SCALING UP OR SCALING BACK?

hen the World Bank’s Scaling Solar initiative was recently called “a victim of its own success,” the response from the Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) was suitably pithy. A letter from the IFC published on 22 May said that the comment was accurate on one count: it was a success.

The IFC was minded to hit back after former investment analyst Teal Emery, writing on the Energy for Growth Hub, accused Scaling Solar of sending inaccurate price signals and undermining market growth in Africa.

That criticism focused on Zambia, ing Solar programme, which aimed to ments seeking to build solar capacity.

ing Solar itself did not scale and that although thoughtfully designed, only tion to Zambia, solar projects were built in Senegal and Uzbekistan).

More broadly, he said, the initiative viding a demonstration model that could be replicated widely. Nor did it scale the broader solar market it was intended to catalyse.

WDespite falling prices and rapid remains a laggard, in Teal’s words. In gion of over a billion people, only one rica (population 62m) has been built to date.

The criticism has found wider opment has noted that the Zambia project – which involved $24.5m in private equity investment, $81.5m nance. That, it said, helped explain why the Zambian experience was proving so hard to replicate. ting Africa to boost energy through sive process. jects are still worth doing in terms of achieving the necessary hard yards. Scaling Solar is helping provide over ergy in eight of the world’s poorest countries, an achievement that was near inconceivable at the dawn of the project, said the IFC. It is a tool that has worked again and again, noted its head of media Adam Hodge.

The World Bank project’s defenders argue that it was developed precisely ca, despite the region’s huge potential. Most utilities in Africa could not have nate in Africa, given the importance of evolving mechanisms that facilitate an ble energy schemes.

The challenge is particularly acute in a global context where investment tional Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment report 2023, this year, ment in electricity generation. Solar is the star performer and more than $1bn a day is expected to go into solar investments in 2023 ($380bn for the year as a whole), edging this spending time.

As the IFC argues, solar PV can now deliver power less expensively and for renewable energy remains a work in progress. But the reality is the more ments come into place, the more likely will eventually make headway and newable capacity.

The question then is why schemes like Scaling Solar are not being taken up beyond the likes of Zambia and Senegal. The IFC’s view is simple. It available to any country that wants to pick it up and use it.