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First, there is nothing “green,” “clean”or “renewable” about wind and solar energy. The vast amounts of land and raw materials, mines and factories required to build wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines – to harness widely dispersed, insufficient, intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy to benefit Sub-Saharan Africans – are anything but clean, green, renewable or sustainable. In fact, trying to meet those needs would require millions of turbines and billions of solar panels.

Driessen has some good points in many of his columns but he has an unreasonable hatred of renewables. Africa has vast amounts of land, mines and materials. They would just need some factories to build the panels. Eventually all of Africa will have panels creating solar fuels, that solve the storage problem. Energy transmission would be through pipelines and fuel trucks.

That's somewhat in the future. Right now they could cover useless areas in panels that would provide electricity on a fairly predictable basis especially in the dry season. That would provide electricity for cooking for a predictable amount of time each day. They would need some grid or storage to smooth the power delivery for intermittent cooking use, but not a lot. They would not need a billion panels for a billion people, but they would need a lot, probably 100 million or so.

The link he provides ("no single solution") suggests nuclear power and I agree with that and all other power sources. But I will not dismiss solar, it is the future.