Declining cost of renewables and climate change curb the need for African hydropower expansion.

Across continental Africa, more than 300 new hydropower projects are under consideration to meet the future energy demand that is expected based on the growing population and increasing energy access. Yet large uncertainties associated with hydroclimatic and socioeconomic changes challenge hydropower planning. In this work, we show that only 40 to 68% of the candidate hydropower capacity in Africa is economically attractive.

Regionalization of the SWAT+ model for projecting climate change impacts on sediment yield: An application in the Nile basin.

Study Region: Nile basin.

Study Focus: Several studies have shown a relationship between climate change and changes in sediment yield. However, there are limited modeling applications that study this relationship at regional scales mainly due to data availability and computational cost.

A spatiotemporal atlas of hydropower in Africa for energy modelling purposes.

The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diurnal and seasonal scales across all continents, this is not yet the case for hydropower. Here, we present a newly developed open-access African hydropower atlas, containing seasonal hydropower generation profiles for nearly all existing and several hundred future hydropower plants on the African continent.