Solar and wind power could mitigate conflict in northeast Africa

A new study argues that several disagreements between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt around Africa’s largest hydropower plant, the new Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), could be alleviated by massively expanding solar and wind power across the region. Adapting GERD operation to support grid integration of solar and wind power would provide tangible energy and water benefits to all involved countries, creating regional win-win situations. “Our results call for integrated hydro-solar-wind planning to be taken up in the GERD negotiations,” says Sebastian Sterl, energy planning expert at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and KU Leuven in Belgium and lead author of the study, published in Nature Energy.