James Mnyupe

Today, I'm going to talk to you about a curious tale from Southern Africa, about how a small, vulnerable nation decided to build a green industrialization hub of note, making lemonade from lemons.

So I hail from a small nation with a population of about three million people.

For our troubles, we consume about four and a half terawatt hours of electricity, and in the process, we emit about 0.01 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions.

So from a climate change perspective, we are not the problem child.

But if we're going to make some lemonades, we're probably going to need some lemons.

So let's talk about those.

Today, Namibia is the second most unequal society in the world as measured by a Gini coefficient.

We have 0.59 as a score.

We have a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 37 percent.

And we import 40 to 60 percent of our energy needs from our neighbors who themselves are energy insecure.

Our largest electricity generator is a hydroelectric power station.

And as you can imagine, when we suffer from debilitating droughts, which, as you know, are getting worse and worse, we find ourselves in a very sticky situation, having to buy electricity from the Southern African power pool at high prices and at the same time trying to subsidize and assist our farmers whose livestock are dying and, of course, their plants are withering.

OK, enough of the lemons.

We also need some sugar.

So, Namibia is actually quite a wealthy nation from a renewable energy perspective.

Vast tracts of our nation are glorified and covered in solar irradiance of 2,200 kilowatt hours per square meter.

At the same time, we have one of the best wind resources on the planet, and in the southwestern part of our country, we enjoy wind speeds in excess of 11 meters per second that generate capacity factors of more than 50 percent for most turbines.

Now, not all of us in the room are energy nerds, so to illustrate the point, a gentleman called Antoine Albert set the windsurfing record for speed over 500 meters, clocking 99 kilometers an hour, just on a board with a sail.

We didn't give him a speeding ticket.

So with all these ingredients of amazing renewable energy,