Today, around 600 million people in Africa completely lack access to electricity.
African leaders are under immense pressure to ramp up energy production to fill the continent’s current needs as well as to meet skyrocketing demand projections, and to do this in a way that doesn’t break the bank or compromise climate goals.
This is known as an energy trilemma: producing energy that is sufficient, affordable, and sustainable.
This task is a daunting one for all contexts, but especially for Africa, which is contending with ongoing economic development, some of the least developed grids on the planet, and a coming population boom. The continent’s population is expected to double between now and 2050; by midcentury, a quarter of the global population will be in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, Africa is faced with an intense and urgent imperative: to leapfrog over fossil fuels and straight into developing a renewable-powered economy.
Rural parts of the continent remain severely underserved and disconnected from power grids, and innovative solutions will be necessary to electrify these regions. Some African researchers are looking into the potential of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) as a clean energy solution in rural areas that are hard to electrify.
MFCs rely on the natural metabolic processes of microorganisms to act as biocatalysts to convert organic waste materials from farms, food waste, or wastewater into electricity. In more scientific terms, they are “bioreactors that convert the energy in the chemical bonds of organic compounds into electrical energy through catalytic activity of microorganisms under anaerobic conditions.”
MFCs are a potentially promising solution for compound crises – most notably energy security, global warming and wastewater management – particularly in rural contexts, as they can provide a cheap, small-scale, and sustainable way to generate power. They are also cleaner and more efficient than other biomass applications since they don’t involve combusting the biomass (resulting in carbon dioxide emissions), but instead derive energy directly from it.
“Progress made over the past two decades has considerably increased the power output and conversion efficiencies of MFCs,” says Ohio State University’s Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering. “As a result, MFCs are broadly applicable for wastewater treatment, powering marine electronic devices in remote locations, and as biological sensors.”
Across Africa, researchers are making important progress in the research and development of MFCs. but, according to a recent report by Nature Africa, there are still considerable challenges to developing, deploying, and scaling the technology. MFCs remain more expensive per watt of energy than other renewable energies like wind and solar, and their reliance on cheap, locally available materials – while in some ways a major boon – makes the technology difficult to scale up and standardize. Until these hurdles are cleared, MFCs are more likely to be used in niche and small-scale applications, such as in wastewater treatment plants, rather than as a broad or large-scale energy production solution.
Furthermore, a lack of funding, expertise, and clear guidance poses a challenge for research teams looking into MFCs in Africa. “The research is not streamlined, and no defined policy guidelines are available,” Shankara Radhakrishnan, associate professor in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Pretoria, told Nature. “Many research groups scattered across Africa are working on bio-electrochemical systems and they can play a major role, especially in rural and remote areas. A clear roadmap must be drawn, and awareness needs to be created to motivate work in this area,” she said.
The issue of fragmentation in MFC research is not unique to Africa. A recent scientific review of MFC research found that “global sustainability issues can be successfully addressed by MFCs only if the efforts are collated, structured and directed towards a common objective of practical application of these technologies.”
