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Determinants of renewable energy consumption in Africa

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Abstract

Although the role that renewable energy consumption plays on economic growth and emissions has been widely studied, there are relatively few papers focusing on the determinants of renewable energy consumption, and only one study focuses on the factors related to the share of renewables in the energy consumption in Africa. This paper contributes to the literature by filling the gap in knowledge by exploring the nexus between the share of renewables in energy consumption and social and economic variables, for a panel consisting of 21 African countries for the period between 1990 and 2013, extending the set of variables and the time span used by a previous study. Estimating a random-effects generalized least squares regression, we find that countries with a higher Human Development Index and a higher gross domestic product per capita have a lower share of renewable energy in the national grid. On the other hand, an increase in foreign direct investment has been found to be related to higher renewable energy integration. The level of democracy, measured by the Freedom House political rights and civil liberties ratings, does not directly affect the integration level of renewable energy sources. The negative relationship between gross domestic product per capita and the share of renewables contradicts previous findings for developed countries. This contradiction and policy implications are discussed in the light of the review of the energy mix of the selected countries.

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Notes

  1. Arto et al. (2016) define energy footprint as “the energy consumed worldwide to satisfy the domestic final demand of a country, including both the direct energy consumption of households and the global energy requirements to produce the goods and services demanded by final users” (Arto et al. 2016, p. 3).

  2. The countries are Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, and Uganda. The country choice is discussed in “Data and countries selection”.

  3. See Owusu (2018) for a detailed analysis of the energy mix and potential of those 21 countries.

  4. World Development Indicators (WDI) 2017.

  5. As FDI takes a negative value for some observations, the same constant has been added to all values to obtain a positive value and to be able to perform its logarithmic transformation.

  6. The countries Egypt, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, Burundi, Malawi, Cameroon, Mauritius, Botswana, South Africa, and Swaziland have a positive FDI for at least one year in the period of study.

  7. The country level descriptive analysis is presented in the appendix.

  8. A table with the correlation coefficients is presented in the appendix.

  9. Figure A.2 in the appendix shows the relationship between HDI and RNEW% for all the countries and years under study. It shows a negative relationship between these two variables for all the countries except Rwanda and Swaziland where the relationship is positive, and Burundi and South Africa where the relationship is extremely weak.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Middle East Technical University – Northern Cyprus Campus, Economics Program, Kalkanli, Guzelyurt, 99738, North Cyprus, Turkey

    Selim Jürgen Ergun & Maria Fernanda Rivas

  2. Middle East Technical University – Northern Cyprus Campus, Sustainable Environment and Energy Systems, Kalkanli, Guzelyurt, 99738, North Cyprus, Turkey

    Phebe Asantewaa Owusu

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  1. Selim Jürgen Ergun
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  2. Phebe Asantewaa Owusu
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  3. Maria Fernanda Rivas
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Correspondence to Selim Jürgen Ergun.

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This article is derived from Phebe Asantewaa Owusu’s Master’s thesis (Owusu 2018) titled “The Nexus Between Renewable Energy Consumption and Socio-Economic Variables in Africa: An Econometric Approach”. The authors are ordered alphabetically.

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Ergun, S.J., Owusu, P.A. & Rivas, M.F. Determinants of renewable energy consumption in Africa. Environ Sci Pollut Res 26, 15390–15405 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-04567-7

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