Renewable Energy Is Shaping Up to End Decades of Energy Colonialism
The Heat Check
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Renewable Energy Could End Decades of Energy Colonialism<br>Rapidly decreasing costs of renewables offer an independent development pathway and economic freedom many nations could have only dreamed of
Ryan Hanson<br>Aug 15, 2026
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Africa is the youngest and fastest growing continent on Earth, yet development has often evaded the nations aside from a lucky few. This comes down to a myriad of historic and current reasons: legacy of colonialism, corruption, destabilization in the Cold War, foreign meddling in domestic politics, etc. To say that the post-colonial period hasn’t been easy feels like the understatement of a century. For many nations, it has been crises after crises.<br>Yet, even with such challenges, there is a sense of optimism to be found. A literal light at the end of the tunnel so to say. Africa has 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources and less than 1 percent of current installed solar capacity. This represents a transformative natural gift, and if managed properly, the path to true energy independence and economic freedom.
Almost 600 million people in Africa still lack access to electricity, and more than 900 million still cook with biofuels such as wood. That’s fairly established and agreed upon, but what folks can’t agree on is why it’s still true after decades of “development” financing from foreign nations and multi-national organizations.<br>For a century, energy development in the Global South has followed a rather basic formula: a foreign company or state decides to finance a power plant, dictates the debt terms, and exports the profits out. Coal and gas plants in Africa are often still financed this way, with the added twist that the debt survives even when the plant doesn’t deliver reliable power.<br>Part of the answer: the financing itself reproduces colonial extraction patterns rather than breaking them. Large hydrogen and solar megaprojects pitched to North African states, for instance, have been criticized as a new resource grab: the power gets built to serve European energy security, the receiving country takes on the debt and the land-use costs, and the electricity doesn’t end up going to the nations that built it in the first place. A 2025 review of Africa’s energy landscape put it plainly: the continent’s renewable potential is constrained by neocolonial patterns of resource extraction combined with rigid fiscal limits (due to World Bank and IMF loans) and fossil fuel dependency inherited from the same donor groups now writing and sponsoring the climate checks.<br>Ghana is the clearest current example of what this development model produces. Under IMF-backed programs (originally meant to stabilize the country’s finances) the energy sector’s debt has continued to compound rather than resolving. By mid-2025, Ghana’s cumulative energy-sector liabilities had surpassed $3 billion, most of it owed to independent power producers and fuel suppliers that built and now run the country’s thermal plants. Even as Ghana prepared to exit its IMF Extended Credit Facility program this year, economists warned the energy debt still threatened spending on health and education, because the underlying structure, dollar-denominated power contracts serviced with Ghanan Cedi revenue, never actually changed. The IMF’s own prescription was more of the same medicine: raise tariffs on electricity, renegotiate a few contracts, tighten collections. That treats the debt as a management failure when in reality it is a structural one. Baked into a financing model where the plant, the fuel, and the loan all originate outside the country and get paid for in a currency the country lacks any control over. Solar, and specifically the decentralized, locally owned version of solar, is the first energy technology in a long time that doesn’t require accepting these deals.<br>Unfortunately, African nations received just about 2 percent of global clean energy investments despite, as previously stated, sitting on some of the best solar and wind resources on the planet. The IEA puts the continent’s real annual financing need at $190 billion through 2030. What it’s getting is not even a rounding error of that amount, while fossil fuel projects elsewhere in the world continue attracting billions in capital that developing nations are told is too risky for them.
Centralized power, whether coal, gas, or a mega-hydro dam, needs a grid, a national utility. Usually a foreign lender or multinational construction company will be standing behind all of it. That’s the underlying point where control gets exercised: whoever finances the plant sets the terms and receives the paychecks once it is done. Sure, a nation may receive billions in financing on paper, but if the company building this project is Australian and the electricity company running it is French, the money that flowed into the developing nation will ultimately flow...