A decade ago, when Nigeria’s then-president Goodluck Jonathan announced the master plan for the continent’s biggest new urban development, Centenary City, a satellite of the capital Abuja, he took care to stress that it would be independent of the notoriously erratic national power grid.
Absent from the tree-lined avenues of the $18.376 billion smart eco-city for 137,000 residents and half a million daily commuters would be the smell and racket of tens of thousands of labouring diesel generators to which Nigerians are so accustomed in Abuja, Lagos, and other cities struggling to keep the lights on.
The largest foreign direct investment (FDI) project in Nigerian history, its design by Cape Town’s Greg Wright Architects boasts not only efficient transportation, biomimetic water and waste management, financial, commercial, residential, science, sports, medical, and cultural facilities – but also autonomous electricity, thanks to its own 500MW gas-fired power station connected directly to a gas terminal.
It was conceived as a legacy project to celebrate Nigeria’s national centenary, alongside the $6 billion Eko Atlantic city for 250,000 residents and an additional 150,000 daily commuters, which already features high-rises going up on the reclaimed foreshore of Victoria Island in Lagos. Eko Atlantic will be served by a dual-fuel power plant, although most of its envisaged 50MW output (later expandable to 1.5GW) will be supplied by natural gas. Panels mounted on top of its water reservoirs will supply 1,600kW of solar power.
Building Centenary City has lagged behind Eko Atlantic, as it has been dogged by greater controversies (land claims by indigenous people evicted from the site, allegations of rule-bending by the companies involved, and a political power struggle between Federal Capital Territory authorities), so its sub-station erected in 2014 currently powers little but a fancy site office. But the ground was broken for the first residential section of the city, the Max Grove Estate of 236 luxury houses, at the end of August last year.
There are three types of current new cities in Africa, all from-scratch developments only lightly reliant on existing, often parlous, state infrastructure. There are self-sufficient satellite city projects on the outskirts of major conurbations, like Centenary City; then there are tech hubs, like the $14.5 billion Konza Technology City for 200,000 residents in Kenya, 64 km south of Nairobi, which is intended to become the heart of the continent’s “silicon savannah”; and lastly, there are dormitory cities for ports and free-trade zones like the 78,000-resident King City, designed to serve the Ghanaian port of Takoradi, which is rapidly expanding thanks to offshore oil wells.
All forms of these new cities require their own power solutions: some, like Konza, are adding more reliable components to the existing national grid, and some, like Tatu City in Kenya, hybridise state and private power generation (often with renewables in the mix), while others, like Centenary City, are designed to be entirely off-grid.
One innovation that has made a huge impact is privately-owned “powerships”, floating oil-fired power stations, which augment the national grid via whichever port they “plug into”, like the Turkish-built Osman Khan that supplies 450MW – fully 26% of Ghana’s entire national capacity. Powerships have also served Sierra Leone, Guinea, Gambia, Senegal, Sudan, and Guinea Bissau – which has received all of its power from a 35MW powership since February 2019. Even land-locked Zambia is served by sharing generation from a powership anchored off Mozambique, while blackout-crippled South Africa is negotiating a 1,220MW powership deal.
Proper data on most new urban developments is often hard to collate and, apparently, the only recent continental study of the phenomenon is a 2019 paper, Spatial challenges for contemporary African new towns and potentials for alternative planning strategies by Dr Rachel Keeton of the University of Twente in the Netherlands and Associate Prof Steffen Nijhuis of the Delft University of Technology in conjunction with the Rotterdam-based International New Town Institute.
The paper defines “new towns” as “planned urban developments for more than 30,000 residents with mixed programmes on greenfield sites, that are developed as a single entity with some degree of political autonomy”.
Unlike the organic, though upmarket, design of Centenary City, the authors write: “From the analysis of the database… it becomes clear that many contemporary new towns in Africa have been developed with strong influences from existing planning models, including the American gated community model, the South African township model, the Chinese grid model, and the French villes nouvelles model.”
Many of these models are too inflexible for local socioeconomic needs, and it almost goes without saying that the SA township model includes the location of dirty industries – like fossil-fuelled power plants – in the lower-income parts of such developments.
The Keeton-Nijhuis paper was based on research from 2015 to 2018, compiling a database of new towns built in Africa since 1960, combined with field research and interviews in eight locations: Tatu City and Konza City in Kenya; Ville Verte Mohammed IV in Morocco; Sheikh Zayed City and 10th of Ramadan City in Egypt; Kilamba in Angola; and Appolonia and Tema in Ghana.
The Dutch paper states: “The majority of these new towns are suburban enclaves catering to higher income groups. They offer amenities ranging in luxury from reliable water and electricity, access to private 24-hour security and horse racing tracks…” It notes, for example, that the $3.5bn Kilamba, one of five new ring cities built on the outskirts of the Angolan capital Luanda in a Chinese state oil-for-development deal, “is one of the only areas in Angola with reliable water, electricity, and sewerage provision”.
Keeton told Africa in Fact that “reliable energy access is often a main attractor mechanism for these new towns. They often have a (private) transformer station and advanced energy infrastructure on-site, although I have yet to see many truly sustainable approaches to energy provision. A few exceptions would be those dependent on solar energy such as… Ville Verte Mohammed VI, Morocco, or BuraNEST, Ethiopia (on a much smaller scale).”
One report, by Mark Akrofi in the World Financial Review, hails gated communities – there are an estimated 6,500 in South Africa alone, and they are “common in cities of many other African countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt” – as perhaps providing a basis for easily replicable sustainable-energy transitions in African cities. He proposes government subsidies assisting private developers in the large-scale integration of solar panels into such residential settlements.
But urban development experts such as Dr Sylvia Croese of the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities have warned that while rapid growth in Africa had excited property developers and political elites, a likely result of “these fantasy plans is a steady worsening of the marginalisation and inequalities that already beset these cities”.
The Dutch paper also stressed that many new city designs are ill-suited to the nature of the communities they serve. For example, they cite Kilamba in saying “heavy infrastructure and strictly-enforced regulations… do not allow for any informality within the new town. As a result, Kilamba is flanked by an informal community along its eastern periphery. Interdependency between the two communities takes the form of service jobs within the new town for residents of the informal community, and the provision of affordable shops, garages, and markets within the informal community.”
This uncomfortably echoes South Africa’s maldevelopment dichotomy, as evidenced by the divide between the glitz of Sandton’s financial capital and the poverty of neighbouring Alexandra township, and creates cultural vacuums within “sanitary” new towns, such as unused public spaces where entrepreneurship is actively discouraged. Also, the very autonomy of such developments often means they are poorly articulated with the transport infrastructure of their surrounding cityscapes: commuting to work from an old to a new city can be hell.
Another 2019 study, by Prof Sylvy Jaglin of the Gustave Eiffel University in France, called Off-grid electricity in sub-Saharan Africa: from rural experiments to urban hybridisations, noted that renewable energy sources, usually developed as “pre-electrification” solutions for rural areas, were being adapted to meet Africa’s energy needs in rapidly urbanising areas. The “decentralised solutions” that are of interest are those that, Jaglin writes, are “institutionalised and well-publicised in the media, (and take) the form of off-grid projects that are themselves part of international programmes”.
She notes that while some solutions to the sub-continent’s energy crisis involve reinforcing, modernising, and extending national infrastructure, there is “another vision, founded on an approach that emphasises decentralised or off-grid solutions, embeddedness in local communities and endogenous local development”.
But she cautions that consumers do not necessarily desire autonomy from the national grid because they see such solutions as merely a “stopgap” measure and would prefer conventional integration into a stable national network. Meanwhile, interest groups such as those who supply generators and fuel often resist their substitution for renewable energy sources. In the end, such “electricity experiments”, Jaglin warns, “necessarily have to operate in co-existence with the grid”.
Examples of a mixed-energy-generation approach come from Rendeavour, the biggest private developer of new cities in Africa, founded in 1995 by New Zealand billionaire investment banker Stephen Jennings, which owns 12,000 hectares of land in major cities in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It has adopted a range of different energy solutions that sometimes integrate with (or even strengthen) national grids, but which are sometimes hybridised with solar, or entirely off-grid with their own power plants.
Rendeavour is responsible for Ghana’s King City and the new 90,000-resident Appolonia City of Light outside of Accra – with a combined price tag of $1 billion – as well as Kenya’s $2.6 billion Tatu City for 70,000 residents and 30,000 day visitors outside Nairobi, the $758 million Kiswishi City outside of Lubumbashi in the DRC, and other developments in Nigeria and Zambia.
Rendeavour spokesperson Tim Beighton told Africa in Fact: “Our developments are designed as integrated live-work-play urban environments, free of the infrastructure deficits of neighbouring city centres.”
Critically, this includes the need for innovative power solutions tailored country by country: “For example, in Kenya, the power supply is a lot more stable than, say, in Nigeria; in all our projects, we try to work with government agencies and tap into the pre-existing power network,” Beighton said.
“In Appolonia, we worked with (the US-sponsored) Ghana Power (Compact) to provide electricity…” to Appolonia’s sub-station via state powerlines. But in 2020, construction began on a private 5MW Axcon Energy solar facility in its industrial park to augment supply.”
In Kenya, Rendeavour built a 66kV sub-station operated by the private Tatu City Power, which runs electricity via two mini-grids – one light current and one heavy current – to residential and commercial/industrial clients in the settlement depending on contracted demand.
In 2019, Tatu City generation was boosted by a 1MW photovoltaic solar installation on the roofs of the Dormans Coffee plant; this was the first part of a 30MW solar plan by Rendeavour. A 2020 proposal for a cold-storage plant there noted that Tatu’s grid was stable, but provided contingency for 79% grid supply, with its own backups of 20% solar and 1% diesel generator.
“In Nigeria,” Beighton said, “at Jigna, the development guidelines are not going to allow generators that you will hear in Lagos… we are not going to allow that to happen. Immediately, we may not be able to get grid supply to the place on an individual housing basis, so we will use solar energy on top of those. In the DRC, we are looking at a wider network, a stand-alone system of gas-powered stations on a smaller scale.”
While the exclusionary enclave nature of much new city planning is a core ethical issue that Africa’s urban developers must address, the power-generating deficit in all African countries looks set to continue the drive towards the energy autonomy of such settlements.
Michael Schmidt is a Johannesburg-based investigative journalist who has worked in 49 countries on six continents. His main focus areas as an Africa correspondent for leading mainstream journals are emerging and high-end technologies, political developments, conflict resolution and transitional justice, and on the continent’s maritime and littoral spaces.
