As crude price skyrockets worldwide, Kenya at the jatropha tree. The tree is at the heart of a five-year strategy to develop bio fuel and reduce dependency on crude oil.
Photo: People line up to buy kerosene as some shops and petrol stations in Kenya. Reuters.

South Africa takes a broad step toward renewable power supply:

South Africa’s first renewable energy power initiative feeding into the national grid was officially powered up on Friday. The R75-million Darling Wind Farm consists of four turbines of 1.3 MW capacity generating a total of 5.2 MW of beautiful clean energy!
The idea for Darling Wind [...]

International volunteer Kathryn Cunningham recruited her local community in Delaware, USA, to help power a local hospital in The Gambia using solar panels. Kathryn: “We started this project in October 2006 - our goal was to raise 300,000 for this project. We have raised 240,000 dollars so far..we will get there!”

Fact: Africa generates abysmally low output of electricity. While Africa is flush with biomass, a sustainable and cheap source of energy, its use as an alternative fuel source for electric power plant is yet to take foothold.
This may be changing soon - Timbuktu Chronicles reports on a biomass/biogas powered “off-grid” power plant [...]

“Govt, oil companies in a battle of wits over gas flaring” is the title of Ben Ukwuoma’s article in Nigerian Guardian. This continues the discussion on gas flaring in Nigeria. The new deadline has been shifted to December 2008, since the oil and gas companies failed to adhere to the January 1st deadline. Excerpts:
It [...]

“From January 1, 2008, government will impose fines on operators that still flare gas and from December 31, 2008, the oilfields of defaulting operators will be shut.” This was a directive from the Nigerian government,reported on AfricanLoft on December 5, 2007, via Reuters.
Today is January 2008, 14 days after the deadline, and gas is [...]

The Financial Times reports that the Russian gas company, Gazprom, is in talks with the Nigerian government on the development of the latter’s gas fields. These talks center on Gazprom investing in “energy infrastructure” in Nigeria “in return for a chance to develop some of the biggest gas deposits in the world” according to information [...]