Today, around 600 million people in Africa completely lack access to electricity. African leaders are under immense pressure to ramp up energy production to fill the continent’s current needs as well as to meet skyrocketing demand projections, and to do this in a way that doesn’t break the bank or compromise climate goals. This is known as an energy trilemma: producing energy that is sufficient, affordable, and sustainable.
This task is a daunting one for all contexts, but especially for Africa, which is contending with ongoing economic development, some of the least developed grids on the planet, and a coming population boom. The continent’s population is expected to double between now and 2050; by midcentury, a quarter of the global population will be in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, Africa is faced with an intense and urgent imperative: to leapfrog over fossil fuels and straight into developing a renewable-powered economy.
Rural parts of the continent remain severely underserved and disconnected from power grids, and innovative solutions will be necessary to electrify these regions. Some African researchers are looking into the potential of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) as a clean energy solution in rural areas that are hard to electrify.
MFCs rely on the natural metabolic processes of microorganisms to act as biocatalysts to convert organic waste materials from farms, food waste, or wastewater into electricity. In more scientific terms, they are “bioreactors that convert the energy in the chemical bonds of organic compounds into electrical energy through catalytic activity of microorganisms under anaerobic conditions.”
MFCs are a potentially promising solution for compound crises – most notably energy security, global warming and wastewater management – particularly in rural contexts, as they can provide a cheap, small-scale, and sustainable way to generate power. They are also cleaner and more efficient than other biomass applications since they don’t involve combusting the biomass (resulting in carbon dioxide emissions), but instead derive energy directly from it.
“Progress made over the past two decades has c