Royal Dutch Shell RDSa.L has announced that it will purchase African solar provider Daystar Power in a bid to expand its global renewables portfolio.
Shell made it clear that the Daystar purchase, which is the oil giant’s first power acquisition in Africa, reflects the company’s mandate to slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
“As we do this, we're helping to address a critical energy gap for many who currently rely on diesel generators for backup power," Thomas Brostrom, Shell's vice president for renewable generation, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Daystar chief executive Jasper Graf von Hardenberg, for his part, told Reuters that the Lagos-based company, which provides off-grid power to commercial and industrial clients in Nigeria, Ghana, Togo and Senegal, plans to expand to eastern and southern Africa, a task that von Hardenberg claimed would be easier to reach with Shell.
“For the next stage - really becoming a pan-Africa power provider - it requires an investor with the same vision. Someone really with sufficient firepower to finance this growth,” the Daystar CEO said. Neither Shell nor Daystar commented on the deal’s price amid reports that the oil giant allocated up to $3 billion in capital expenditure for renewables and energy solutions in 2022.
The Daystar sale came a few months after the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said that foreign direct investment (FDI) to African countries hit a record $83 billion in 2021, more than double the amount reported in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic weighed heavily on investment flows to the continent.
According to UNCTAD, the largest holders of foreign assets in Africa remain those from EU countries, led by investors in the United Kingdom ($65 billion) and France ($60 billion).
The report was released as a whole array of Western-backed environmentalist entities, the EU parliament and US President Joe Biden's climate czar John Kerry remain opposed to African nations’ own energy projects.
Brussels, for example, earlier advised EU member states not to assist in the implementation of Uganda's oil and gas projects either diplomatically or financially, with 20 western banks and 13 insurers already voicing opposition. For his part, Kerry previously warned against investing in long-term gas projects in Africa while speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the 18th session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) in Dakar, Senegal.
The environmentalist Africa-based groups in turn argue that the continent's natural gas pipelines pose a "threat" to "Africa’s energy sovereignty" and "accelerate the already run-away climate crisis”, also insisting that the continent's "corrupt governments" will sell all the fuel to the so-called Global North and will leave the people of the region in poverty.