Supply Chain Diversification
Lamine Savadogo is President of Marison Energy Systems and Global Ambassador, Edison Electric Institute.
In response to the supply chain challenges that the world has been experiencing, concepts such as onshoring, nearshoring, friendshoring, and decoupling have taken center stage. The energy transition will intensify this trend by inducing an exponential surge in the demand for critical minerals and their downstream outputs, such as solar panels, transmission and distribution cables, batteries, storage devices, sensors, wind turbines and parts, et cetera.
It has therefore become crucial to diversify and multiply supply chain alliances, to avoid being overly dependent on any one supplier. Decarbonization, digitalization, distributed generation, grid resilience and expansion, the electrification of transportation and of buildings, et cetera, will lead to an exponential increase in the demand for cobalt, bauxite, manganese, copper, lithium, graphite, nickel, rare earth elements, and other minerals.
The African continent possesses many of these critical minerals, however, in the search for nearshoring or friendshoring and decoupling partners, the continent has not yet sunk into the minds of most U.S. corporate decision makers in the power sector as an alternative supply chain partner.