 Good afternoon, everyone That whole stage thing is always made to look so much easier when you've got a whole team of like people at these big conferences So thank you for actually getting it out. It's not easy work. So Once again, my name is James Irongomwangi. I am the founder and chief executive officer of Africa climate ventures We're a climate venture fund and venture builder That's focused on achieving or helping realize the proposition that Africa holds part of the key Achieving global net zero and it will transform its economy and transform the global economy by unlocking its particular ability to achieve climate positive growth So why don't we start with what climate positive growth is and and then from there go to some of the work that we're doing at Africa climate ventures I'm at the I well, I'm at the OECD speaking to folks who are involved with the IEA So I'm going to need to be very careful. So what I'll do is rather than Throughout too many numbers also because I don't have my notes in front of me I'll stick to the general logic of what I'm trying to say And I will trust that there's a lot of people in here who can tell how all of this fits together Quantitatively sometimes I'll give some examples But I'll start by noting that I think there are three fundamental imperatives to getting to net zero I'll assume no one in this room thinks that net zero is an optional thing or that it's okay to overshoot 1.5 degrees by as much as we are going to overshoot it already And if we all aligned that getting to net zero is urgent Then there are three global imperatives that that are out there if you look at Or from my reading of the IPCC reports The first is humanity needs to urgently conserve and indeed expand our remaining few natural carbon 6 Rain forests, grasslands, peatlands, mangroves, etc The second thing is we need to urgently decarbonize every aspect of global production and consumption Every aspect we tend to get anchored on transportation and The energy grid But that's just the beginning and we all know about all of the other sectors that need to be decarbonized as well And the third thing is we need to get real and recognize that we've left it too late We're going to substantially overshoot and we will need to remove Greenhouse gases from the atmosphere over and above the natural capacity of our existing systems to do so In order to come back from overshoot that means investments in a whole range of hybrid and then engineered carbon removal technologies At potentially unimaginable scales from where we are standing today, right? You'll read the numbers and we're talking about between five and 15 billion tons of removals needed annually by 2050 200 billion tons of removals between now and 2050 to begin with a A fraction of which will be potentially done through nature the rest of which will need new technologies to do So a very tall order and some of you are probably looking on saying well I thought this guy was gonna talk about Africa why why are we all the way over there and Part of my argument is a part of what we mean by climate-positive growth is that the world Under-recognizes the role that Africa can play not just in the first category. Yes preserving natural carbon sinks, but in the other two as well and I will tell the story of how we go about it by talking about three investments that That we are making or three businesses that we are that we are invested in The first one Is a company that I'm I'm really excited about that we've been involved in for a long time called Cocoa Networks Cocoa Networks is a bioethanol cook stove business It started in Kenya Delivering a high-quality Cooking solution for homes on the continent the largest single driver of deforestation in Africa is fuel for domestic heating the largest single driver of deforestation and indeed the largest single driver of Africa's current Emissions footprint is fuel for heating that's firewood and that's charcoal displacing that and Moving households on to newer forms of indoor or household heating for cooking in particular Accomplishes a number of things one is the obvious carbon and climatic impact Two is the biodiversity impact where you attack where where you're cutting down old-growth forests Three perhaps most immediately and importantly is a huge health benefit from getting rid of particulate health particulate indoor air pollution and Four is addressing the inequity that exists in the time burden of actually fetching all of this fire You know thermal cooking material which a burden that falls heavily on women So Cocoa Networks started about five years ago already serves over 1.2 million households Expanding rapidly across the continent, but is running into the challenge of how do you get into multiple markets? We partnered with them to go from Kenya where they were already adding households at the rate of several tens of thousands per month into Rwanda where we started in November and I'm happy to say that as of last week when I last checked we were doing several thousand stoves in a per week in Rwanda as well And on track to hit at least a hundred thousand stoves by the end of the year Probably reaching more than half a million households in the coming years the potential across the continent is huge That's one angle so solve cooking and you will you will add back into of the global carbon budget anything between 250 to 500 million tons of CO2 equivalent to per annum and that's an eminently solvable space The next thing I'll talk about though is one way you probably did not think of Africa as as a central to the solution and that's emissions from global consumption and production on One level. There's the idea of leapfrogging African countries and African populations to greener technologies After all it will be 2.5 billion people on earth the fastest growing population on earth between now and 2050 It makes sense that getting them to be early adopters of Greener technologies will be a major Diva to hitting that zero, but that's not what I'm here to talk about what I'm here to talk about is industry Industry in general again, usually I get puzzled looks Africa is only less than 5% of global industrial activity today Yeah, we can decarbonize that that's not going to be too big a prize But that falls into a trap It falls into the trap of saying that the way that any country can contribute to global net zero is to Decarbonize its current activity as much as it possibly can That's false the biggest contribution any country can make is to contribute as much as possible to global net decarbonization Because we can move industries around And so to give an example We are currently investing in a green industrial park developer That's working to build out the business case for deploying large portions of global compute capacity Essentially green data centers to countries like Kenya to give you a sense Kenya because of its geothermal wind and solar assets Currently has a grid that's 92% renewable. That's very exciting We'll get to a hundred percent renewable probably by the end of this decade, but that's not the you know That's also interesting, but that grid is only about three gigawatts today not because there isn't energy demand Among the population, but because we cannot finance a faster growth of that grid There are literally hundreds of gigawatts of energy potential scattered across the country in some of the highest quality wind solar and geothermal on earth The question is how do you unlock that supply? Into into production and the answer is bring high concentrations of energy demand And so that's where things industries like green data centers where you do have a High-value service. You're not trying to export electrons You're trying to export value added services that use green electrons to the rest of the world And the value proposition there is by first focusing on Applications that can tolerate high levels of latency. So for example AI training and so on so forth stuff that doesn't require too much back and forth as not to mention Africa's own growing data center demand You can begin to address what is going to what is already about one point point five percent of global electricity demand And will be as high as three to four percent of global electricity demand by one by 2030 You can move at disproportionate portion share of that to places in the world where you have functionally infinite green electrical headroom Now sticking to that That that thread of that infinite green energy headroom. I'll come to our third investment Also in the green industrial Park space Was we asked what other industries out there are still relatively early in their life? So they have not yet settled into into existing kind of ecosystems might benefit from particular characteristics of Africa in terms of its natural resources its energy endowment and Ideally use a lot of energy because Africa's comparative advantages any industry that requires a lot of energy And ideally doesn't have too many other infrastructure requirements Might have an advantage in Africa and we settled on one that people often surprised by We settled on direct air capture Right. This is a critical part of the long-term equation for global carbon removal It's a tiny industry today less than you know a few thousand tons of carb of captured carbon In the last few years by the end of this year will have about 50,000 tons of installed capacity Maybe we'll be up to a couple of million tons by the end of this decade The challenge is in order to get those learning effects and to come down the learning curve and cut the cost of direct air capture Which is the the technology of last resort for carbon removal. We're going to need deploy at need to deploy at scale somewhere Doing this in the places where people are currently doing it There's projects planned for Louisiana in Texas There's a fair amount of capacity being built in Iceland kind of makes sense But it's also problematic Because every electron every green electron you take away from shutting down existing emitting Energy is taking two steps forward and one step back You'd have been better off instead of using that electricity to do direct air capture You'd have been better off using it to retire more coal or retire more gas So what could be better than a place that has the right geology for carbon mineralization And as I said before has functionally infinite energy headroom And that's what East Africa and the East African Rift offers and that's what our through great carbon valley We're trying to put together and we're partnering with companies like Climeworks and Carbfix to build one of the first global South based You know direct air capture hub for not just their technology But to showcase a whole range of other technologies and hopefully to begin to scale them up and you begin to see How with these types of in installations you can begin to make more investments in the grid and in energy generation in developing countries Bankable not just by lowering the cost of capital so they can invest in energy for their own use But moving global public good uses of energy to the places where we get the highest number of electrons per unit of capital investment and that's very much Going to be concentrated in the tropics, which is exactly where we need to be deploying investment for climate justice and for future equity So the argument is don't just look at the climate justice argument for investing in Africa On climate rather say Actually, is there a role for places like Africa in leading the charge to net zero And how do we make sure that climate action is not something that's done for or to? places like Africa But by and with the folks who are over there looking to build the industries of the future and be part of the vanguard of Transforming both global energy and the future of climate action. Thank you Thank you so much James for that for that presentation From what you've said to me it sounds like there's a clear business case When we talk about Africa's potential, you know, the business case is there why Have you not seen investments in this at the speed and and the scale you would hope for So part of it is the case is becoming clearer with time Right, so the cost of for example green energy technologies is is going off the proverbial cliff which helps with Africa's comparative advantage I think also the challenge with the case is it's plagued by that age-old problem of chicken and egg I've talked about this before There are no more expensive electrons than those available on African grids The reason they're expensive is that there is not enough financing to invest in appropriate supply When you invest in that supply you have to pay off huge costs of capital So the power in the grid is expensive You can't attract industry the country stays poor and that's the power and the grid is expensive You can go around that circuit forever All while the best insulation and the best wind and so on is hitting you and so there's one aspect of this Which is try and talk down the cost of capital or or or or somehow buy off some of the the spreads the excessive spreads in the cost of capital, but the other angle is actually Embedding the cost of energy development into new projects and actually focusing not on financing energy supply but on attracting energy demand at scale and that work hasn't been done people have talked about it theoretically but known as To the best of my knowledge said what would it take to bring this one gigawatt user From where they are where they're thinking of going to this location here where you can deliver them a gigawatt of pure green energy We had a guest earlier today who said essentially investors are willing to invest in the Production of energy, but there's a whole Supply chain of what comes after that where it's hard to you know get you know the investment needed to Really develop it Yeah, in a sense I almost think that at this point we squeezed as much as we're gonna squeeze out of innovations in financing energy supply We really need to think about how we Attracting and deploying energy demand or motivating energy demand and once you have the demand coming Then supply becomes a lot easier to do if I've got a guaranteed off-take from a fortune 500 company That's coming to use Energy in my country. I will be able to get the financing to build the energy plant Kenya has four gigawatts of pending renewable energy plan, you know plants just waiting for someone to say I'll buy that Right bring the off-take. They'll get finance it How do you change You know the perception of of Africa as a helpless kind of victim to You know actually the potential to be to be you know that that the this this source of innovation and In to achieve net zero, I think you just have to do it. I think On one level it's about really anchoring as we're trying to do in our work really anchoring in the pure raw business case Of why it makes sense to do some of this work at times It is Understandable but unhelpful That folks want to layer on all of the other social reasons to do some of these things It's important to have those in mind But if you foreground them at the expense of highlighting the business case then a whole set of assumptions are made by the people who control real capital That actually ironically make it harder to do the things that would do the most good And so part of what we are trying to do is offer as cold-blooded a set of business cases as possible for why it is advantageous to all parties concerned owners of capital innovators Local communities to do some of these transactions and hopefully you get some of them over the line I don't think the perception shifts unless you're actually getting stuff done So talking about it too much is not helpful talking like this is kind of helpful because hopefully we can find some partners investors And so on in the various audiences, but the real value is in focusing on execution, which is what we've set out set out to do now You said in your presentation that Climate justice should not be the main argument to invest in in Africa the same time don't you think that It's important that the global south also holds accountable the global north for their responsibility in in the climate crisis that Yeah It's it's a good rhetorical point, but what does it actually mean? And then to be clear and I don't want to be misunderstood The climate justice argument is fundamentally correct and vital that everyone understand. It's what motivates me But unless you've got some means of compelling Allocators of capital and the plurals of technology to do what you are saying from a justice perspective They should do Then at some point it's it's outrun its utility and you need to ask yourself What does it take to get the things you need to do done? And that's going to be about him, you know Convincing investment committees in various organizations that don't have among their KPIs Climate justice for Africa you need to get them to decide to make those investments And that means speaking to them in the language that they understand So I am not please please please saying that the climate justice movement is wrong I am just saying it is unnecessary, but insufficient component of the work that needs to be done today and Sometimes if it's over foregrounded it can get in the way of the other components that need to be heard just as much Including the fact that there are clear and present business cases for doing some of this You talked about CCS as well in in your presentation Is there a I mean there are concerns of course About the how much we should rely on on these technologies Should we be careful as well and and not turn Africa into you know the the the graveyard for emissions elsewhere or Yeah, I think so firstly I was talking about DAC not not CCS and They are related but distinct right so smoke stack CCS Will be used to reduce emissions from existing industry DAC is about ambient co2 and Up until now no one I've come across I've not seen a single iota of scientific evidence that says there is any Localized harm from doing that you're removing a tiny component co2 is evenly distributed in the atmosphere Essentially someone somewhere is going to make money from converting energy into co2 removals The argument that you should not do it in the global south Essentially then boils down to saying that having caused the problem the companies that should make money from turning energy into carbon removals Should also be in the places that cause the problem, right? This is an industry in which it's not about pollution We exhale co2 all the time. It has a whole bunch of negative externalities. It's evenly distributed around the world It should not matter other than from a position of materials efficiency Where this work is done? But at the same time we could end up being very valuable work and work that could generate jobs and investment I argue that it's an industry to go after rather than want to shy away from keeping a careful eye on whether there are indeed some Currently unrecognized Negative externalities, but to be clear we are investing in DAC, but we are also investing in biochar at scale Which is another durable carbon removal technology and enhanced rock weathering as well Both of which have soil benefits and benefit farmers They just not as related to the conversation of today, which is really around the energy system. So I didn't talk about them as much How do you make sure that as you unleash Africa's potential through the Investment examples that you've presented That people on the ground actually benefit from that And that it doesn't end up being in the hands of the same people So the first step is making sure that there's more African participation all the way up and down the the stack of innovation I said earlier, this is not something to be done to or for the continents to be done by and with and that means finding innovators from the continent finding Inventors investors, etc. And particularly that last line around investors from the continent Very proud of the fact that in our first round of capital raising Something between 60 and 70 percent of our raised capital was from Africa And that was a deliberate choice because we wanted to be sure that we do begin to be successful The returns are recycled on the continent And then there's a question of the substance of what you do and there It's important to look all the way across the spectrum like I said, you know some in some Interventions so we're an organic fertilizer and in clean cooking Well, you're really engaging with the African consumer as part of your your climate leverage But you need to also keep in mind that the reason why there's such a struggle to boost livelihoods in many African countries Is a lack of global competitiveness a lack of competitive industry and so you cannot say oh I'm focused on the elite uplifting people out of poverty and ignore the biggest single lever for raising communities of poverty Which is raising countries out of poverty and into competitiveness? And that's where we focus on the industries of the future just as much Where we think the story looks more like what has worked in other places like in Asia Which is attract global industry to invest in the country bring the skills and over time you'll have your own national champions Emerge before you had a BYD. You had a whole range of global Industry transfer technology to China. You're seeing the same effect in India South Korea, etc. And I think that it's time for Africa to go through that same journey beginning with attracting the right kinds of heavy industry Thank you so much James Longhi for your insights. Thank you Thank you That brings us to the end of today's everything energy talks and I'd like to thank Everyone who attended also our guests for taking the time to share their expertise or insights And their passion as well It's been really inspiring to see the diversity of people Individuals from different backgrounds with different stories all working together with a same goal Which is building the energy systems of tomorrow. So thank you again so much for coming here and A big thank you as well to the international energy agency for hosting this event the agencies opening plenary is About to begin in about an hour And you're more than welcome to stay in the room or have a break and come back if you want to Follow the plenary through this room as it will be broadcast here So yeah, thank you again. Have a good evening afternoon