A new study for IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, shows that continental Africa possesses an onshore wind potential of almost 180,000 Terawatt hours (TWh) per annum, enough to satisfy the entire continent’s electricity demands 250 times over.
The analysis, carried out by Everoze, finds that 27 countries in Africa have enough wind potential on their own to satisfy the entire continental electricity demand, estimated at 700 TWh annually. Algeria has the highest resource with a total potential of 7,700GW. Fifteen other countries have technical wind potentials over 1,000GW including Mauritania, Mali, Egypt, Namibia, South Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya. The analysis also finds that over one-third of Africa’s wind potential is in areas with very strong winds, averaging greater than 8.5 meters per second. IFC worked in collaboration with Everoze, Vortex and GWEC to conduct the analysis. Everoze drew on high-resolution mesoscale data from the Global Wind Atlas and applied basic constraints for technical restrictions (i.e. slopes, elevation, minimum wind speed, land use cover) and basic environmental restrictions (i.e. population density, protected areas).
