When Tropical Storm Ana made landfall in Malawi in 2022, it hit the landlocked country’s electricity system hard, destroying a third of its hydropower capacity and causing nationwide system shutdowns.

Even before the storm, Malawi’s power supply – generated mostly from renewables including solar and hydro – had been unreliable for many years, suffering from persistent outages.

The Malawian government is now hoping to improve the stability of its grid power with the construction of a battery energy storage system (BESS) in its capital that will charge up with surplus electricity generated when the sun is shining and hydropower dams are running, and release it when needed.

More than 80% of Malawi’s electricity comes from renewables and the country has been expanding capacity by adding more solar power while decommissioning 78 megawatts (MW) of diesel generation. But climatic impacts such as cyclones disrupt the grid and threaten to reverse energy transition gains.

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To ensure a more stable supply, Malawi is building the 20 MW/30 megawatt hour (MWh) battery storage system in Lilongwe with support from the Global Energy Alliance (GEA), under Mission 300 – an initiative led by development banks and their partners to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.

The project in Malawi aims to stabilise the country’s grid, smooth its intermittent power supply, and reduce its reliance on diesel generators, as well as averting about 10,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year.

Battery energy storage systems act like giant power banks, absorbing clean electricity during periods of lower demand and releasing it for use when demand is high or generation drops. A typical BESS includes battery packs, inverters that allow electricity to flow between the batteries and the grid, transformers, and cooling and safety systems.

Damola Omole, director of the ‘Grids of the Future, Africa’ programme at the GEA, a philanthropic organisation, said BESS offers the “flexibility needed to smoothly integrate high levels of variable renewables” into the power grid. In doing so, it can reduce reliance on expensive diesel generation and protect consumers and industries from rising energy costs, he added.

Can BESS drive Africa’s industrialisation?

As calls to develop local green industries grow louder in Africa, Omole said there is a need to prioritise upgrading national grids with BESS so they can “transmit reliable, cost-reflective power directly to commercial clusters”.

While financiers previously doubted that intermittent solar and wind could meet the needs of industrial production, utility-scale BESS has demonstrated that renewables can deliver “predictable, steady output just like traditional fossil-fuel baseload power”, he added.

In recent years, African leaders, including William Ruto of Kenya, Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe, have called for the continent to use the energy transition to drive green industrialisation and create value from its resources at home.

At a mining investment conference in Nairobi in April, Ruto said Africa had stayed at the bottom of the value chain for too long but would now collaborate to process its minerals within the continent. “We will refine them here and we will manufacture them here,” he told African ministers and business executives.

Kenya seeks regional coordination to build African mineral value chains

However, deploying energy at scale to advance this industrial ambition has long been a problem, while about 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. BESS could therefore become a critical technology in the continent’s development drive, experts say.

Michael Iwu, West Africa business development manager at Empower New Energy, which finances and co-develops renewable energy, said BESS is challenging the narrative that solar and wind power alone cannot provide enough reliable electricity to run factories and other energy-intensive industries. Modern battery systems can now support business operations for several hours, helping maintain production during grid outages, he added.

For GEA’s Omole, the key question has shifted to how quickly countries can build the battery storage, grid infrastructure and market frameworks needed to unlock the potential of renewables.

BESS to help renewables displace fossil fuels

While BESS is still in its initial stages of deployment in Africa, interest is growing as countries look for ways to make renewable energy more reliable.

South Africa is leading with the largest and first of its kind utility-scale BESS on the continent. With the capacity to discharge up to five uninterrupted hours of power, the system is keeping homes and businesses running in Worcester, a southwestern town of more than 100,000 people.

Egypt is also investing heavily in battery storage. In 2025, the country launched its first utility-scale BESS, a 300-MWh facility integrated with a 500 MW solar plant in the southern city of Aswan. It has also committed more than $1 billion to strengthen its electricity grid and update regulation to support battery storage projects.

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Falling battery prices are helping drive the rapid deployment of energy storage. According to BloombergNEF, battery packs for stationary storage (used in BESS) cost an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour in 2025, down 45% from 2024.

Soon the role of BESS in supporting the grid integration of wind and solar could reduce reliance on fossil fuels and help the world meet ambitious climate goals, according to a GEA report released in April.

Stephen Nicholls, director of South-Africa based energy think-tank African Energy Futures, said the rapid pace of technological development and the falling costs of BESS are attracting growing attention.

He said improvements in storage duration could further strengthen the role of renewables in industrial power systems. While most commercial and utility-scale battery systems currently provide around four to eight hours of storage, Nicholls said researchers are developing units capable of storing electricity for extended periods.

“The cheaper the storage and the longer the storage, the more [BESS] will replace fossil fuels like gas,” he added.

Limited awareness and data

However, significant obstacles to BESS deployment still stand in the way of its massive potential. Iwu of Empower New Energy said limited awareness of utility-scale BESS, as well as concerns about financing and a lack of long-term performance data continue to slow investment across Africa. 

Governments and developers need to build more pilot projects and demonstration sites to generate evidence of the technology’s value and benefits and boost confidence among investors and policymakers, he added. To scale BESS, we need to “keep amassing this [evidence] data and keep talking about it and exploring it,” Iwu said.

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To help address those barriers, Omole said a BESS Consortium under the Global Energy Alliance is working with governments, development banks and other technical partners to de-risk the sector for private financiers by generating evidence from early projects, mobilising public finance to attract private capital, and introducing policies that make battery storage commercially viable.

“This coordinated action helps African nations bypass legacy infrastructure constraints, integrate massive volumes of clean energy, and secure the reliable power required for large-scale industrialisation,” Omole explained.

The post Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?

Eric Mackres is senior manager of urban analytics for the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and attended London Climate Action Week during the June 2026 heatwave. Usama Bilal is an associate professor of epidemiology and co-director of the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University.

As thousands gathered in London for one of the year’s largest climate gatherings last week, Western Europe faced its most severe heatwave ever recorded. The irony was not lost.

Across Europe, over a dozen countries issued urgent heat warnings and Spain registered significant deaths. In London, where air conditioning is rare in buildings and on trains and buses, temperatures soared past 36 degrees Celsius (97F) and schools closed early. The mayor announced the city’s first heat action plan – an important step.

Extreme heat is now a public health crisis for many of the world’s cities, as the urban heat island effect intensifies dangerous temperatures – and it’s growing worse. Around 500,000 people die from extreme heat every year. As global temperatures rise, and with a severe El Niño getting underway, even more people will die and be hospitalised unless cities act soon.

But most cities are still taking a far too one-sized-fits-all approach to tackling heat, looking only at temperatures and not its local effects on people and their health.

People experience heat differently

How extreme heat affects people’s health can vary widely across a country and city, depending on their environment and demographics. Cities can save far more lives and prevent more hospitalisations by taking a tailored approach, using data to understand who’s most vulnerable and directing solutions toward them.

The good news: better data now exists that enable cities to pinpoint who’s most at risk. And that data can inform customised adaptation strategies to save lives. Indeed, the future of cities will hinge on their ability to deliver solutions to extreme heat tailored to at-risk people and neighborhoods.

Comment: Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions

First, cities should start by measuring heat’s risks to people’s health locally. Our work in Brazil and across Latin America shows big differences in what temperatures are dangerous and how quickly risks escalate at higher temperatures. These variations exist between cities, between demographic groups and between neighbourhoods.

But it’s not as simple as finding the hottest places. In temperate Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, a person’s risk of death increases by 25% at temperatures of 27 degrees Celsius (81F). In tropical Teresina, in northern Brazil, which is hot year-round, the same temperature does not elevate the risk of death. At 32 degrees Celsius (90F), a person’s risk of death increases by a milder 10%.

These differences also exist within cities where the climate is the same. Elderly people, the very young, lower-income communities and those without air-conditioning and shaded green spaces are all more likely to get sick, be hospitalised, or die from heat. Areas with more trees and green spaces usually have lower temperatures, and therefore lower impacts of heat.

Targeted heat alerts

Second, cities can use this data to develop early warning systems and outreach campaigns that give people more targeted heat alerts. Research in the UK found that the elderly, despite being among the most at-risk, often were unable to heed warnings during the 2022 heatwave. Well-designed heat warning systems and city responses strengthen people’s trust in health services. They can change people’s behaviours and better prepare municipal services, helping reduce illness, hospital visits and deaths.

Rio de Janeiro adopted a heat alert system in 2024 with five alert levels based on past heatwaves’ impacts on health and forecasts of when temperature and humidity will hit those dangerous levels again. The alert levels activate services like cooling centres, extra public drinking water, and changes to outdoor events. When a heatwave struck during Carnival in 2025, the city was able to deploy resources to protect and warn people while still allowing events to go on.

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Finally, cities should use local heat data to target cooling solutions to where they can help people the most. Solutions like tree cover, shade structures and cool roofs lower temperatures and can provide targeted relief for the most vulnerable people, like outdoor workers and those who travel by foot, bike or public transit.

In Florianópolis, Brazil, we helped the local government use heat impact modeling to design a green corridor and urban forestry project that will reduce pedestrians’ heat stress up to 7 degrees C. In Hermosillo, Mexico, our researchers worked with the city and found that certain neighbourhoods could feel up to 14 degrees C hotter than the shaded city center. A park is now under construction that will bring better shade and heat relief to one of the city’s most at-risk areas.

Connecting health and climate planning

Momentum to address extreme heat in cities is growing, from both national and local governments. At last year’s UN climate summit in Brazil, the Belém Health Action Plan saw 30 national health ministries commit to build climate-resilient health systems based on local data and evidence-based policies.

And over 160 local governments joined the Beat the Heat initiative, committing to develop urban heat action plans and deliver passive cooling projects to reduce health risks.

But there’s still a disconnect between health, urban and climate officials. Only 23% of World Meteorological Organization member countries integrate weather information into health surveillance systems. Heat-health impact models, though increasingly easy to scale, are not yet built for every city. Some cities still need to collect local data for specific demographics and neighbourhoods – and many need support.

National and local governments will need to partner on this tailored approach. It will require integrating local heat and health data into public health systems, city planning, infrastructure, and disaster preparedness.

We have the data to know who will be most impacted by extreme heat when – and the solutions to keep people alive and out of the hospital. It’s time for governments to use them.

The post With extreme heat now a public health crisis, local data can save lives appeared first on Climate Home News.

With extreme heat now a public health crisis, local data can save lives

As governments gathered at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa this month, pledging over $6 billion for marine protection, sustainable fisheries and offshore wind, one issue remained largely absent from the main stage: the continued expansion of offshore oil and gas.

From Norway, Brazil and Guyana to South Africa, Angola and Kenya, countries are pushing ahead with offshore oil and gas projects even as they promise to protect marine ecosystems and tackle the climate change that is heating the ocean, raising sea levels and damaging coastal livelihoods.

Governments argue that offshore oil and gas production is needed for energy security, public revenues and economic growth, but environmental groups say new drilling risks locking countries into decades of fossil fuel production just as they are promising to build a sustainable blue economy. 

Inia Seruiratu, Fijian parliamentarian and the Pacific COP31 Envoy for the Ocean, said the contradiction is becoming harder to ignore. 

“For too long, two conversations – climate mitigation and ocean protection – have run on separate tracks, in separate rooms, with separate experts,” Seruiratu told delegates at a side event during the Mombasa conference held on the shores on the Indian Ocean. 

“We talk about emissions reductions in one hall, and coral bleaching in the other, as if they were unrelated phenomena rather than cause and effect. As we commit to new marine protected areas, new ocean financing and fisheries action, we cannot continue to treat the symptoms while funding the disease,” he added. 

In Mombasa, only one side event out of the dozens of panels was dedicated to the threats posed by the expansion of offshore oil and gas. That event was organised by civil society rather than governments.

New wave of offshore projects

One-third of the world’s global production of oil and gas comes from offshore projects. They harm oceans in part through the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the fuels they produce, with climate change already driving record sea temperatures, coral bleaching and sea-level rise.

Offshore exploration and production also affect marine life through seismic surveys, underwater noise, vessel traffic and the risk of oil spills, threatening sensitive habitats such as coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass meadows that support fisheries, biodiversity and coastal protection. 

Now, as onshore reserves mature, a new wave of offshore oil and gas development is advancing across the world.

Offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report warns

A May report by Earth Insight found that 85% of all hydrocarbon discoveries made in 2024 were offshore, with new projects advancing from Norway and Brazil to Guyana, Namibia and East Africa. 

In Africa, countries such as Namibia, Tanzania and Kenya say exploiting fossil fuel resources could help finance development, support economic growth and lift millions out of poverty, particularly at a time when many face high debt levels and limited access to climate finance.

Kenya’s conundrum

The debate was on display at the Mombasa conference, where host Kenya announced it was joining the Global Offshore Wind Alliance (GOWA), while also defending plans to explore for oil and gas in the Lamu Basin, a biodiverse coastal region.

“The energy transition is a journey. It is not a one-stop shop,” Alex Wachira, principal secretary for Kenya’s Department of Energy, told Climate Home News. “Therefore, we must explore the transition and bring on as many options as possible while exploiting the resources we have. At some point, the entire sector will transition to 100% renewable,” he added.

Wachira said Kenya’s low contribution to global emissions and its continued development needs justify pursuing offshore oil and gas alongside renewables, adding that the country still has “the industrial revolution” to achieve.

“Kenya needs to have a piece of the pie … our emissions today are the least, but we have suffered the most,” said Wachira.

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The East African nation is seen as a world leader in renewable energy, with about 90% of its electricity generated from geothermal, hydropower, wind and solar.

Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan climate activist and member of the Fossil Free Ocean Initiative, said Kenya should focus on expanding renewable energy, adding that new fossil fuel projects could result in financial losses as countries move to cut planet-heating emissions and shift to cleaner energy. 

“We know we cannot have a future dependent on fossil fuels. The rest of the world is talking about how to move beyond them,” Elmawi told Climate Home News.

“If we invest heavily in fossil fuels within our oceans, we’ll end up with stranded assets and a huge debt that taxpayers will have to pay,” he added.

Offshore wind as a solution

Many environmental groups argue that offshore wind is a promising alternative, as it can deliver similar economic benefits from energy production without worsening climate change. 

A study unveiled at the Mombasa conference by Zero Carbon Analytics, Ocean Conservancy and GOWA found that Africa’s offshore wind potential is vast, yet largely untapped.

The continent could install around 6,750 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity – roughly 28 times its current power generation capacity.

Developing just 5% of that potential could create an estimated 5.9 million jobs and generate more than $1 trillion in economic benefits, while producing enough electricity to meet all projected growth in power demand through 2040, the study found.

Campaigners say this could strengthen energy security, reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels and help build new industries around ports, manufacturing and maritime services.

According to a 2025 World Bank report, every $1 million invested in offshore wind creates around 25 jobs – five times more than fossil fuels.

Robust marine protection needed

Bruna Campos, senior campaigner for the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said offshore wind offers a cleaner alternative to offshore oil and gas, but warned that poorly planned projects can also cause harm. 

She called for robust marine spatial planning, environmental assessments and early community involvement to ensure the industry does not repeat mistakes associated with fossil fuel development.

“You need to understand what are the impacts that offshore wind will have on sensitive ecosystems and communities,” Campos told Climate Home News.

West African nations target Eastern Atlantic for early high seas protection

A 2024 UN study found that offshore wind farms can disturb whales, seals, porpoises and migratory fish, particularly during construction, when underwater noise and seabed disruption are greatest. At the same time, turbine foundations can act as artificial reefs, creating habitat for some species and boosting local fish populations. 

Pacific COP31 Envoy for the Ocean Seruiratu said that while investing in renewables is crucial, it is also important to keep pushing for fossil fuels to be phased out. 

He said his own country, Fiji, is among a growing block of nations calling for “a binding international mechanism for an orderly and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels”. 

“Every offshore drilling decision, every new exploration site, every delayed phase-out is a decision made against the common good,” he added. 

The post Ocean summit stays silent on new wave of offshore oil and gas expansion appeared first on Climate Home News.

Ocean summit stays silent on new wave of offshore oil and gas expansion