Diesel generators are everywhere, and it’s a major challenge for the global energy transition
Summary
By 2022, at least seventeen African countries had diesel generators providing the majority of electricity supply. In Ukraine, generator imports surged so dramatically after the Russian invasion they had to be tracked separately in national accounts.
These extraordinary statistics led Charlie and colleague Camillo Stubenberg to write an academic article, ‘Friend or Foe? Diesel generators and the global energy transition’, exploring the reasons why generators seem to be everywhere these days.
The study, published in Energy Research & Social Science, argues that the diesel generator — noisy, polluting, and largely ignored by researchers — is one of the most important energy technologies on the planet.
We tried to show that generators haven't just filled a gap: they've filled a gap left by the failure of decades of privatisation policy. When international institutions pushed developing countries to break up their state electricity companies in the 1990s and 2000s, the promised investment and affordable power never materialised. Households didn't wait; they bought generators.
If the objective is to avoid new forms of fossil fuel infrastructure, the diesel generator must be contended with as a formidable and durable form of decentralised fossil fuel infrastructure.
Far from being replaced by solar microgrids, diesel generators are what make them function. When the sun doesn't shine, something has to keep the lights on — and in most communities, that something is diesel. We visited one of Lebanon's most advanced solar microgrids, complete with a football-field-sized solar array and lithium batteries, and found a large diesel generator quietly doing the necessary work on cloudy days.
The uncomfortable implication is that the energy "transition" may be less of a transition than an accumulation — new technologies layered on top of old ones, not replacing them. If the policy objective is to avoid the proliferation of new forms of fossil fuel infrastructure, the diesel generator must be contended with as a formidable and durable form of decentralised fossil fuel infrastructure.