Promoting Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in Africa: A Framework to Evaluate Employment Generation and Cost-effectiveness
Abstract
The ongoing debate over the cost-effectiveness of renewable energy (RE) and energy efficiency (EE) deployment often hinges on the current cost of incumbent fossil-fuel technologies versus the long-term benefit of clean energy alternatives. This debate is often focused on mature, or ‘industrialized’ economies and externalities such as job creation. In many ways, however the situation in developing economies is as or more interesting due to the generally faster current rate of economic growth and of infrastructure deployment . On the one hand RE and EE could help to decarbonize economies in developing countries, but on the other hand higher upfront costs of RE and EE could hamper short term growth. The methodology developed in this paper confirms the existence of this trade-off for some scenarios, but at the same time provides considerable evidence about the positive impact of EE and RE from a job creation and employment perspective. By extending and adopting for Africa a methodology designed to calculate employment from electricity generation for the U.S., this paper finds that energy savings and the conversion of electricity supply mix to renewable energy generates employment compared to a reference scenario and that costs per additional job created tends to decrease with increasing levels of EE adoption and of RE shares.