Africa's Energy Shift: Capital, Grids, and the New Frontier

Solarplaza and FMO are once again co-hosting the Future of Energy Summit in Amsterdam on 24 and 25 March 2026, an event dedicated to accelerating renewable energy investment and deployment in emerging markets across Africa, Latin America, and Central & Southeast Asia. For this edition, the event theme, "Navigating change in the energy transition," spotlights the critical need to adapt to evolving global dynamics and financial models.

To set the tone for the summit, the "Agents of Change: Catalysts for the Energy Transition in Emerging Markets" white paper was published, featuring interviews with six leaders driving electrification in developing nations. As we continue to profile those accelerating the energy transition, we secured an additional, crucial perspective from Olusola Lawson (Sola Lawson), Co-Managing Director at AIIM (African Infrastructure Investment Managers). With over 16 years of experience in corporate finance and infrastructure equity investing, Olusola has been responsible for originating, executing, and managing over $500 million of equity invested across various sectors, including power and renewables in Africa. His perspective offers a powerful complement to the "Agents of Change" series, focusing on the structural shifts needed—from private-sector innovation to critical infrastructure development—to scale clean energy across the continent.

What do you consider to be the most important change you've contributed to in the energy transition over the past year?

Over the past year, AIIM has focused on unlocking private-sector driven clean energy solutions. A standout achievement was our support for the NOA Group platform, an independent power producer and energy trader established in late 2022 to supply businesses with affordable renewable power. Through NOA, we pioneered an aggregation model that combines a dispersed portfolio of wind, solar and battery storage projects to deliver electricity to multiple customers via wheeling (using existing transmission lines). In 2024 this model reached a milestone with financial close on 239 MW of wind capacity, including the 140 MW Ishwati wind farm, the first major wind project in South Africa where the power purchaser is a start-up trading company. This landmark deal (publicly announced in early 2025) was hailed as a “significant game changer” for demonstrating how private off-takers and innovative business models can accelerate renewable energy deployment even amid a national power crisis.

In addition, AIIM has worked to bridge the energy transition financing gap. We launched the African Transition Acceleration Fund (ATAF 1) in 2025 – a pan-African investment vehicle designed to support early-stage and scale-up opportunities across key energy transition themes. This fund targets “clean electrons” (on-grid and off-grid renewables, energy storage, transmission infrastructure), “clean molecules” (e.g. green hydrogen/ammonia, biofuels), and sustainable transport solutions. By providing development and growth capital to clean energy platforms and developers, ATAF 1 addresses a critical bottleneck: the shortage of early-stage funding for African energy transition projects, which has historically limited the pipeline of bankable projects. Our most important contribution this past year has been to innovate both on the project model side and the financing side – proving new ways to deliver clean power to consumers and mobilising new pools of capital to drive the continent’s shift to sustainable energy.

What do you see as the most significant game-changer in the energy transition for emerging markets in recent years?

In recent years, the single most significant game-changer for the energy transition in emerging markets has been the dramatic reduction in renewable energy costs coupled with advances in energy storage. The cost of solar and wind power has plummeted, making clean energy the cheapest source of new electricity in many markets. For example, solar PV costs have fallen by roughly 33% every time global capacity doubled between 2010 and 2023, a stunning learning-curve effect that has made solar power increasingly affordable across the developing world. This cost revolution, along with technology improvements, means that renewable projects are now economically competitive without heavy subsidies. As a result, emerging economies can leapfrog to cleaner energy: we see businesses and communities installing solar panels en masse to escape expensive, unreliable grids and volatile fossil fuel prices.

Equally game-changing is the emergence of viable energy storage and modern grid solutions that overcome renewables’ intermittency. The maturation of battery energy storage systems (BESS) is allowing wind and solar to function as reliable power sources. As batteries become cheaper and more widely deployed, they enable renewable energy to be stored and used on demand, fundamentally improving grid stability and extending clean power access beyond daylight hours. We are already witnessing this in Africa: large-scale battery projects are being rolled out to support the grid. In South Africa, for example, the state utility Eskom has initiated procurement of ~343 MW of utility-scale batteries (as part of a 500 MW BESS initiative) to help buffer the grid and address the country’s long-running power shortages. This shows that storage is moving from a behind-the-meter backup role to a strategic asset for load management and peak supply, enabling renewables to displace fossil generation during critical demand periods.

Another pivotal development has been policy and market liberalisation in the power sector of emerging markets. Many countries have started opening up their electricity markets – allowing independent power producers and private buyers to transact which unleashes competition and accelerates renewable investment. For instance, regulations in South Africa were reformed in 2022 to permit large-scale private generation and wheeling of power to multiple off-takers, breaking the monopoly of the state utility. Similarly, other markets (from Nigeria to Egypt) are granting direct grid access for private projects and enabling renewable energy trading. This trend is enormously significant: instead of the energy transition being driven solely by government-owned utilities or subsidies, it creates a level playing field where private capital, producers, and consumers can directly participate. The result is a surge in corporate PPAs and merchant renewable projects across emerging economies. In our experience, this shift has been a game-changer – it has unlocked new funding sources and business models (as our NOA platform illustrates) and dramatically scaled up the deployment of clean energy in markets that adopt such enabling frameworks.

In your opinion, what is one crucial change that absolutely must happen in the next few years to advance the energy transition?

Building the transmission line and battery storage

To advance the energy transition in the next few years, one absolutely crucial change is the aggressive development of enabling infrastructure – in particular, expanding the electricity transmission network and deploying energy storage at scale. These overlooked pieces of the power system are critical to unlock the full potential of renewables: without them, clean generation cannot be delivered where and when it’s needed.

Expand and modernise transmission networks: Massive investment is needed to build new transmission lines and upgrade grid capacity, especially in Africa and other emerging markets. The reason is simple – the best renewable energy resources (sun, wind, hydro) are often located far from the population and industrial centers that need the power. Today, much of this potential goes untapped because we lack the long-distance high-voltage lines to transmit electricity across regions. In short, transmission is the backbone of the energy transition and scaling up renewable energy must go hand-in-hand with grid expansion. Accelerating these projects (many of which take years to plan and construct) is an urgent priority for the next phase of the transition.

Scale up energy storage deployment: Alongside grids, large-scale battery storage must be rapidly rolled out to support renewable integration. Solar and wind power are intermittent by nature – without storage, countries risk having excess generation when conditions are good and shortages when they aren’t. Grid-scale batteries and other storage solutions solve this by storing surplus energy and releasing it when demand peaks or when renewable output dips, effectively turning variable renewables into dependable, on-demand power sources. We’ve already seen pioneering examples proving this concept: for instance, the Kenhardt solar-plus-storage complex in South Africa (one of the world’s largest such projects. Likewise, many utilities are now adding battery banks to solar farms or wind parks so that clean energy can be dispatched after sunset and stabilise the grid.

In summary, upgrading the grid and investing in storage are must-haves for the next stage of the energy transition. These infrastructural changes will enable us to connect more renewable generation swiftly and use it optimally. At AIIM, we strongly believe that focusing on these areas: facilitating transmission projects, supporting large battery deployments, and attracting the capital to fund them – is absolutely crucial to advance the energy transition in Africa and other emerging markets. By building the “pipes and batteries” that underpin a modern green power system, we can vastly accelerate the shift to clean energy and ensure its benefits (reliable, affordable power and a stable climate) reach all communities in the coming years.

Join the Agents of Change in Amsterdam

Olusola Lawson’s insightful comments underscore a critical theme: the energy transition's success now hinges on unlocking private capital for innovative models and essential infrastructure like transmission and storage. This focus on market liberalization and financing mechanisms perfectly complements the insights shared by the six leaders in our original report.

To hear more perspectives like this one, join the global mix of developers, investors, financial institutions, and asset owners at the Future of Energy Summit. The event takes place on 24 and 25 March 2026 in Amsterdam.

And if you haven't yet, you can download the full white paper, "Agents of Change: Catalysts for the Energy Transition in Emerging Markets," to discover the personal contributions and visions of all featured leaders. Access to the full white paper is available by signing up for a free Solarplaza account on the resource page:

• View the Event: Future of Energy Summit

• Download the Full White Paper: Agents of Change: Catalysts for the Energy Transition in Emerging Markets