Is Africa leapfrogging to renewables or heading for carbon lock-in? - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Jan 05, 2023 181 likes •234 views

Is Africa leapfrogging to renewables or heading for carbon lock-in? Predicting success of power-generation projects X Galina Alova, Philipp Trotter, Alex Money X Work in progress. Paper under review. Please do not cite. NeurIPS 2020 Workshop

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Galina Alova, Philipp Trotter, Alex Money

NeurIPS 2020 Workshop Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning

11 December 2020

Is Africa leapfrogging to renewables or heading for carbon lock-in? Predicting success of power-generation projects

Work in progress. Paper under review. Please do not cite.

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we use largest dataset on Africa’s commissioned, failed & planned power plants, combined with country-level governance & economic indicators we build Gradient Boosted Trees (LightGBM) model, given its merits:

works well out-of-the-box
deals well missing values
good interpretability with SHAP values
high performance, low bias
captures non-linear relationships
possibility to inject domain knowledge

We predict probabilities of planned plant commissioning and estimate capacity mix in 2030

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Capacity more than doubles, but transition to renewables slow

Africa’s current capacity mix in 2019 and predicted capacity mix in 2030 by fuel type

WORK IN PROGRESS. DO NOT CITE

Share of non- hydro RE remains low

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Reaching RE share of current studies requires immediate large- scale cancellation of majority of planned fossil-fuel plants

Comparison of projected generation mix for Africa in 2030 by extant studies and our study

WORK IN PROGRESS. DO NOT CITE

In terms of overall generation, our prediction is similar to extant studies

Significant cancellation of planned fossil-fuel capacity from 2025 Immediate cancellation of most planned fossil-fuel capacity

but we predict much lower RE share

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