world are experiencing really like erratic power blackouts, rationing.

You know, in rich countries you just have 24 7 power, and sometimes you do have incidents where you, you know, there are big events where there are blackouts, but for the most part you can kind of. Expect to have power. You know, this is a big problem. When I was growing up in Nairobi, I just, this was just the way of life.

We had chronic power shortages. We relied on some old hydro dams and we were constantly, which are very vulnerable to droughts. Uh, we're it Kenya? We are, you know, it's a semi-arid country, a lot of parts of it. We don't get a, you know, that much rain as opposed to say in more central parts of Africa.

Anytime we had a dry season or a drought just. Immediately no power. So really extreme rationing regimes power is really expensive. Like my mom would be honest, like if any, a light bulb is on for like half a millisecond longer than it should be because we really felt the cost of power. One thing that's really interesting in, in just the, my coming of age is that the picture changed drastically.

So when I was really young, it was just a fact of life that there'll be frequent shortages and rationing. But around the two thousands Kenya. Brought online, or the late nineties, early two thousands, brought online geothermal powers. Kenya started building power plants off of geothermal steam, and that made a huge difference.

Just I remember as I was. In my late teens, the, the situation was less extreme, and that's just because we like diversified our power sector and, and we're not just relying on hydro. So I've kind of seen a bit of an arc, a bit of progress. 

[00:08:24] Ed Whittingham: It's changing everywhere. It's good to know about that progress.

I've spoken recently and I, I pulled up some stats talking about electricity and here in Canada, if I le leave a 40 watt light bulb in my house for an hour, the cost to me is less than half of 1 cent Canadian. And that's extraordinarily cheap. And in fact, electricity is, was 200 times more affordable in the year 2000 when I was in Sierra Leone and Guinea than it was in 1990.

And Canada as a country spends two to 3% of its GDP on electricity, which is also a fraction of other countries. 

[00:08:58] Dr. Rose Mutiso: I think that poorer people pay more for their power. So yeah, the poorer you are, the more expensive your power by far. 

[00:09:05] Ed Whittingham: Exactly. So the stat is 160 million people in the world don't have reliable access to electricity.

And for that many have to walk to stores and say, pay 25 cents or more to charge a cell phone. And that's hundreds of times more than what we pay in Canada. And actually when they run the numbers, it's 192 times. More than what we pay. If you're taking like an all-inclusive cost of 10 cents a kilowatt hour, 

[00:09:28] Dr. Rose Mutiso: if you look beyond individuals and what we're paying in our homes, if you're a company, this is a huge call center, so you're so price sensitive and so, I mean this is part of the work of the Energy for Growth Hub where I've been working is shining a light to that kind of the non-residential part of the picture and just the impact on the economy to have such endemically costly power.

It really. Puts the brakes on on your economy. 

[00:09:54] Ed Whittingham: David you've, you've shared with us an economist article that talked about, uh, Nigeria's electricity grid, and I think that's a great case study for this discussion. Could you talk about that article? 

[00:10:05] David Keith: Yeah, I found it fascinating. I've never actually traveled to Nigeria myself, but have lots of colleagues who've grown up there, lived there and, you know, it's obviously this monster country.

Over 200 million people, about 15. Mid 15% of all the people in Sub-Saharan Africa and you know, in many ways lots of business and other enterprise. And yet it's electricity system seems like kind of stuck in a, a terrible middle ground where many, it sounds like wealthy people and businesses are basically assuming it doesn't work.

And so all are having backup power and for a variety of reasons, there's really not investment in the grid infrastructure. And so. Even in large cities, even with a fair amount of, um, generation, the grid goes down very frequently. And I guess, you know, and, and know Rose that you don't work specially there, but like that seems like a case study.

'cause Nigeria is the, you outside, I guess South Africa, kind of biggest country and a country that we all hope can, can be much more successful. Um, and. And electricity is a key to that. Um, tell us a little bit about why it's bad, but also, you know, how you could imagine it getting better. 

[00:11:14] Dr. Rose Mutiso: And I mean, Nigeria is a, a complicated country.

Like each African country has its own kind of set of complications and constraints. Uh, before I get into like all of the kind of wo begone, like everything is not working properly. I just wanna say something about Nigeria, which is like super vibrant place. And if you haven't already checked out Afrobeats, which is like a Nigerian export to the world and is all of pop music in the world now is dominated by Nigerians.

So it's a very creative, very vibrant space. That being said, you know, I think a place like Nigeria is just com compounding of so much dysfunction. Have a lot of, you know, uh, governance, political challenges of post independence elite who have, underinvested in public goods. You have the problem of a very difficult and corrupt, uh, extractive industry. So Nigeria is a huge oil oil producer, which is, yeah, so it's a big fossil fuel producer, a big energy producer, but like, has not invested, uh, for many dysfunctional reasons in their domestic consumption and growth. And I think there.

There's a lot to unpack there in terms of the drivers of the dysfunction, but maybe what I'd like to pick out, 'cause we don't have enough time to talk about all of that, maybe what I'd like to pick out is what you said about like when you don't have, when you don't create public goods and shared infrastructure, I.

For all of these different reasons, then everybody loses. And so the elites and the rich people have diesel generators. So I, I have a colleague who does work on this, and I don't have the number right off my, the bat, but like the installed generation in. Generator terms in Nigeria is huge, and this is really expensive power, but if you can't, so you know, it's just, and you, you can't rely on the grid and so you basically generate your own power.

And so it's, I have a colleague who says, you know, it's interesting that we are talking about distributed energy systems and how we kind of go to a more distributed energy system and power system in the future. A country like Nigeria is all distributed energy. It's just a very kind of. Dysfunctional type 'cause it's generators and so.

When everybody, you create this download spiral where everybody is, you know, essentially migrating away from the, the grid and then you don't have a shared infrastructure and then you just have inequality. A well, people who are on the generators are paying a lot of money for the electricity.

People who can afford them are living in endemic poverty and the economy grows. And I think, I'd like to contrast this with Kenya where we have dysfunction, but there's actually a bit more shared infrastructure. So the the penetration of generators is, is much less in a country like Kenya.

So our grid is semi-functional and that, and, and everybody, like all of the companies are hooked to the grid because it's cheaper and it might not always be reliable. You might have backup. But just on the spectrum of dysfunction, it's a little bit less extreme. And so I think that what happens is the dysfunction fuels this compounding risk where everybody is moving away from shared infrastructure and that just leaves you stuck.

And there's a real, real stuckness. One of the ways I got into this debate about, and I covered this in my tech talks about there was a lot of interest in Africa leapfrogging legacy energy systems and we could just have distributed solar everywhere, and that's the future. And you don't have to make the mistakes.

I think I had to enter this debate from the perspective of shared infrastructure, centralized infrastructure. These are the benefits, like a strong central grid that connects everybody is a great place to start. And what we see in Africa is. What happens when you start without the shared infrastructure and try to work backwards?

Um, and whether that's solar or diesel generators, like we cannot under emphasize the importance of shared infrastructure that kind of shares costs across the system. I. 

[00:14:51] David Keith: I strongly agree, but I also wonder if it's changed a little bit. So sometime, I guess probably around 2015 or a little bit before, uh, I was, me and Ken Calder and Seminar, others were running these educational meetings for, for Bill Gates and we had Dan Kaman in who's, you know, famous for working on a bunch of Christina.

Dan is a good friend. Yeah. Know Dan. Yeah, Dan was very excited about local. Very small scale solar, and obviously there's a way in which at a very small scale, if you're talking an individual household that's running kerosene labs, kerosene's both very expensive. And when you knock the lamp over, it's a big fire hazard.

It actually kills a fair number of people. So. It's certainly true that it can be worthwhile for people to buy really household level solar infrastructure to allow them to have tiny lighting or recharge electric devices, even if the cause that power is very high. But what, you know, bill Gates argued back to Dan, and I think I was more on Bill's side and that argument I.

Was that thinking that this is kind of a solution is nuts and it's sort of low balling what we should hope for in development and that it really was much more important for Africa to drive forward to actually build up systematic large grids. And uh, back then that really seemed. To be right to me. I think it still seems to be right to me, and you just said that, but it does feel a little bit different now, given how cheap solar is in getting batteries cheaper, it seems less crazy to think about a kind of microgrid based systems.

So I'd really like you to hear what your opinion has changed with with solar getting so cheap. 

[00:16:19] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Yeah, and it actually almost hasn't changed. I think this was kind of part of the nuance of the message is we're solving multiple problems on multiple scales. I started my career in this space working on off grid energy, and I've seen the difference it makes for people to go from kerosene and the advances in both kind of the.

Costs go. Going down with solar and the advances in LED lighting and when you bring, when you have like a super efficient end use, whether it's a TV or light or something that uses very little energy and you pair that with a small solar panel, then people can unlock a lot of energy service and that's great.

It's still. Costly. It's cheaper than in, in some cases in dragging the grid, especially in very remote areas. But it's a way for people to have entry level access and build some productive uses in these kind of specific cases. And, and actually that sector has driven a lot of access. So in Kenya, I think we are like now, uh, have almost doubled our access rate over the past decade.

And, and a big, a significant chunk of that has been just people coming online through these off grid pieces. So that's true. What the, the other side of the problem that you're saying, it seems more feasible that we could have a pretty distributed system and don't do the centralized grids. So, you know, like a household, a solar panel system is a few kilowatt hours, uh, a few kilowatt rating in like a place like the US that already is pretty large scale and you then, you know, say like the really microsystems we see in very rural parts of Africa, right? So I think that already their economies of scale, even if you're putting solar in your home on your rooftop in a very distributed way, that size of that system is quite large compared to what you would, it's, it's not dissimilar to what you would put on a like small commercial building or in Africa.

So I just, so I like to push the conversation towards like. There's the distributed ness of it and people self-generating, and there's a scale of the installations and how you just kind of bring down cost by having larger and larger, which is like people are having bigger systems, are consuming more power.

And then that there are all of the ways in which the network, the network has to interconnect to share the benefits. So basically having central infrastructure to move electrons around to where they're produced versus where they're needed needs to coexist with the distributed ness. The modularity of the generation itself.

So I think it's, it's like a very, like multi-dimensional problem. So we're not saying that we just need to make traditional, like large power, power plants, you know, going to a consumption center. But even in these modularized, decentralized systems, you benefit from scale. So we just need to be thinking more ambitiously and then they need to interconnect and speak to each other. And this is a problem that everybody's trying to figure out. 

[00:18:57] David Keith: Yeah. So I, I wanna push a little further. I think it really is interesting again, you know, the, the cost of silver has changed so much and the cost of, of utility scale battery or small utility scale battery storage is changing. So I'm not asking you to kind of tell us how to fix that.

It'd be great if you can tell us how to fix Nigeria or how Nigerians to fix themselves. It's not our job, but, but, but you wonder if there's some intermediate scale, so much bigger than rooftop solar, but still much smaller than national grids, where some combination of local communities, a significant scale nowadays, it could actually make sense to build a grid that was solar plus batteries, but not on rooftop utility solar, with the fact that we, we have three big things that happened.

Battery's suddenly getting to be not a joke in terms of price. Solar getting really cheap and a bunch of electric switching infrastructure that's made it easier to have, uh, robust micro grids that can interconnect when they do, but don't have to. And I wonder if that's a way to kind of actually fulfill that, that kind of old van cam and dream that I was skeptical of maybe actually makes more sense, but not at the house scale at a bigger scale.

[00:19:58] Dr. Rose Mutiso: I, I get everything you're saying, but I just, my sense is that even in this scenario describing like having aggregator institutions, business models, infrastructure that kind of interconnect all of this different kind of more sophisticated and futuristic and new tech loads and supply is still important.

 I feel like the connective tissue and. Still there. And I think sometimes people imagine we will not need that interconnection in some way, some way to kind of, to make, to, to kind of drive if both scale and efficiency across the board. And so I even, even with like reductions in, in batteries, which we're not yet there, so we still need like a lot of renewables still, it's much cheaper to balance it out with say, natural gas for example.

We're not yet there. But you know, I think that the, the ways that we're. Trying to deploy batteries. Actually, the, the first use case is actually just like as to provide ancillary services to the grid. That's where the kind of the business model is. And we're, we're kind of marching on to as the costs come down.

To pairing solar and batteries in ways that kind of move us to that vision, but I'm skeptical of, of not needing institutions infrastructure, some way for us to kind of efficiently interconnect and speak and have these systems and loads speak to each other, both for an efficiency and for our cost perspective.

[00:21:17] David Keith: Last, last comment on this. I think this is really interesting. So just to be clear, I I, I absolutely agree that what I hope for in the long run is that Africa has big interconnected grids. I mean, when the US National Academy summarized the most important adventures of the 20th century interconnected grids were number one more important than computers or aircraft.

I think it's a fair judgment there. They, the. This the great invention of the last century. I absolutely agree with you. That's where, where, where Africa should hope to go. But it might still be politically that you can kind of, I wonder if you can build towards a large grid from the bottom up. Maybe it's hopeless.

I always used to critique this view. I'm taking me opposite side as I used to. 

[00:21:52] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Yeah, it is actually, so my colleagues and I literally just published a, a piece about the organic rise of solar grid connected solar in Africa. So actually what you're describing is kind of happening where without. Without any subsidy, without any regulation people are putting crazy amounts of roof, pretty for Africa, pretty decent scale. Rooftop solar. So these are companies, malls, businesses, commercial buildings, whatever industry like people are. Uh, people are like expanding solar at really rapid rates. And we're seeing this in other countries. People are reporting about like a solar revolution in Pakistan, whatever.

And this is because of like the, the prices are going down, people are fed up with expensive and honorable, honorable grid power. And so it either gives you energy security or it. Is, especially if you're on say, a mall, a mall or an office building, the profile of the generation matches with your load profile.

And so, so actually there's, there's weird, there's this, this revolution racing where people are doing aspects of what you're describing, which they're democratizing energy and they're putting their own energy. But then, you know, I think. There are some side effects to that, which is, then you're driving a lot of inequality because these users are what cross-subsidize across the grid.

And I think that if you undermine the grid, uh. The health of the utilities and the centralized grid too much. I think this becomes a problem because they still value in having, in having these institutions that's, you know, interconnect users and share kind of resources. Another thing we're seeing is that because in Africa, like if we're talking about the kind of renewable, like build out that we need as part of this energy transition, the resources like is, you know, there are parts of Africa that have work, really high wind resource, really high quality parts that have really high, the quality of wind resource has some geographic distribution. And so you want to be able to create infrastructure that can really move these like huge resource generation points to people to kind of make the whole system work and interconnect that with batteries and whatever. So I do think that, I think we, we agree, we agree. It's just that there's so much nuance and it doesn't really come through in a soundbite. To, to sum up, I'm excited about like off-grid energy and how it can lift people out of extreme energy poverty and, and what is possible.

Like there's a future in that that I, we cannot even see now in that world as costs come down and use cases like really expand. I'm excited about the democratization of energy and people kind of building this distributed systems enabled by price going down. But I still, I'm always so worried. I'm worried about people losing sight of shared resources and public public goods. 

[00:24:27] Ed Whittingham: Hmm. Rose a, a consistent theme in your work has been that. Africa's energy transition must be driven by Africans. I, I do wanna pivot a bit to then what does it mean for policy technology , and the role of the global North as well. But, but first, just on this note of democratizing energy and, and you said, well, not undermining energy infrastructure.

I think of a conversation that I had with Shell's country chair for Nigeria. Back in mid 2016, his name was Ogi O Kubo. And it was fascinating 'cause President Buhari had just recently come in. He had campaigned on security economy, economic development. We talked a lot about security and local benefits and here it was, shell, you know, it was, you mentioned, you know, Nigeria is a big oil and gas producer.

Shell Is, was then at least the largest of the companies producing there. And we talk, we figured out that. Oil theft in Nigeria at that time was costing 130,000 barrels per day of people going in and tapping oil and gas infrastructure and pipelines. And there it created all sorts of disasters in terms of safety issues and security issues.

People were taking the oil, they were locally refining it, but then, you know, dumping some of the residue into the delta. So, and I'm using that and I'm sorry, I'm talking about Nigeria again and some of the dysfunction. But they were doing that because they felt, and they lived in a way that they weren't sharing in the benefits from that oil and gas economy.

But then. Undermining that infrastructure. They're creating all sorts of security and safety issues that were ultimately counterproductive. And a company was Shell like saying, can we stay here? And if we pull out venue, we had the Chinese state-owned enterprise in sort of picking up the pieces, and that could be a bad outcome.

What are your thoughts and, and maybe more like how do we democratize energy and create those local benefits without undermining those centralized systems? 

[00:26:24] Dr. Rose Mutiso: So maybe because I, I, I, I said I don't follow ONG very much or especially, as a sector. Maybe I'll pose the kind of the setup in terms of electricity.

So, uh, every African utility has like a, has a eu, you know, we, they report like technical and non-technical losses and non-technical losses is just you. Optimistically all the theft, right? And so that's undermining it. But, you know, people are stealing because they're poor and desperate, and they are intermediaries, unsavory characters that are preying on that vulnerability.

So, like in Kenya, in the informal settings, we have a lot of gangs that control the stolen electricity. It's, it gets really unsavory pretty quickly. But at the, at the kind of the, the core level, I think that. When people are poor and people are desperate and they have no way to have dignified work, they do stuff like this, including, you know, like all of the kind of.

Yeah, trying to, harvest minerals or oil or these resources at an artisanal level can be, it's really bad for your health. It's really backbreaking work. Children involve, it's horrible. Nobody wants, chooses to live like this everywhere in the world where we've seen this transition to kind of more dignified work less exploitation, you know, from the, like the, the, the children who are working in the like, um.

Cotton mills in Northern England to, you know what I mean? Like, I think like all of those protections come when you, you have a society that is progressing, is becoming more affluent, is creating in parallel structures that like provide social protections. And so this is really, really missing. And so I guess, and there are many, many things that need to happen to solve that.

So I'm not going to try and minimize the complexity, but one thing that we often talk about is. Making people less poor solves a lot of problems for you, and there are studies about it makes them more healthy, it makes them more climate resilient. So actually in poor countries, eradicating poverty is a climate solution.

It's the number one climate solution. You know, it makes them less. Desperate. And you know, like even in, in, in Kenya is an example of a country where I'm from. It's an example of a country that has a little bit more of a middle and a working class. There's a little bit more of a segmentation there. People are still poorly lived, desperate lives, but like, there's just like, you can see, you know, the ways in which, you know, people can make choices that kind of ensure like a bit more of safety and dignity for their children as they kind of get less forward. So I think that we should really be thinking about how do we create opportunity? How do we create low wage? And this is what happened in, I think one of the things we freak out in the development spaces.

You know, the model was always low, low scale. Jobs to get people off that kind of extreme subsistence life. And I know those pathways are kind of narrowing, so this is a big panic because that is how we move society toward less dysfunction and more kind of dignified lives.

[00:29:13] Ed Whittingham: I think David and I fully agree that if you want to address some of these systemic issues, you have to lift people outta poverty first. And, and you've written, and you've been critical about talking about carbon footprints now and the the world effort to decrease emissions that. Many national plans and international models IPCC and others that they've been crafted by foreign consultants.

They don't have good local data. They don't have lo local contacts, and I don't know if they're taking into account the need for that economic development first. And what we would imagine is a commiserate rise in emissions in order to then. Make in order to then enable an energy transition that will ultimately decrease, uh, emissions in Africa in short and further to the substance of your TED talk, unless I'm, I'm misrepresenting you.

There needs to be room for emissions to grow at first to get people outta poverty, to get the resources in, and then a burden placed on reducing emissions later on. Can you comment on that? 

[00:30:19] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Yeah. I think this goes back to what you were saying earlier about agency. I just, you know, if. If, if you are not really actively thinking about your needs, your priorities and like kind of trying to shape the pathways around where you are, your context, where you're trying to get to, then you have really perverse outcomes, right?

So. Climate is really important. It's a big issue. We need to tackle it. Everybody actually, to be honest, like I sometimes I feel like nobody agrees with it with that more than African people. You know, I remember in the two thousands we used to joke that like, you know, the climate deniers only exist like in the US and rich countries, like people.

Nobody's climate denying in in poor countries. 'Cause people really feel, feel the sense of precariousness and are, you know, they're already suffering droughts and extreme weather and they're hearing that there's this other phenomenon that will make that worse. So people are like, have always taken Clement seriously.

So when there was a blanket narrative, which is everybody in the world needs to mitigate, then what you have is countries, like many countries in Africa with such kind of low per capita. Consumption and emissions. Like if you take out South Africa, I think accumulative co contribution of everyone else in South, South Africa is like a fraction of a percent of the global picture.

So you're, there's first, there's nothing to mitigate, 'cause your consumption is so low, so, and b, that you, by mitigating nothing, you're obviously then also you're not really solving the problem. So that's what I mean by when you have agency and you have people thinking thoughtfully from their context about how their needs and their priorities.

You start from there, you from where you are, and then you try to intersect with the global picture. Then, then, then you have less kind of perverse decisions where people are trying to, so you'd, you'd find rich countries like say Scandinavian countries that are extremely like. You know, like noise. An extremely poor climate country.

It's a huge orangey country, but they're like fixated on like, trying to really push poor countries towards a, like a, a particular energy trajectory. Uh, you know, and not making a lot of noise at the bilateral and the multilateral kind of donor space in terms of what should be funded and not, but then it's like, it's not what BU Faso is doing with the energy system that matters actually, probably, it matters more what Norway is doing.

And so that's kind of what I mean by agency. So, and I think sometimes people have taken this, and I've tried to twist it to their own agenda. So I'm not saying that this is the way for Africa, I'm just saying start with. Kind of a thoughtful, understanding of the problem and the solutions. And don't just like, do this blanket application of some global narratives about what the, what the problem or what the solution is.

[00:33:01] David Keith: Two, two comments. One, um, about something you, you mentioned you don't work on so much, which was the other big energy challenge in the developing world, which is access to clean fuels for cooking, huge health toll, particularly on women. Uh, for indoor cooking with, uh, primitive fuels and there's been lots of sort of action and political push to get cheap LPG, which can be distributed by, you know, bicycles or mopeds that have the, uh, LPG canisters and would have an enormous health benefit for people.

And my, well, not my knowledge, in some places, I don't know how it's changed really recently, is that that's been blocked or attacked by rich world environmental groups that want to kind of block development of fossil infrastructure. And I think that's really well polite way to say it would be ethically questionable given that the giant benefits and the small, actual total emissions involved.

And I think I've seen that a little bit. I, I traveled, um, looking at appropriate technology and stove development infrastructure in the early nineties in East Africa. And I think I really saw close up some of the need for access to clean fuels, and that's true lots of places around the developing world.

And I think more broadly, my impression partly from. Service on that overshoot commission was that there's really a blindness in a bunch of elite climate policy circles in the, in the rich world, to the fact that any reasonable hope for development in the developing world would have a, a big buildup of emissions over the next decades.

And that's not compatible with people's kind of imagination of these very rapid emissions cuts. 

[00:34:38] Dr. Rose Mutiso: I think your comment is tying together like so many complex threads, but yes, all in all, like I, I really do believe that, poor people are suffering the most from a problem they did not create, and they deserve the most leeway to come out of poverty. And at the same time, they're also really, you know, you know, poor people, for example, they don't want to have old legacy polluting infrastructure either, you know? So I think like in a lot of African countries, as a matter of policy, a lot of governments are very interested in expanding their renewable energy generation. They wanna take advantage of their different renewable resources. They wanna kind of get on board on the latest, uh, technology source, and they don't wanna be like, build a system that is outdated. So I think all of these points are operating at the same time, which is people want to be expedient most you know, in addressing poverty but they're also in the same way. They're trying to like. Think strategically about the future , and how to build like future systems that are resilient, robust. But then at the end of the day, like my point is like less scrutiny for what, and like kind of dictating for what very poor people do are, are doing to kind of achieve goals.

And for The most part, if you're very poor country, for the very, very low. Poor low emitting countries of which this represents just in Africa. This is just a billion people. Um, our fall in that bucket of very low emitting, even if they increase the energy consumption, even if they did that all with fossils, it'll make not a huge difference.

That represents about a billion people. And so I think that fixate less on those people. That being said. I think there is a global reckoning right now, and we see this in the US about like, what is the climate narrative? Like, what is, you know, where do we go? People are not willing to pay, an extra $10 a month in their bills to, for higher energy.

We now have this new abundance narrative that is trying to like, respond to this idea that people want more, they want cheap energy, they want. Growth. And, and so I think that there's, I think it's a, a different manifestation of this question, which is how do we solve climate in ways that align with what people, people's aspirations and, and, you know.

Energy innovation solves that to a large extent. But you know, there there're gonna be trade offs and there's gonna be a pain. And, and part of my point, which is a little bit maybe passing the buck, is I think that those trade offs and those difficult discussions are belong more in the rich, kind of richer, high emitting countries than they do in the poor low emitting part of the world.

[00:37:14] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And Rose, you know, when you said that. Many or most south, uh, Sub-Saharan Africans recognize that climate change is real and it's happening. I was in Indonesia recently and I experienced exactly the same thing, and yeah, and it's entirely anecdotal, but I didn't come across a climate kind of climate denialism that is especially rampant in, in the United States.

Your, your middle attitude and equatorial states are really at risk and on the front lines of climate breakdown, and it's happening. Quickly. So how do you balance the changes that we need to make that are longer term? Like what would you like Rich countries, the global North, to do differently in international climate, finance or aid or policy?

Or bonds or carbon market rules that could really help to address this inequity. Uh, and then set up Africa for success all over the long term and, uh, uh, reducing emissions. But then if you're comfortable, I'd love to hear from you. I. Some of the conversations that you had in Cape Town with David and a couple hundred others talking about climate engineering interventions like solar geoengineering and, and attitudes amongst those people from countries who are really on the front lines of climate breakdown.

[00:38:32] Dr. Rose Mutiso: So in terms of my wishlist, it's such an interesting time to be asking this because, you know, we are like in the US completely like an an dismantling aid. Everybody's paring back, you know, you know, so we've always had a, so every, every COP like people show up and have their. Wishlist, which is we never, give us more finance loss and damages, you know, so I, I don't know if it's productive for me to like, restate that wishlist that has always been. 

[00:38:56] Ed Whittingham: And, and I will flag, in your podcast you did a show on like, talk about dismantling aid.

[00:39:00] Dr. Rose Mutiso: There are the things that we would love, which is, you know, you broke it, you fix it. There are all of these things that we would love to happen, uh, or also that. You will suffer more in the short term than you do and all of this. But then, sometimes at this point it's clear that the global direction is, uh, that these that the receptiveness to this wishlist messages are kind of, it's like less than lower than ever before.

And, and in terms of the vulnerability and the kind of the risk that people are exposed to. We're still unpacking what that means. So we're, there's still a lot of research that is trying to kind of figure out like , what are the impacts and when and how, but you know, definitely heat, heat is a good one.

So heat is where we know that the, like the signal there's quite loud and clear that there's extreme heat and people are like already really experiencing that. My, my wishlist is less for the like international people. 'cause I don't know what else we can say to them and they'll just do. Act according to the incentives, moral or not, is.

So, my message is more for like the leaders of, of poor countries who, have some blame in it. You know, like we were talking about Nigeria, there's a very corrupt, corrupt political class that have brought the country to its knees and it can't just all be the pro, the, the fault of the west.

And so African leaders and leaders in poor countries need to get serious about, creating conditions in which. Like people in their countries can, be creating jobs and opportunity, which is how people have incomes, which is how they can buy fans and air conditioning and, you know what I mean?

And we see this in places like India. I know people will wanna ask about how India's uh, emissions are. Kind of part of, increasingly part of the problem. I'm gonna bookmark that too, but, but the idea is in India, and in China, like air condition ownership is really going up. And like more and more people, there's still a lot more vulnerable people, but as incomes increase, people are able to adapt and are able to bring on these appliances that make their lives better.

So, especially for African countries, it starts. With creating an economy and having an industrial policy that creates jobs and then people have some income and then they can start to kind of acquire these kind of lifesaving appliances, whether it's house cooling. Um, and then, and then you have to do things that there's some policy things you have to do, which is like require efficiency, high quality products, build the infrastructure in your grid.

So I think there's. The wishlist for me is more for the African leaders at this point. 'cause I don't know what rich countries will do, maybe rich countries. What they can do is, you know, invest in innovation that creates these high quality products that deliver the service at lower, lower cost. 

[00:41:22] Ed Whittingham: Mm-hmm. And, and what, uh, I'm curious and depress you a bit, what message did you bring to that Solar Geo conference in Cape Town?

[00:41:31] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Uh, yeah, so I'm pretty new to this space. I'm kind of like an observer more than anything. I think. It was very interesting to be in that conversation. And it was, it is especially , meaningful because actually there're quite a number. It's a small but growing number of African experts in that conversation who are doing research and modeling and scenario planning.

And I think that is really great 'cause it's , that just to have, credibility, you know, on this topic. And you need like people from. More parts of the world than just a global north, like weighing in at an expert in a substantive level. So I think when we were at the Degrees Forum in Cape Town, that was great that there was quite a diversity of voices and opinions.

And I, especially at the expert level, I'm still working through this where I, I think it's extremely important that we have . Research and thinking at the Frontiers. And David, we talked about this, that I want this research to be happening. I want people who are at the frontiers, like kind of the centuries at the edge of, of, of climate who are exploring new options, who are like, trying to think about, a broad so solution set and all of the different what ifs.

And so I think that I like, I'm super, I'm excited about that. But in terms of how it feeds into. Meaningfully into climate action right now? I think I left a little bit, you know, not sure because I think that the, and this is, especially for SRM, definitely right now, it almost, it climates, it, it complicates rather than simplifies the politics of climate action.

So I'm not sure how it, it, it can kind of meaningfully have bearing right now 'cause it's just, it just is. So it's so complicated for many reasons, but then I still think that it's important that we like, explore and understand and, and research that in a way that's as inclusive as possible.

I know. David, what do you think about that? You are there too. 

[00:43:14] David Keith: We, um, I, I agree that it complicates the politics and, and that make Yeah. Agreed. Whether that ends up being a good or bad thing, we have no idea. Yeah. Over to you, ed, to close out. 

[00:43:24] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. I'm gonna, I've got a couple questions, from, our, call 'em, our number one listener, our EVC super fan Rob Tremblay.

And his first question is, how reliable is the power that commercial and industrial loads get compared to households and are they using diesel backup and rooftop solar and is their dynamic load and dynamic and responsive load management as well when say solar power. Solar production is, makes power cheaper.

So that's one if you can, if we can hold that. And then the second one, he is just asking about ev. And ev penetration in Africa, he's here. It's quite a lot and especially two wheel EVs. And, uh, how much is that affecting, or what kind of pressure is that putting on the development of grids? 

[00:44:10] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Two good questions.

Uh, so quick one on the first one. So I think, like most places, the utilities in many African countries try to have like a segmentation of by user price. So you have different tariffs for larger users. If you're a very, very big user, the utility might have al you know, like a bespoke. Agreement with you might have a kind of dedicated line to you if you're really important.

So I think these, uh, these ideas are active in African countries where, uh, because, you know, uh, large par uses industrial uses so important, I think in Kenya, like out of you know, 3000 out of several million users are responsible for like more than half of the revenues of the utility or something like that.

So there's kind of a, an attempt to apply best practice in terms of how you manage your large users. But for the most part, many large users are experiencing, um. Unreliable power. Expensive power, expensive power. Everybody is so, it's just more expensive than like in many African, like in Kenya it's just you're paying more than you would in, you know, other parts of the world.

Um, and then power quality is a big issue. So your equipment, so there, um, a lot of industrial customers have to have a lot of contingencies to protect the equipment from like when the voltage, uh, lags and that kind of thing. So I think that utilities are. Attentive to the problem because if you start, um, hemorrhaging your large power users, you're in trouble and they're trying to have kind of more bespoke arrangements to make the experience better for large power users.

But it's overall, it's still a big problem and a lot of users are doing captive energy, whether it's rooftop solar or plus generators. Some of the big energy. I think like some years ago there was like a big industrial, um, user in Kenya who was going to have their own like mini coal plant. I dunno where, I don't think that went anywhere, but people were just desperately trying to.

Capture their own generation and bring down their cost. It's, it's not a great situation. And if your industrial customers are suffering, that's a bad sign. 'cause they're the ones who are supposed to have the kind of the sweetest deal to uncover the rest of the network. EV's, great question.

I am working, uh, one of my big. Projects is on ev e mobility in Africa. Um, I think that there is a lot of energy, but this is, and in the two, three wheeler space, so there's a kind of an explosion of companies and, uh, business models and whatnot. But this is really, really small, so, you know, a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.

So in, in countries like. I dunno, I think South Africa, you're, you're talking about, several thousand EVs both across all classes and this is like one of our biggest, uh, markets. So I think there's a lot of hype that you'll read in the news about everyone's going, uh, electric in Africa and look at this one company has made a motorbike.

So I would just, I would just , takeaway for the listeners is there is. Energy and there's a real entrepreneurial spirit, but we are nowhere near scale for immobility. And some of that is, uh, there's a lot of experimentation basically. And that's exciting. But I think that it's just, it's just we're not quite there yet.

[00:46:55] Ed Whittingham: Well, that's one commonality between where we are here in Canada. We're still in E's, nowhere near at scale. Rose, do you want to take just 30 seconds? I had alluded to it to plug your new institute. 

[00:47:06] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Oh, yes. Yeah. So yes, I am just actually this week launching a new, virtual think tank called the African Tech Futures Lab.

We're actually incubated within the Energy for Growth Hub where I am currently, uh, where I served. Until recently as a research director, I'm now a science advisor and I'm taking on this new role. African Tech Features Lab is trying to, leverage this network of African experts all over the world in the diaspora and on on the continent, including myself, to try and weigh in on big.

Questions around the science and technology that is reshaping the future. And so a lot of African countries are really in reactive mode. Like things are happening to us. Um, and there's not a lot of room to be strategic. And we, you know, where other countries have a lot of kind of, kind of a brain trust of thinkers in a very diverse knowledge ecosystem, from academic academics to think tanks to lobbyists, you name it.

There are a lot of people thinking about the future of ex climate. The future, the climate futures, energy futures, ai or digital tech futures. And so this virtual institute is trying to create a virtual platform where we can have diverse African thinkers. Kind of trying to think strategically about these kind of global transformations and trying to provide some insights, some strategic insight about, what this means if you, you're a poor African country, what do you do now?

What do you do in the future? How does that change? So, um, yep, look it up. We're gonna be, our website is live on Wednesday in a couple of days, www.africantechfutures.org and I'd love to hear from you. 

[00:48:31] Ed Whittingham: Cool. Cool. I hope listeners check it out. I look forward to checking it out myself. Um, Rose, thank you.

We covered a lot of ground today on a topic that we've wanted to cover for some time on EVC, but we haven't to date. So we're really grateful for you taking the time to, to come on and chat with us. 

[00:48:48] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Thanks for having me, and I think there's so much more, we didn't even scratch the surface. Sorry, and I was jumping around, but I, I think please have more people on to talk about this, uh, including, uh, I think, I think the Nigeria question is interesting, and I think a lot of Nigerian experts would have a lot to say on that.

But please, please don't shy away from this topic on EvC. 

[00:49:04] Ed Whittingham: No, we won't. We won't. Um, and, and so thanks again. 

[00:49:07] Dr. Rose Mutiso: Thank you. Bye. 

[00:49:08] Ed Whittingham: Bye-Bye. Thanks for listening to Energy Versus Climate. The show is created by David, Keith, Sara Hasting-Simon, and me, Ed Whittingham. And produced by Amit Tandon with help from Crystal Hickey Vinuki Arachchi and Haris Ahmed.

Our title in show Music is The Windup by Brian Lips. This season of Energy versus Climate is produced with support from the University of Calgary's, office of the Vice President Research and the university's global research initiative. Further, the support comes from the Trottier Family Foundation, the North Family Foundation, the Palmer Family Foundation, and our generous listeners.

Sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyvsclimate.com and review and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. This helps new listeners to find the show. We'll be back with more EVC content over the course of the summer, including a couple of climate book review shows with my old friend Roger Thompson.

For now. Enjoy the last couple of weeks of spring and see you then.