Meet the new Renewables Rising index!

From the newsletter

Today we introduce our monthly index for the renewables sector. It shows whether the situation in the sector has improved or worsened in the past month and by how much. This is measured by the change in five key areas: Funding, capacity, pricing, staffing and policy. Data is drawn from public sources.

• We also include a ranking of African countries based on data in five separate categories in the past three months: Projects (number and cumulative size), policy (number and impact), funding (number and size and type), events (number), employment (number of jobs advertised, number of top ten companies in the sector).

• Furthermore, we include a ranking of companies in Africa's renewables sector. This is based on the conviction that people are the single best indicator for how well a company is doing. Hence we rank companies by people metrics: Size (number of staff, number of sales staff, number of country locations with 3+ staff), growth (increase in staff, increase in number of sales staff) and maturity (experience, tenure, number of top degrees).

More details

• South Africa tops our country ranking, followed by its peers, Egypt and Nigeria. It is no surprise that South Africa leads. You would expect their energy challenges to be a significant reason for energy investments, and the same applies to Nigeria.

• In the last three months, South Africa received $376 million in funding for nine renewable energy projects totalling over 1,200 MW. These are mainly led by private sector investors. In the same period, it hosted over ten events that effectively marketed its energy sector to investors.

• Egypt received the highest amount of funding, at about $4 billion, for four renewable energy projects. Most interestingly, it secured funding for its 2,000 MW wind farm, which is set to be the largest in Africa once completed.

• In our company ranking, the top three positions are held by two Chinese solar manufacturing companies, JA Solar and Jinko Solar. Nairobi-based CrossBoundary Group emerges second but has the highest number of staff in Africa, double the total of the two Chinese giants. 

• CrossBoundary Group has a segment specialised in energy projects in Africa, mainly mini-grids, but has recently shifted its focus to commercial and industrial customers. Over the last year, it hired 78 people. Jinko and JA Solar have the highest number of sales staff, at 41, which is more than 60% of the total staff for the listed ten companies.

• Norway-based Scatec ASA emerged as fourth in the ranking but had the highest number of new hires in the last year, at 117. The company has secured major renewable energy projects in South Africa and Egypt, and this could explain why they are hiring.