The UN’s new Global Grids Accelerator arrives without a dollar of new money, and the test for Africa is whether it can get transmission lines to reach financial close.
The Accelerator doesn’t create a new financing institution but does act as a broker. It brings UN agencies, development finance institutions, utilities and investors together around grid priorities that governments set.
“Renewables are booming, but the grids that carry clean power are not keeping pace,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the initiative’s launch in New York on 23 September.
Megawatts without wires
For Africa’s utilities and IPPs, transmission build has long failed to keep pace with new generation. South Africa’s Minister of Electricity and Energy, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, stated in 2025: “We are not short of megawatts – we are short of grid capacity.” More than 130GW of generation projects in South Africa sit stalled by limited network access.
And that gap carries an economic price tag, as Ramokgopa pointed out at Windaba in Cape Town this week: “We’re losing potential revenue of close to R49 billion per annum [due to curtailment].” He linked the problem to the transmission grid that cannot absorb new generation fast enough.
He said faster transmission expansion is the only lasting fix. Meanwhile, the government is weighing exports of surplus wind power to the region, and Zambia has asked for up to 5,000MW.
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Officials from the National Transmission Company South Africa (NTCSA) pointed to a second cause at the conference. Without a flexible fleet to meet peak demand, coal baseload must keep running, pushing renewable output off the system.
At a media briefing on 7 October, Ramokgopa warned that the next crisis will come from “too much of the wrong kind at the wrong time”.
To address this, he announced a Ministerial Determination that brings forward the full 4,600MW battery energy storage allocation (the IRP had expected only about 2,200MW by 2030), and paired it with 5,000MW of gas-to-power, making no new provision for wind or solar.
Of reference South Africa front-loads 4,600MW of battery storage to beat curtailment
The finance gap for wires
Africa will attract about $110 billion in energy investment in 2026, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Investment 2026. That figure is up 11%, but it is just 3% of the global total for a continent that is home to a fifth of the world’s population. It works out at $68 per person, against a global average of $396.
Global spending on electricity networks will reach about $550 billion this year, up nearly 20%. The world will spend five times more on grids than Africa invests in its entire energy sector.
The IEA warns that grid investment is lagging generation worldwide, “creating electricity security risks”. Meanwhile, financing costs in emerging and developing economies outside China remain at least double those in advanced economies.
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Earlier IEA analysis estimated that annual investment in African grids must climb from about $10 billion to nearly $50 billion by 2030 to meet the continent’s energy and climate goals.
Transmission grid plans without bankable projects
Africa does not lack grid plans. It has the Continental Power System Master Plan, the African Single Electricity Market, the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) and the national energy compacts signed under Mission 300.
What it lacks is the step between a master plan corridor and a signed financing agreement. That step demands technical preparation, regulatory clarity, a credible off-taker and careful financial structuring.
However, more than 60% of Africa’s state-owned power utilities operate at a loss, according to the AfDB and the IMF. A loss-making utility cannot borrow for a 400kV line, pushing risk back onto sovereign guarantees, which finance ministries are increasingly reluctant to extend.
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UN Economic Commission for Africa Executive Secretary Claver Gatete said the Accelerator “should be grounded in Africa’s realities”. Those realities are fiscal as much as technical.
Independent transmission deals lead
The encouraging part is that African markets started cracking the model themselves, before the UN arrived.
In December 2025, Kenya signed what the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (KETRACO) called Africa’s first public-private partnership (PPP) for a transmission line. The 30-year concession with Africa50 and India’s Power Grid Corporation is worth about $311 million and requires no public funding.
It covers a 400kV line serving the Baringo–Silali geothermal corridor and a 220kV line in western Kenya.
Uganda amended its Electricity Act to admit private transmission investors. Gridworks’ Amari project, billed as the continent’s first independent transmission project to reach financial close, broke ground in July 2026. Tanzania has signed an MoU with Africa50 to develop its first transmission PPPs.
South Africa‘s Independent Transmission Projects (ITP) programme has prequalified seven consortia for a first phase of about 1,164km of lines across seven corridors, valued at around $1 billion.
Successful bidders will earn availability-based payments under 25-year contracts with the NTCSA’s Central Purchasing Agency.
These deals share a structure in that each one:
- rests on a clear legal basis for private ownership,
- a creditworthy payment counterparty, and
- availability payments that remove volume risk from the investor.
TAQA Arabia CEO Pakinam Kafafi summed up the investor logic: “Without bankable, predictable power transmission, generation projects carry higher risk and weaker cash flows.”
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Where the Accelerator adds value
To earn its place in a crowded field of initiatives, the Accelerator should work as a replication engine for these templates, not a fresh layer of coordination.
Three priorities stand out:
- Project preparation funding for transmission, which remains scarcer than generation.
- Standardised ITP contracts and regulatory templates that smaller markets can adopt without rebuilding the legal architecture from scratch.
- Credit enhancement and guarantees that shore up the payment counterparty where utility finances are weak. South Africa’s Credit Guarantee Vehicle, backed by National Treasury and the World Bank, offers one model.
Within this structure, regional interconnection deserves equal weight. Synchronising the Southern African Power Pool and the Eastern Africa Power Pool, targeted for the end of 2026, could create one of the world’s largest cross-border electricity corridors.
But Lioko Sitali, director of transmission, operations and trade at Zambia‘s ZESCO, warns that “regional trade will be limited if national transmission backbones remain weak”.
AfDB President Dr Sidi Ould Tah said the Accelerator “will strengthen the pillars underpinning Mission 300”, the AfDB and World Bank drive to connect 300 million Africans by 2030.
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On a universal-access pathway, the IEA expects the main grid to reach about 45% of currently unconnected households. But what of the remaining households? Off-grid solar cannot carry the burden, and it cannot power mines, smelters and industrial zones.
To succeed, the Accelerator should be measured by kilometres of line reaching financial close, construction and energisation. Guterres called grids “the arteries of the energy transition”. In Africa, those arteries are going up too slowly, and the Accelerator’s job is to make the next deals move faster than the first.
With an initial focus on Africa and South-East Asia, the Accelerator is convened by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL).
