While access to electricity has improved across the world, sub-Saharan Africa would continue its struggle to light up the continent by 2050, the World Energy Council’s (WEC’s) latest report shows.

‘The World Energy Scenarios – Composing Energy Futures to 2050’ showed Africa remained behind the rest of the world and would, in the next 30 years, continue to have the most people without access to electricity.

The WEC based its research on two possible scenarios to 2050, namely Jazz, which examined a potential world where there was a consumer focus on achieving energy access, affordability and quality of supply with the use of the best available energy source, and Symphony, which focused on driving environmental sustainability and energy security through corresponding international practices and policies.

In 2010, a total of 1.27-billion people world-wide were without access to electricity. By 2050, this was expected to decrease to 319-mil- lion in the Jazz scenario and 530-million in the Symphony scenario.

Africa would be home to the biggest propor-tion of people without access to electricity.

About 589-million of Africa’s population had no access to electricity in 2010. The WEC predicted that this would drop to 266-million by 2015 in the Jazz scenario and to 402-million in the Symphony scenario.

This was compared with South and Central Asia, which would host 102-million people without access to electricity in the Symphony scenario and 45-million people in the Jazz scenario – a significant decline from the 471-million people in the dark in 2010.

The entire population of East Asia would have access to electricity in both scenarios by 2050, as would the Middle East and North Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.

South-East Asia and the Pacific were expected to report that eight-million of their population would be without access to electricity by 2050 in the Jazz version and 26-million in the Symphony scenario.

The report revealed that the world had entered into unprecedented uncertainty for the energy sector, with a key challenge being to meet the increasing future energy demand.

The world’s population would increase from about 7-billion in 2013 to 8.7-billion by 2050 in the Jazz scenario and 9.4-billion in the Symphony scenario.

The WEC estimated that the global total primary energy supply would increase from 546 EJ/y in 2010 to 879 EJ/y in 2050 in the Jazz scenario and 696 EJ in the Symphony scenario.

Total primary energy supply from South and Central Asia would register 96 EJ/y and 136 EJ/y in the Symphony and Jazz scenarios respectively, up from 43 EJ/y in 2010.

Sub-Saharan Africa would register the lowest total energy supply at 50 EJ/y and 46 EJ/y by 2050 in the Jazz and Symphony scenarios respectively – double the supply of the 23 EJ/y reported in 2010.

South-East Asia and the Pacific would record an increase from the 2010 32 EJ/y to 54 EJ/y in the Symphony scenario and 71 EJ/y in the Jazz scenario.