Sub-Saharan Africa Needs $563 Billion Spent on Power Generation

(Bloomberg) -- Sub-Saharan Africa needs to spend $563 billion during the next 25 years to increase generation capacity by 270 gigawatts and avoid a “looming power crisis,” Frost & Sullivan, a market research company, said.

The “long-term growth rate in power demand is expected to be 4.4 percent per annum” during the next quarter of a century, energy analyst Moses Duma said in an e-mailed report today.

Less than a quarter of Africa’s population has access to electricity, and the average retail price of about 13 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour is twice that of other emerging market regions, the International Finance Corp., a branch of the World Bank that lends to businesses, said on April 22.

South Africa’s state-owned power utility, Eskom Holdings Ltd., halted supplies to mines for five days in January 2008 because of capacity constraints in the continent’s largest economy. Mines including those belonging to BHP Billiton and Anglo American Plc. were affected by the cuts.

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