For the past two days, under the soft lights of chandeliers in a Marriott basement a block from the White House, energy ministers and tech founders from across Africa gathered to discuss how best to bring electricity to more than 600 million people on the continent who have none.
Much of their hope, and fear, came from the whirlwind of change President Trump has brought to U.S. foreign policy, including the termination of Power Africa, a major initiative that had supported them for a decade. Was Mr. Trump abandoning them? Or might his promises of “global energy dominance” be a boon?
Attendees got at least a part of their answer on Friday morning. Chris Wright, the new administration’s energy secretary, took the stage and gave an impassioned speech on how concerns over climate change should not prevent Africa from charging ahead with fossil fuel development.
“This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand.”
His remarks came just weeks after the administration shuttered Power Africa, which had financed tens of millions of electricity connections since its start under President Barack Obama in 2013.
Africa, like the rest of the world, faces an immensely consequential choice: exploit fossil fuels that contribute to global warming, or forge a new path with renewable energy. Mr. Wright said Africa simply needed more energy of all kinds, including and even especially coal, one of the most polluting fossil fuels.
“We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.”
And while Mr. Wright said climate change was a “real, physical phenomenon,” he said it wouldn’t make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world.
Mr. Wright’s appearance on Friday was met with roaring approval. His remarks were in line with what many African energy developers have been urging for years. They say the persistence of energy poverty is a blight on the continent’s development, and Western skittishness to invest in energy projects, whether because of concerns over governance or greenhouse gas emissions, is akin to keeping Africa down.
Africa’s population is growing faster than current electrification rates. Officials often buck at the suggestion they should opt for clean-energy technologies to help fight climate change, instead of using their own abundant supplies of fossil fuels, given that their countries have contributed nearly nothing historically to the emissions that cause global warming. Other countries used fossil fuels for generations to build prosperity, the argument goes, so why shouldn’t they?
Other U.S. officials speaking at the summit said that, with Mr. Trump in office, the days of shying away from fossil fuel investment in favor of renewables were over.
“When we say ‘all of the above,’ you might ask, is that code for carbon? And yes, it is code for carbon,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department official and former ambassador to Guinea. “There are no restrictions anymore on what kind of energy we can promote.”
African executives in their own speeches said that they hoped they would get more investment and fewer regulatory hurdles. “We can’t wait for three years, or even half that time,” to do environmental or social impact assessments on a project, said Akinwole Omoboriowo II, who leads Genesis Energy, a company focused on renewable energy.
“People are dying without the chance to watch TV,” he said, to a murmur of chuckles. “I just think we should think about that.”
Mr. Wright’s remarks left major questions unanswered and did not detail how much or where the U.S. government would invest in African energy access. Would he seek to revive Power Africa but change its mandate? Might he bring its responsibilities under his own department? (Previously, Power Africa’s budget fell under the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has all but eliminated.)
What he did offer was a pro-Africa message at a time when his boss has unnerved Africans. Mr. Trump froze aid to South Africa last month and accused its government of using a new land law to discriminate against white citizens. Many African officials fear his administration will end the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a decades-old trade agreement that allows 32 African countries to send billions of dollars of goods to the United States duty-free. And in his speech to Congress on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made a dismissive mention of Lesotho, saying “nobody has ever heard of” the country.
Conspicuously missing from the gathering were representatives of the American agencies that had taken a lead on energy initiatives in Africa: U.S.A.I.D. and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Mr. Trump created in his first term but whose billions of dollars of investments are currently frozen.
The meeting rooms were full of former Power Africa officials, however, and they questioned whether the Trump administration would muster much follow-through. “The biggest question is whether the U.S. can be a credible partner when we’ve just dismantled our main mechanism for investing in African energy,” said Katie Auth, the former deputy director of Power Africa.
She and others acknowledged that an increasing focus on low-carbon energy made the program a target for an administration that is hostile to what its officials often call the “climate change alarm industry.”
But Ms. Auth also noted that not only did Power Africa invest in gas, but that the plummeting cost of renewable energy technology has made those forms of power the fastest and cheapest to deploy in many African countries.
“I think they don’t realize that Power Africa was never a climate initiative,” Ms. Auth said. “It was driven by economic viability and driven by U.S. firms.” She added, “If anything, this is the encapsulation of the kind of assistance this administration should want to do.”
Planet-warming emissions aside, gas investment also collides with an additional hurdle: weak power grids. Building more gas-burning power plants would require building far more electrical transmission lines. That’s a key difference with solar, which can be built on a much smaller scale locally, so it doesn’t necessarily require huge, sprawling networks of power lines.
Rosemary Oduor, a top official at Kenya Power and Lighting Company, the country’s state-owned utility, described African grids as “old trees growing heavy with fruit.” Without huge investment in their modernization, and without major subsidies, she said, bringing new power sources online might only make them more likely to fail.