Energy Secretary Chris Wright is expected to deliver a message about ending energy poverty at an event this week on scaling up power in Africa. But his comments will come days after the Trump administration eviscerated a 12-year-old initiative called Power Africa that was created to do just that.
“It’s going to be the elephant in the room,” said a former Power Africa official who was granted anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Power Africa’s contracts under the U.S. Agency for International Development have been canceled and staff laid off amid sweeping moves by the Trump administration to dismantle the agency. Among the cuts are a $6 million grant to expand solar power in Zambia and Senegal and a $47 million program to help bring electricity and digital connectivity to health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Scrapping the initiative has raised questions among energy and development experts about what, if anything, it might be replaced with. One concern looms high: that the U.S. could promote oil, gas and coal instead of cleaner forms of energy. That would fit with Wright’s views.
The former CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking services company, has said fossil fuels are necessary to end energy poverty in poorer countries. He has also dismissed concerns about climate change as a “mania.” He told a gathering of conservative leaders in London recently that the goal of zeroing out climate pollution by 2050 was “impoverishing citizens in pursuit of a delusion.”
That has created tension ahead of the Powering Africa summit in Washington, at which Wright will give the keynote speech.
“I think people in the energy access community are going into this event with an open mind,” said Katie Auth, a former Power Africa official who’s now the policy director at the Energy for Growth Hub. “But they’re also wary of the administration potentially turning this into a purely fossil fuel endeavor.”
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
Former President Barack Obama launched Power Africa in 2013 with a goal of adding 30,000 megawatts of cleaner electricity generation to tens of millions of households across the continent, where about half the population doesn’t have electricity.
Since then, the program, primarily overseen by USAID, has laid the groundwork for expanding energy access in countries where solar and wind have become among the cheapest options for electricity. But its focus wasn’t explicitly on climate change or renewable energy — in its early days, the lion’s share of investments were in natural gas.
“A decade into Power Africa, we have proven that powering communities at scale doesn’t have to come at the cost of polluting the planet,” Samantha Power, who ran USAID under former President Joe Biden, said at the opening of last year’s Powering Africa summit.
The slapdash nature of the funding cuts carried out by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have left some supporters of Power Africa hopeful that the program was an unintended casualty and might make a comeback, particularly since energy and critical minerals of the kind that are abundant in parts of Africa are so important to the administration.
Whether President Donald Trump, who has a long history of expressing hostility toward renewable energy, will ease his restraints on international funding for wind or solar remains to be seen.
America first?
Power Africa was meant to be technology agnostic — based on a country’s needs and resources rather than ideology. Kenya, for example, doesn’t have fossil fuels, but it does have plenty of sunlight, while oil-rich Nigeria could do more to make its fossil fuel operations cleaner as it transitions to renewables.
That hasn’t changed much from one administration to the next, according to people involved with the initiative. It’s part of what earned it broad bipartisan support.
The USAID programs provided mostly technical assistance and other types of regulatory and legal support so that private companies, many of them American, would be willing to make investments in a rapidly growing African market.
The program survived Trump’s first term in part because it used a relatively small amount of government money to bring in private dollars.
Nancy Lee, director of sustainable development finance at the Center for Global Development, estimates that Power Africa’s budget since 2013 totaled around $1.2 billion for 42 countries, but helped generate $29 billion in outside finance. It was supporting more than $26 billion in projects with U.S. companies prior to its USAID contracts being terminated.
“It creates and expands new markets for Americans and American businesses, it counters China, and it uses a small amount of aid to catalyze much larger amounts of private finance,” said Lee, pointing to several factors that align the initiative with what Trump says he wants from his America First policy.
Some people who work on energy poverty said the initiative had drifted from its original mission of how power could drive economic growth and job creation while improving health, education and environmental outcomes. Wright’s professed concern for the issue could make him a champion of the cause.
“I think his idea of how the energy transition is working is probably more pragmatic than the people who just look at it purely from a climate perspective,” said Andrew Kamau, co-director of the Energy Opportunity Lab at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a former official in Kenya’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mining. “At its core, what we’re saying is we need to give people the most reliable and affordable energy they can get.”
Climate advocates argue that clean energy is a better choice than fossil fuels for development, given the growing damages that are stemming from rising temperatures caused largely by fossil fuel combustion.
“It would be an act of folly for Africa, whose people are paying the heaviest price of fossil fuel-driven climate change, to continue to rely on dirty energy,” Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based think tank, said in an email.
Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has advised different administrations on renewable energy policy, said clean energy is better at addressing energy access needs since fossil fuel projects often go to powering industry.
“If you can separate out the performance from the politics, clean energy in my technical analysis is usually a better investment,” he said.
Kammen, who is scheduled to chair a closed-door session at the Powering Africa summit with African ministers and heads of utilities, expects them to ask the same question: What’s the role of the U.S. now?
The two-day summit, beginning Thursday, will include panels on how mining can be powered with clean energy and how the Trump administration’s push to expand oil and gas production could affect Africa.
Landon Derentz, senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, said Wright’s view that natural gas is needed to solve energy poverty is consistent with the interests of developing communities that see it as a transition fuel. But he said they’ll want to use their own resources rather than buy U.S. gas, a view that could create tension with Trump’s plans to achieve energy dominance.
Other challenges stem from dismantling USAID.
The agency had often laid the groundwork for support from the Department of Energy or energy investments that are managed by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, America’s development bank. So far, those Power Africa investments haven’t been canceled.
But Auth, of the Energy for Growth Hub, worries that without an overarching initiative those efforts could splinter and become less effective.
“Part of the core purpose of Power Africa was to bring those folks together in one room and coordinate their actions and say, ‘This isn’t just a bunch of isolated agencies. This is about a national goal and figuring out how to get everybody to work together,” she said.
This story also appears in Energywire.
