{"id":931,"date":"2015-04-29T14:09:49","date_gmt":"2015-04-29T22:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/?p=931"},"modified":"2015-04-29T14:09:49","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T22:09:49","slug":"electricity-for-africa-if-its-a-moral-imperative-must-it-be-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/29\/electricity-for-africa-if-its-a-moral-imperative-must-it-be-green\/","title":{"rendered":"Electricity for Africa: if it&#8217;s a moral imperative, must it be green?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/rationaloptimist.com\/blog\/electricity-for-africa.aspx\">Electricity for Africa<\/a>, Matt Ridley quotes a UN official who says, despite the troubles in Libya and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sahel\">the Sahel<\/a> that make the news, the long-term problems are concentrated in Subsaharan Africa:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Just to get sub-Saharan electricity consumption up to the levels of South Africa or Bulgaria would mean adding about 1,000 gigawatts of capacity, the installation of which would cost at least \u00c2\u00a31 trillion. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Renewable generation will cost about 4-5 times what natural gas generation costs. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The economist Bj\u00c3\u00b8rn Lomborg has been making the case that getting energy and clean water to Africans is a higher moral priority than pursuing renewable energy. He still thinks climate change is a danger, but he thinks developing new energy technologies will get far better results than rolling out expensive and land-hungry renewables today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Worth reading the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Electricity for Africa, Matt Ridley quotes a UN official who says, despite the troubles in Libya and the Sahel that make the news, the long-term problems are concentrated in Subsaharan Africa: Just to get sub-Saharan electricity consumption up to the levels of South Africa or Bulgaria would mean adding about 1,000 gigawatts of capacity, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23],"tags":[846,847,728,848],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-africa","tag-climate-change","tag-energy","tag-renewables"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRqpr-f1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}