Welcome to Energy in Botswana

Dumelang. My name is Mike Mooiman. I am a visiting professor from the US and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Botswana, where I am associated with the Clean Energy Research Centre at the university. I am here in Botswana until June 2016 to study energy issues and, particularly, battery storage associated with off-grid solar projects. I have been studying, teaching and writing about energy issues in the State of New Hampshire for a number of years now and my other blog, “Energy in New Hampshire”, has resonated well with regulators, legislators, academics, business people and the general public in New Hampshire. I hope to accomplish the same here in Botswana. The objective of this blog is to inform and educate students and the general public about energy issues in Botswana. Through my writing and research, I learn and educate myself and, as a reader, I hope that you will learn something in the process as well.

Information here can sometimes be very hard to come by and I am pretty sure that there will be times that I will, in my analysis and opinion, completely miss the point because I don’t have all the information—but that is one of the joys of blogging. Through your comments and insights, I will be able to correct and update the data and posts I have presented and, over time, build up a useful database of information about the energy situation in Botswana. So please do not be shy about commenting on my posts – I want your input and perspective.

Just a quick word about my background: I am an engineer by trade but have spent a good deal of my career managing and owning businesses. During these years, I have always worked at the intersection of technology, finance and energy. I developed an early interest in designing new processes, working to make them energy-efficient, and getting them funded on the basis of energy savings. The energy field has always appealed to me because it is so vitally important to our economic wellbeing, standing squarely at the intersection of technology, finance and policy. Even if we don’t think about it much, energy and energy issues permeate our lives and daily activities. There is nothing we do that does not have some energy component to it.

At my home university, Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, I have also had the opportunity to build a new type of MBA – one that looks at energy from a business and sustainability viewpoint. This is our MBA in Energy and Sustainability Studies. In this program, students can spend 25% of their MBA studies studying and thinking about energy and sustainability matters. It is our goal that these students will enter the workforce with a good understanding of energy issues and that they will be able to assist and direct the organizations they join in these matters. In fact, many of our graduates are already doing so: some are working for wood-burning power plants, some for solar companies, and others for large wind-power operations.  

I first visited Botswana in 1985 with my brother when we took a drive from Johannesburg to Maun and, in a trip of a lifetime, made our way into the Okavango where we spent several days touring the delta with a guide in his mokoro. I have always wanted to return to Botswana and, 30 years later, I have finally done so.

Even though my main research topic is very much focused on storage of solar-generated electricity, I will be undertaking a deep study of the energy concerns in this country to provide context for my project. As part of my research, I chat to people, read a lot, and work hard to find information so I that can present the facts about energy matters. As a visitor to this wonderful country, I am here to learn and understand and I will do my best to avoid taking hard positions on difficult energy issues. Ultimately, it will be up to the citizens of Botswana, their elected leaders, government officials and regulators to make the decisions that will work best for them. However, I have learnt that decisions about energy issues are best done with as much information and data as possible and hopefully this blog will, in a small way, provide some of that information and illumination.

Unfortunately, Botswana is not an energy “island”: it does not generate sufficient energy for its own needs and is very dependent on imports of energy, particularly electricity and fossil fuels, from other countries in Southern Africa. Therefore, when considering energy matters in Botswana, one often has to consider them in the broader Southern African context: many of my posts will consequently cover matters of wider regional concern.

Before I jump into energy issues in Botswana, I would like to present some details about the country to provide some background information for my readers from the US.

So here are some basic facts about Botswana:

• It is a landlocked country in Southern Africa, sharing borders with South Africa to the south and east, Namibia to the west and north, Zimbabwe to the east, and— in the shortest border in the world—with Zambia for ~150 meters in the very north.
• During the period from 1880 to 1966,Botswana was a British Protectorate known as Bechuanaland: on independence 49 years ago, its name was changed to Botswana.
• It has a population of about 2 million and a land area just slightly less than that of Texas.
• Since independence, it has had a stable democracy and astute leadership. It has avoided many of the problems, such as political instability, wide-spread corruption, and press censorship that have plagued many other African countries.
• It has a great deal of mineral wealth, largely in the form of diamonds, with some copper and coal.
• 80% of the country is covered by the Kalahari Desert and 80% of the population lives in the eastern part of the country which is home to most of the large urban areas. Approximately 60% of the population has migrated to these urban areas.
• The capital and largest city, with a population of about 250,000, is Gaborone.
• It is also home to several universities. The largest is the University of Botswana with a student body of ~17,000.

Gaborone, which is my home for the next year, is an interesting and rather random mixture of new and old. It has modern casinos and shopping malls, intersecting with traditional ways of life and simple homes, and cattle wandering down the main roads. Many of the residential communities are a hodgepodge of new and old, with large mansions built right next to humble homes.

Botswana is a hot, dry and dusty country with warm winters and very hot summers, where temperatures exceeding 100^oF (38^oC) are common. At present, the water situation in the southern part of the country is problematic and Gaborone and surrounding areas are suffering from profound water shortages: just recently, the city was without water for several days in a row. The situation is anticipated to get worse as we move into the summer. The rainy season is October through February but the forecast for this year is for a drought. Added to this, there has recently been news that South African dams, which supply 16% of Gaborone’s water, are contemplating cutting off supply due to the drought and very low dam levels on their side of the border. It looks like it will be an extra hot and very dry summer coming up. With some of those basic facts about Botswana under our belt, let us turn our thoughts to matters of energy.

The first issue I have to deal with when it comes to information about energy is: where do I find the information? In my research of the past few years, which involves US states, I have regularly turned to the Energy Information Agency (EIA) of the US Government, so this was my starting point. I found that the EIA has some information regarding other countries and, according to them, the 2012 energy consumption for Botswana was 65,415 Terajoules (TJ or 10¹² J).

However, I wanted to confirm this number so I went to the energy data base of the International Energy Agency (IEA) which does a good job of collecting global numbers through surveys. According to this source, energy consumption in 2012 for Botswana was 86,206 TJ. Now this is a 32% increase over the EIA numbers—which can hardly be accounted for by statistical differences! As I continued my research, I came upon some energy data from the United Nations (UN) which indicated that the 2012 energy consumption was 69,904 TJ. Now this is closer to the EIA number, but still does not help resolve the discrepancies. As a result, we have the three sets of numbers shown in the following table.

An examination of the data underlying these numbers indicated very different estimates for the consumption of biofuel (wood). The IEA numbers were 4.5x higher than the UN estimate. Developing reliable biofuel consumption estimates is very difficult for developing countries and certainly bears further investigation: this will be a topic for a future blog.  For the moment, I am going to go with the IEA numbers simply because I know their numbers are highly regarded in the international energy community and they appear to do a good job of data collection and analysis.

There is a Department of  Energy within the Botswana Ministry of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources but, at least at this time, current information regarding energy supply and consumption is hard to come by. The most recent set of data is from 2008 and does not include estimates of biofuel consumption.

For most folks, numbers such as terajoules are somewhat difficult to relate to or comprehend. I find it useful to convert these to number of barrels of oil per person. Most of us have a sense of the size of a barrel of oil (which contains 42 gallons or 159 litres) so these units allow some comprehension of the magnitude of these energy values. If Botswana’s energy consumption is 85,228 TJ for a population of about two million, this works out to 0.042 MJ per person, which is equivalent to 7 barrels of oil per person for the year.  Compare this to New Hampshire, where the annual energy consumption for 2012 was 298,579 TJ for 1.3 million people or 38 barrels of oil per person.  

New Hampshire’s per capita consumption is 5.3x that of Botswana. The fact that the US per capita energy consumption is so much greater than that of other countries in the world is hardly a new fact, but, having just left New Hampshire for Botswana, it did resonate with me. Of course, many reasons contribute to greater energy consumption of this US state, such as its colder climate, the higher standard of living, and the higher level of economic output, but the differences are, as shown in the figure below, still stark and are food for thought. 

So I leave you contemplating the figure above. Welcome to “Energy in Botswana” and don’t be shy about weighing in.

Until next time, remember to turn off the lights when you leave the room.

Tsamayang Sentle*

Mike Mooiman

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

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(*Go well or Goodbye in Setswana)