How can North Africa harness its ‘green dividend?’

The sunbaked deserts and wind-swept coasts of North Africa could power not just the region but much of Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa as well, offering a blueprint for energy resilience in an era of climate disruption.
Yet this potential remains constrained. While individual countries have made strides in the adoption of renewable energy, collective progress is hamstrung by decades of political discord, fragmentation, and infrastructural isolation. The region’s transition to clean energy, driven by existential threats such as water scarcity, agricultural collapse, and volatile commodity markets, has unfolded in enforced silos.
These efforts, however impressive, are only mirroring the region’s broader economic and diplomatic fractures.
The urgency is undeniable. North Africa’s energy demand is rising twice as quickly as the global average, straining budgets in hydrocarbon-importing states such as Tunisia and Morocco while putting pressure on exporters Algeria and Libya to reconcile their fossil fuel dependencies with ambitious decarbonization pledges.
Renewables now account for 40 percent of installed capacity regionally, yet their contribution to the overall energy mix lags at less than 5 percent, a disconnect that reveals systemic inefficiencies: Solar farms in the Sahara generate power hundreds of miles from population centers, wind projects along the Atlantic coast lack transmission links to neighboring grids.
This disjointedness inflates costs, limits scalability, and leaves countries vulnerable to the very external shocks — energy price spikes, climate disasters — they seek to mitigate.
Thus, we must revisit the mostly ignored fact that the case for closer regional integration is not ideological but pragmatic. For instance, a regional electricity market could help balance Morocco’s midday solar surplus with Algeria’s evening demand peaks, stabilize Tunisia’s grid during windless nights, and export excess capacity to Europe or elsewhere.
Shared infrastructure would lower prices, attract foreign investment, and cushion against the droughts and heatwaves that ravage subsistence farmers. Technical solutions exist, from harmonized grid codes to cross-border auctions for renewable projects, and joint ventures in green hydrogen production.
What is missing is the political will to transcend the historical grievances that have frozen cooperation since the collapse of the Arab Maghreb Union in the 1990s.
Europe, with its decarbonization targets and energy diversification goals, has a vested interest in underwriting this integration, especially if the ensuing “green dividend” extends to Sub-Saharan Africa as a means, for example, of tackling the underlying drivers of migration.
Yet the path to realizing this goal hinges not on potentially “greenwashing” external actors but on the region’s ability to reframe renewables as a neutral domain insulated from broader tensions. North Africa, with its complementary resources and geographic proximity, is uniquely positioned to become a renewable energy hub, but only if its leaders confront the barriers that have long Balkanized progress.
In a nutshell, the region’s chronic fragmentation stems from a combustible mix of historical grievances, clashing economic ideologies, and infrastructural neglect. Infrastructural deficits further compound this dysfunction. Highways between major cities, such as Casablanca and Algiers, remain incomplete and cross-border rail links are nonexistent. Electricity grids operate as isolated islands, with Morocco’s advanced renewables infrastructure disconnected from Algeria’s gas-fired plants or Tunisia’s wind farms.
This physical disconnect mirrors institutional barriers. Tariff regimes favor external partners over regional ones, while subsidies for fossil fuels, still dominant in Algeria and Libya, distort incentives for green investment.
Unfortunately, the costs of such fragmentation are rising. As global demand for green hydrogen and critical minerals grows, North African countries risk ceding competitive advantage to more integrated regions. Europe’s energy diversification post-Ukraine has intensified the focus on North Africa’s renewables potential, but disjointed national strategies lack scale without regional interconnection.

In a region where sunlight and wind transcend borders, electrons might yet achieve what diplomats cannot. 

Hafed Al-Ghwell

The recent Algeria-Tunisia-Libya consultations, though exclusionary, hint at nascent recognition of shared challenges, one of which is to transition from energy Balkanization to integration because green growth requires that the tensions that have come to define the region for more than half a century be deprioritized.
Fortunately, renewables offer North Africa a rare opportunity to decouple electricity cooperation from entrenched geopolitical rivalries. Existing cross-border grid infrastructure provides a technical foundation for this. Such exchanges, though currently hydrocarbon-dependent, could pivot to renewables as countries expand solar and wind capacities.
Moreover, other regional complements enhance the case. Morocco’s solar surplus could power Algerian industries during peak demand, or Tunisian wind energy could be channeled to Libyan cities battered by conflict-disrupted grids after dusk.
Such synergies require minimal political alignment, only agreements on pricing and transmission protocols. This way, a regional electricity market, linked by high-capacity interconnectors, could reduce dependence on costly or volatile fossil fuel backups, curb emissions, and reduce prices from Rabat to Sharm El-Sheikh.
Challenges persist, however. Power grids remain mostly fragmented, with interconnection capacity underutilized as a result of incompatible regulations and chronic underinvestment. A proposal by COMELEC, a regional electricity cooperation oversight body formed in 1974 by the national utility companies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, joined later by Libya and Mauritania, envisioned the introduction of an integrated electricity market by 2025, to be built on standardized tariffs and incentivized private sector participation.
Phased approaches such as these, starting with renewable-specific corridors or peak-time trading, could build trust without demanding full political reconciliation.
For Europe, which seeks stable, clean energy imports, supporting such incrementalism is pragmatic: Functional electricity markets in North Africa would preempt the need for politically fraught gas deals. In a region where sunlight and wind transcend borders, electrons might yet achieve what diplomats cannot.
Achieving this will require decisive action on three parallel tracks. Firstly, governments must prioritize functional interconnectivity. Existing bilateral projects, such as the Morocco-Spain undersea cable, demonstrate technical feasibility but remain exceptions. A regional grid would demand standardized regulations, harmonized subsidy reforms, and joint investment in transmission infrastructure, possibly facilitated by multilateral lenders such as the African Development Bank.
Secondly, knowledge-sharing platforms could accelerate innovation. Algeria’s geothermal experiments in the Sahara, Egypt’s expertise in large-scale solar deployment, and Mauritania’s wind projects each hold lessons for their neighbors.
Thirdly, sector-specific diplomacy must bypass broader political stalemates. Renewable energy working groups, insulated from high tensions, could foster trust through incremental gains: agreements on shared grid codes, for example, or coordination of bids for international climate funds.
Critics argue that domestic instability, from fractured governance in Libya to Egypt’s debt burdens, precludes such coordination. Yet these challenges amplify the need for collective solutions. Otherwise, North Africa’s green dividend will remain elusive.
The alternative, a patchwork of disconnected renewable projects, will just replicate the inefficiencies of the fossil fuel era. By embracing interconnectivity as a strategic imperative, governments can transform energy from a source of division into a catalyst for shared resilience.
The window of opportunity is narrow but the rewards are profound: energy security, climate adaptation, and economic convergence.
In a region long defined by its fractures, cooperation is not idealism, it is simple arithmetic.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. X: @HafedAlGhwell