Nigeria’s presidential villa is being kitted out with a $6-million solar mini-grid – a pricey solution to erratic power supplies that small business manager Victor Onyim can only dream of as he grapples with near-daily power cuts.
For more than two weeks until early May, Onyim’s drinking water company and other businesses in the southern city of Port Harcourt struggled to keep operating due to a total blackout blamed by the local power utility on vandalism. It has since been resolved, but regular outages continue.
“The lack of light (electricity) is affecting our business. We have not been making sales since the power issue,” he told Climate Home, gesturing towards the half-empty stock room and idle delivery trucks parked at the front of the plant in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta region.
To keep the business afloat during the recent outage, Onyim spent 30,000 naira ($18) daily on diesel and was forced to halt production at midday to reduce the fuel bill, sending workers home early.
“Substituting the light from the grid with generators … is better than not having light at all,” he said.
Generators far cheaper than solar
The whirr of generators is a common sound in Nigeria, where the national power grid is prone to frequent failures, plagued by creaky and poorly maintained infrastructure despite repeated pledges by governments over the years to tackle it.
While those who can afford it are starting to install solar panels and storage batteries to bypass grid supplies, poorer Nigerians have no option but to stretch household budgets to buy fuel – to supply generators – kerosene lamps and candles for lighting and bottled gas for cooking.
Petrol and diesel generators remain the favoured alternative for power generation. While the fuel is an extra running cost, a small petrol generator can be bought for as little as 120,000 naira ($74).
It costs roughly five times more than that – 600,000 naira ($323) – to buy just one solar panel with an inverter battery. The minimum monthly wage in Nigeria is 70,000 naira ($45).
Leapfrogging straight to renewables
In much of Africa, where an estimated 600 million people still have no access at all to mains electricity, leapfrogging straight to solar power would boost power access while also reducing the need for fossil fuels such as natural gas, oil and coal to generate electricity.
Nigeria’s power sector is heavily reliant on fossil fuels, with gas accounting for over three-quarters of electricity generated in 2022, hydropower delivering about a quarter, and renewables less than 1%.
But high solar system installation costs are a huge hurdle, particularly in the poorer rural areas that would stand to gain the most – access to electricity, in many cases for the first time.
Almost half of Nigeria’s roughly 230 million people live without access to electricity from the grid – making it the country with the highest number of people lacking it globally.
Even for those who are connected to the grid, dilapidated transmission infrastructure, vandalism and inadequate maintenance resources mean the supply is unreliable, raising the appeal of self-contained solar systems – even for the country’s leader.
In Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa, solar booms have been driven by power cuts prompting those who can afford to invest in reliable solar electricity. However, this is usually a fraction of the majority. The 2025 Africa Solar Outlook report found that commercial and industrial users made up a large part of the installations in 2024.
Renewables for the rich?
With few signs of improvement in Nigeria’s power supply, civil society campaigners have criticised the government’s approval of the multi-million-dollar solar system at the sprawling Aso Rock presidential residence in the capital, Abuja.
A spokesperson for President Bola Tinubu said the initial investment would soon be clawed back through savings on electricity bills.
Indigenous land disputes cloud Kenya’s carbon market ambitions
But solar for the rich, and government officials, is not the equitable shift to greener electricity that Africa’s policymakers should be working to implement, said Joshua Alade, founder of Network of Youth for Sustainable Initiative, a youth-led civil society organisation based in Nigeria.
“This current trend of renewables being accessible mainly to the affluent is far from what we advocate for,” Alade said, adding that government efforts to foster renewable energy must focus on vulnerable communities “historically left behind by traditional energy systems”.
Nigeria’s power crisis perpetuates deep economic inequalities in Africa’s most populous country, with smaller businesses and micro enterprises like Onyim’s in Port Harcourt less able to cope with the blackouts.
According to estimates by the World Bank, unreliable electricity supplies cost the Nigerian economy $29 billion a year.
Clean energy investments are growing – slowly
Investments in renewable energy in Africa are growing, but too slowly to put the continent on track to reach its sustainable development goals, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Clean energy investments in Africa account for just 2% of the global total, the IEA said in its latest World Energy Investment Analysis report, adding that as they stand, energy investments are equivalent to only 1.2% of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Efforts to tackle Africa’s power access gap, and boosting renewable energy generation at the same time, are the focus of initiatives such as Mission300, a joint effort of the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Bank.
The programme, which aims to get power supplies to 300 million people – half of the number without electricity access in Africa – by 2030, raised over $50 billion in pledges of support earlier this year at a meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Ensuring green power shift benefits all
For the initiative to succeed where others have failed, Nigeria-based energy expert Teslim Giwa said African governments must place greater emphasis on the economic benefits of improving – and widening access to – electricity.
In order to ensure lower-income communities are reached, he called for policies including subsidies on products such as solar panels and batteries for storage and discounted electricity bills for the poorest people.
Community ownership of clean electricity initiatives – for example, solar mini-grids in neighbourhoods – should also be promoted, Giwa said, adding that the approach would help prevent vandalism and stop infrastructure falling into disrepair.
Back in Port Harcourt’s Rumuokwachi district, not far from Onyim’s water packaging plant, welder Bright Azuka hunches over a steel gate, sparks flying as his welding machine crackles to life.
The hum of a generator can be heard in the background as he works swiftly, racing to finish a job before it runs out of fuel. Azuka spends 10,000 naira ($7) per day on petrol so he can carry on working during power outages.
He urged President Tinubu’s government to find ways of making solar systems more affordable for ordinary Nigerians like him.
“Even though I don’t have electricity here, I am paying monthly bills,” he said. “It’s not easy.”
The post Nigerian president’s solar panels stir debate over renewables for the rich appeared first on Climate Home News.
Nigerian president’s solar panels stir debate over renewables for the rich
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological economist at Lund University, tells Carbon Brief.
Influential organisations relying on CCS in their net-zero scenarios range from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) through to the oil company Shell. The IEA has stated that net-zero would be “virtually impossible” without CCS.
These scenarios often include 10s to 100s of times more CCS capacity being built in the coming decades. The IEA includes 1.7GtCO2 being captured by 2035 in its net-zero scenario – nearly 30 times more than is captured today.
(Some of the much higher numbers in scenarios assessed by the IPCC have been dismissed by experts as implausible, especially given the slow rollout of CCS to date.)
When considering CCS for both emissions cuts and removals, Dr Jennifer Roberts, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde and deputy director at the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC), tells Carbon Brief the situation is clear:
“From an IPCC climate modelling perspective…reaching net-zero without CCS is far more expensive, disruptive and potentially out of reach.”
This does not mean that it would be impossible to reach net-zero without using CCS. However, net-zero scenarios that use little or no CCS rely on dramatic changes elsewhere, such as much lower global energy demand.
Net-zero scenarios often include a crucial role for CCS in “hard-to-abate” sectors, referring to activities that lack available, low-cost options to fully decarbonise. In particular, CCS is widely seen as vital for decarbonising parts of heavy industry.
The IPCC sixth assessment report (AR6) summary for policymakers calls CCS a “critical mitigation option” for some sectors, including cement and chemicals. The technical summary of the AR6 Working Group III report says that “CCS will be required to mitigate remaining CO2” in industrial sectors.
The IEA describes CCS as “virtually the only technology” that can significantly cut cement emissions, which account for around 7%