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East Africa: Overview of Regional Energy Resources
The Eastern Africa region is endowed with a variety of energy resources requisite for sustainable development. These energy resources, which are widely distributed throughout the region, include hydro, wind, biomass, solar, geothermal, peat and fossil fuels.
Despite this enormous potential, the region's energy sector remains largely undeveloped and is characterized by extremely low levels of modern energy access, low per capita consumption and heavy reliance on biomass energy, which accounts for over 90% of total energy consumption across the region. Access to electricity in rural areas across the region is less than 1% in rural areas. Wood fuel provides energy needs of the traditional sector including rural and poor urban households and some cottage industries whilst electricity and petroleum products supply a large fraction of the countries commercial energy needs.
The energy sector is dominated by petroleum and electricity as the drivers of modern sectors of the economy. Biomass is predominantly used at the household level. A considerable amount of biomass is also used in the services/commercial and industrial sectors. The recent high usage of biomass in these sectors has been attributed to rising prices of petroleum products, inadequate and inefficient power supply systems arising from stunted growth in generation capacity and a poor transmission and distribution infrastructure.
For more information on the energy sector in the respective East African countries, click on the links below:
Challenges impeding the development of the energy resources include barriers in technical, technological, economic capacity and institutional weaknesses. Unfavourable policy also impedes energy resource development. Policies that focus on promoting options for rural energy supply, such as solar energy, wind energy and extension of the grid to rural areas need to be put in place to tap into the vast natural energy resources available across the region. Entry incentives need to be created and barriers broken in order to `allow renewable energy technologies to enter the market and contribute to strengthening and diversifying supply of modern energy services.
For more information on challenges and issues affecting the exploitation of renewable energies in the respective East African countries, click on the links below:
References
GTZ (2007): Eastern Africa Resource Base: GTZ Online Regional Energy Resource Base: Regional and Country Specific Energy Resource Database: II - Energy Resource.
