To fight the death threatened immediately by the COVID-19 pandemic and famine, as well as to secure and develop its future, Africa requires a twenty-fold increase in in its net electricity-generating capacity — the power equivalent to the building of 7,000 new nuclear power plants — preliminary work by the LaRouche Economic Task Force has found.
This electricity would not only be necessary to power hospitals, but to run the whole economy: water purification plants and irrigation, manufacturing plants, high-speed rail systems, homes and apartments, etc.
The populations of Africa’s 54 nations consumed, collectively, in 2017, 683 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. For a continent of 1.2 billion people, this is gravely insufficient. The Task Force used the United States’ per capita electricity consumption annually as a provisional standard. Remember, this means the total electricity used for the total U.S. economy—manufacturing, agriculture, housing, etc.—expressed per person. To reach that working standard, Africa would require raising electricity consumption to 14,450 billion kilowatt-hours annually, for all purposes of the economy, an increase in electricity consumption of an additional 13,770 billion kilowatt-hours. This is a twenty-fold increase.
