How Switzerland is crowding out renewable energy in Africa
SERV’s latest gas power plant: threatening the climate and Senegal’s economic development
A gas power plant in Africa (photo credit Africa Energy Portal)
The Swiss Export Risk Insurance (SERV) is ready to approve a guarantee for a 250 MW gas power plant in Senegal. The project will be developed by Aksa Energy – a private Turkish company which in 2020 was implicated in a bribery scandal over a gas project in Ghana – and will rely on turbines supplied by GE. It is one of ten gas power plants insured by SERV after Switzerland pledged to no longer support such projects under the Clean Energy Transition Partnership, and the second such project in West Africa within a few months.
According to its Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA), the new power plant in Senegal will emit 700,000 tons of CO2 equivalents per year over a life time of 30 years – roughly the emissions produced by 150,000 gasoline-driven cars. Yet the project is not only bad for the climate. It is also more expensive and slower to build than solar alternatives.
The Aksa power plant has already faced significant delays. The developer announced that it began construction in January 2024 and expected power generation to start in 2026. Yet SERV states that final preparations and construction will still take at least another three years. For comparison, Solar World was awarded the contract for a solar farm of 250 MW – the same capacity as the power plant in Senegal – in India in December 2025; this project is scheduled to be completed by mid 2027.
We don’t know the price which Aksa negotiated with Senegal’s power utility for the sale of electricity from its proposed power plant. Yet a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency found that in 2024, 91% of new utility-scale renewable projects were cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel alternatives. Solar power specifically was on average 41% cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel.
A solar farm with battery packs in Senegal (photo credit: Africa-Ren)
The Aksa project’s ESIA argues that because solar power is intermittent (i.e., can only be generated during daytime), it needs to be complemented by conventional power sources. Yet this argument ignores that solar power can be stored in batteries, and that Senegal is already developing such battery storage for a wind farm and a solar power plant. Over a project’s lifetime, the average cost of solar power with battery storage is 25 dollars per MWh, compared to 38 dollars for power from a gas project.
“A larger role for renewables would offer a less risky pathway to achieving Senegal’s energy goals, and offer additional benefits”, a USAID report found in 2024. “Renewables may offer a cheaper source of energy than gas even now, particularly if development partners help bring down the cost of capital.”
Meanwhile, consumers are voting solar with their wallets. From Pakistan to Germany, from South Africa to Senegal, millions of households and business owners are buying cheap Chinese solar panels to avoid being dependent on expensive (and in many countries, unreliable) power from the electric grid.
In the 12 months up to June 2025, consumers in Senegal bought Chinese solar panels with a total capacity of no less than 519 MW – twice the capacity of the Aksa gas power plant. Even if they don’t generate power around the clock, these solar panels – imported during a single year! – are able to produce 8% of Senegal’s power generation.
While the cost of gas power is fairly constant, the cost of solar power continues to drop quickly. Whether it is at the household or the utility level, the generation of solar power in Senegal will continue to expand. Yet through the Aksa power project, the country will be locked into buying expensive gas power for 30 years. In Pakistan, the same situation is forcing the public utility into a death spiral, as ever fewer consumers are prepared to buy expensive power from the grid when solar panels and battery storage have become ubiquitous and cheap.
The Senegalese government may be concerned it doesn’t have sufficient expertise to integrate rapidly growing solar capacity and battery storage into the electric grid and needs to complement them with gas power (as the ESIA suggests). If this were the case, the government would commission power plants based on open-cycle gas turbines, which are cheap and flexible and can be used to generate peaking power when the sun doesn’t shine. Yet the Aksa power plant uses combined-cycle gas turbines, which are more efficient but generate baseload power and don’t play well with renewables.
“If the government does successfully implement a large gas-to-power plan”, the 2024 USAID report warned, “it could lock Senegal into using large quantities of gas far into the future when the alternatives would be unequivocally cheaper and more secure.” This is unfortunately the strategy which the Swiss government seems determined to support.