Water scarcity biggest threat to North Africa’s green energy drive 

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• Demand pushing green energy
• Lack of financing a problem
• Governance failures

Water scarcity is the biggest hurdle to the development of renewable power across North Africa, along with a lack of financing and governance failures, a new report says.

Nevertheless, countries in the region are boosting production of sustainable sources of energy, pushed by unmet domestic demand and the European Union’s increasing hunger for imports of fossil-fuel alternatives. 

Water is the “secret ingredient” of the energy transition and one that is often glossed over, said Mohammed Mahmoud, a policy expert who, until recently, led climate and water research at the Washington DC-based Middle East Institute (MEI).

Production of green hydrogen, for instance, relies on electrolysis, where renewable power is used to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

“Surface water supplies are limited in North Africa: there’s the Nile and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco,” Mahmoud said on Monday at a virtual event for the launch of a new MEI report. “But a lot of the region is dependent on ground water resources, and those are finite and mostly not renewable.”

Mix in desalination and you get an “interesting paradox”, Mahmoud said. 

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“You are generating safe water for usage, but that also has a higher energy component,” he said. “And one of the discussion points is, is it actually feasible in the larger sense to use desalinated water to create green hydrogen?” 

The new MEI report, titled ​​North Africa’s Power Shift, found that Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia are at a crossroads in the transition to green energy as they balance abundant natural resources and strategic locations with constraints stemming from governance, planning and climate financing.

Mirette Mabrouk, who heads MEI’s Egypt Studies programme and co-authored the report, said: “North Africa is one of the areas that is going to be hit the hardest by climate change, but it is getting a very, very small amount of money. 

“In addition, a lot of the money is given out as loans, which further saddles these countries with debt when many are already up to their eyeballs in debt.”

The report argues that renewables such as solar and wind have been ramping up “impressively” in Egypt and hold significant potential for the long term. 

To get there, however, it is imperative that the country learns from its “mismanagement” of the domestic gas market, which continues to cause energy shortages, said Colby Connelly, director of the MEI’s economics and energy programme.

Morocco, lacking oil and gas reserves and thus dependent on energy imports, launched its energy transition early, more than a decade ago. Despite some progress, the process has encountered delays and failed to meet its targets, the report found.

Growing consumption

Data cited by co-author Rachid Aourraz of the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis showed the country as the fifth in Africa for electricity production in 2023, with a total of over 3,700MW, and second only to Egypt in the Arab world.

“However, the transition to an economy completely dependent on renewables is still a long way off,” Aourraz wrote, arguing that Morocco should focus on generating “significant investment into renewable infrastructure”.

Growing domestic electricity consumption has led the leadership of Algeria, a major oil and gas exporter, to look at renewables to meet some of that demand while preserving its foreign sales of fossil fuels, said Andrew Farrand, director for Middle East and North Africa at the political risk consultancy Horizon Engage, another of the report’s authors.

“We have seen signatures earlier this year of over three gigawatts of new solar power projects that will be coming online over the coming year, year-plus, and will multiply Algeria’s renewable capacity seven-fold during that time,” Farrand said on Monday.

Algeria is also showing “cautious curiosity” about its possible part in supplying the European Union with green hydrogen, he said.

Elsewhere in North Africa, Tunisia’s development of alternative sources of green energy is largely driven by a desire to export to the EU, and it is increasingly relying on close cooperation with Italy, said Fadil Aliriza, founder and editor-in-chief of Meshkal, a Tunisian news website.  

The country is also dabbling in new partnerships with China as a means to diversify its renewables dealings, Aliriza said.