COP 27: AU launches common platform to connect energy users and regulatory agencies
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (PANA) - The African Union (AU) has launched a digital platform to connect energy sector regulators and users through a common interface with the aim of ensuring efficient energy consumption.
The newly launched platform, the Digital Green Corridor, creates an “integration highway” for African countries to harmonise regulatory and investment policies.
The integration of these policies would be done in ways that advance the continent’s green transformation by leveraging existing interstate legal frameworks.
Those frameworks include the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) and policy instruments such as the AU-led Green Recovery Action Plan for Africa (GRAP).
The launch took place on the sidelines of the UN (COP 27) Climate Change Conference.
The Transition Fuels Oversight and Regulatory Management Accelerator (Transforma Platform), combines business, governance, and digital platform to connect African energy regulators, industry actors, and consumers around a common interface to advance Africa’s clean energy and green transformation agenda.
Vice Presidents Esperanca Maria Francisco da Costa of Angola, Eve Bazaiba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Yemi Osinbajo of Nigeria, attended the launch of the platform.
AU Commissioners, Amani Abou-Zeid and Josefa Correia Sacko presided over the launch of the project, which marked a major highlight of the Africa programme at COP 27.
President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia was represented by Hon. Collins Nzovu, Minister of Green Economy and Environment.
"The launch of the Transforma platform by the continent’s political and technocratic leadership signals the AU’s commitment to coordinating the search for durable and practical pathways to Africa’s sustainable future," the AU said in a statement.
Some 600 million people, or 43% of the total population, lack access to electricity, most of them in sub‐Saharan Africa.
About 970 million people in Africa lack access to clean cooking with the attendant deaths and other health risks.
Transforma is a critical module of the 4D Digital Green Corridor jointly promoted by the AU and its strategic partners mobilised by AfroChampions.
Osinbajo said innovations like the 4D Digital Green Corridor and Transforma are critical to finance and more broadly, resource mobilisation on the continent.
As an agile implementation vehicle, Transforma is focused on the innovative adaptation of already existing instruments to practically speed up actions in the value chains of transition fuels, especially natural gas, and its derivatives, across Africa rather than putting up new policies and legal instruments.
Digitalization of natural gas regulatory and safety frameworks, distribution networks, marketplace clearing and settlement mechanisms, and tokenization protocols should greatly advance the long overdue modularisation of infrastructure needed to accelerate the rapid uptake of cleaner, cheaper, gas products across the services and manufacturing sectors.
Many African countries have instituted policies to promote the switch from unsustainable biomass to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for household energy needs.
Others are exploring the use of clean gas for public and private transport applications.
The transition of thermal power plants to gas from high-emission fuels like heavy fuel oil (HFO) and crude oil has intensified in a growing number of African countries.
The pace of these shifts is unfortunately not quick enough to meet critical timelines in Agenda 2063, the SDGs framework, and other continental development blueprints for transformation.
In particular, production infrastructure at the meso-level has lagged behind the gas adoption trend even though “embedded generation” opportunities have seen some uptake in a few industrial enclaves in Africa.
Through the combined regulatory and innovation exchanges and the unified digital ecosystem created by Transforma, an active implementation corridor will simplify gas trading between emerging hubs in Africa and major consumption centers whilst mitigating the safety and quality risks of gas distribution.
By lowering prices, boosting value discovery, intensifying trade networks, and cutting the costs of regulatory action whilst alleviating the burden of compliance on the industry, Transforma is poised to open a new era for gas and transition fuels mainstreaming in Africa’s quest to eliminate energy poverty whilst future-proofing its industrial base through strategic mastery of green alternatives for fast, high and just economic growth.
-0- PANA AO/MA 15Nov2022
