Africa’s push to host world-class data centers — AI’s digital engines — is running up against a political embargo on the fuels that reliably power them, and ordinary Africans are paying the price.
Kenya just shelved a $1 billion project backed by Microsoft and UAE-based G42. President William Ruto explained the decision plainly: The facility would have consumed roughly one-third of the country’s entire 3,000-megawatt installed capacity – the amount of power from a single coal-fired power plant. Such a modest amount of electricity cannot support a modern lifestyle for a nation of more than 58 million people, much less meet the added requirements of power-hungry data centers.
A key factor contributing to Africa’s paltry energy production is a systematic embargo on fossil fuels in the name of climate action, which has disrupted fossil fuel investments in Africa over the past decade or so.
Energy poverty: The fruit of green colonialism
Across Africa, over 600 million people still lack access to electricity and more than 900 million still cook with biomass like cow dung and wood. Yet global financiers and Western NGOs treat fossil fuels, including natural gas, as public enemy number one. This has real effects: Financial restrictions from major institutions freeze investments in the fastest route to stable baseload power, and coal- and natural gas-fired facilities are delayed or never even proposed.
When the World Bank, regional development banks, or U.N.-backed initiatives fold climate alarmism into lending criteria, they effectively impose an energy embargo on nations trying to lift their people out of poverty. The African Development Bank stopped financing coal projects in 2019 and severely restricted the backing of oil and gas projects in 2021. The World Bank followed suit. These decisions, driven by United Nations climate targets and pressure from EU-funded groups, cut off capital that could have unlocked Africa’s abundant reserves of hydrocarbons.
African countries wanting dependable electricity for hospitals, factories, and data centers cannot afford to wait for an idealized power grid that exists only in the imaginations of the climate deluded. They need natural gas, coal, and oil, which can deliver continuous power at scale today to jump-start industrial activity.
The fundamental physics and economics of power generation expose the delusions of the green energy movement. Energy experts consistently point out that expensive, weather-dependent systems like wind and solar cannot sustain modern economies.
The mainstream narrative demands absolute obedience to a manipulated scientific consensus. The climate dogma thrives on a deliberate ignorance of the real-world limitations of solar and wind technologies.
Projections for Africa show that economic stagnation and population growth will cause a net increase in poverty. Three decades ago, most of the extremely impoverished lived in Asia; today, most are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Energy proliferation is the difference. Asia is now the highest consumer of coal, and millions have transitioned from harmful biomass to liquefied petroleum gas for cooking. Africa’s future needs no magic wand, just affordable and reliable energy.
Way forward
Financing should be directed to establishing stable power supplies at affordable prices. Wind and solar cannot do that, especially at the scale required to lift Africans out of generational poverty.
Second, governments should secure diversified energy mixes — natural gas for dispatchable power, targeted coal where air-quality controls are achievable, and nuclear where scale and safety make sense. A green ideological checklist has no place in this formula.
Third, lenders must stop weaponizing environmental assessments as de facto bans on fossil fuels. Instead, they should finance measures that make fossil projects cleaner. Policymakers, financiers, and philanthropists should stop treating African energy strategies as a laboratory for climate alarmists’ virtue signaling.
Echoing these sentiments, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told African leaders that America has no desire to dictate their energy choices and rejected the paternalistic attitude of climate evangelism. His approach respects sovereignty and recognizes fossil fuels as tools for African progress and stands in contrast to the autocratic tendencies of the U.N. and Europeans.
The suspension of the Kenyan data center reveals a chasm between the fantasies of the climate industrial complex and the gritty reality of building a modern society. Such a gap, engendered by misguided international policy, might well be labeled energy apartheid.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.