Beyond clean energy: measuring the wider impact of Africa's energy transition
Infinity Power is on a mission to be Africa's preferred sustainable energy solutions partner – powering economic growth and social development, and enabling communities to realise their full potential through access to clean energy.
We do this because we are committed to a clear vision: powering Africa through renewable energy technologies. Africa's energy transition is the largest development opportunity of our generation, and how we build matters as much as how much we build.
Sustainability is not a workstream alongside that growth. It is one of our core values, and it is delivered through Infinity Power's Sustainability Strategy. The strategy rests on four pillars: delivering standards of energy excellence, protecting the natural environment, leading the just energy transition, and operating with integrity. These pillars are not parallel tracks. They reinforce one another. A wind farm that funds vegetation restoration to protect a catchment is also creating jobs; a community that trusts our grievance process is a community where our assets run reliably.
We have committed to establishing links between our Sustainability Strategy, our material issues and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In doing so we can help Africa achieve its development ambitions, transforming the continent towards prosperity, resilience and equality.
What follows is what we have achieved to date, and the approach we are carrying into the projects entering construction and our advanced development pipeline.
Protecting the natural environment
The headline environmental benefit of renewable energy is usually expressed in tonnes of CO₂ avoided. Across our operating portfolio that figure was 3.3 million tonnes in 2025, from 3,798 GWh of clean electricity generated. It is an important measure of progress. It is not the whole environmental picture.
Responsible development starts by understanding the environments in which projects are built, assessing potential impacts, and putting measures in place to protect biodiversity and natural resources through construction and into operations. In 2025 we completed the first full year of our group-wide biodiversity policy and recorded zero environmental incidents across the portfolio.
West Bakr Wind Farm in Egypt is a 252 MW project avoiding around 571,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year. It also sits on the Red Sea Flyway, one of the world's most important migration routes for raptors and soaring birds. We operate real-time monitoring with shutdown-on-demand, and we publish what that monitoring finds. During the spring season of this year we recorded one migratory bird fatality . Those findings are not a footnote to the project; they are the evidence base now shaping a raptor-focused biodiversity offset programme. Managing collision risk on a flyway is a permanent operational discipline, not a problem that is solved once and closed out.
At Ras Ghareb, ecological surveys ahead of construction identified active Egyptian spiny-tailed lizard burrows inside the works area. Working with specialist consultants, our teams excavated the burrows, carried out health checks and translocated the animals beyond the construction zone; follow-up monitoring confirmed they resettled. Designing around biodiversity before ground is broken how we truly protect the environment around us.
In South Africa, that responsibility extends to the ecosystems surrounding our sites. Close to the perdekraal East Wind Farm we worked with Witzenberg Municipality and CapeNature to clear invasive alien vegetation from over 300 hectares of local nature reserve. Combined with efforts to replant indigenous Cliffortia, these initiatives have been invaluable for improving water security , carbon sequestration and wider catchment area health.
SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy
SDG 13: Climate Action.
SDG 15: Life on Land
Leading the just energy transition
Every renewable energy project is developed somewhere, alongside communities with their own needs and priorities. The material issues under this pillar – local job creation, community investment and engagement, responsible land use, labour management, diversity and inclusion – are the ones our social licence rests on.
In 2025 we invested $3.1 million across eight communities, reaching more than 80,000 beneficiaries, of whom 55% were women and girls. We held 355 community engagements and launched the WE ARE Gender Committee, formalising our work on gender equity across the organisation.
The success of the community investment strategy is in our impact numbers. In South Africa, a careers day reached 2,810 learners across four high schools, 14 trainees progressed through multi-year electrical and welding certifications, and six young people moved from internships into permanent roles in our operations. In Senegal, solar-powered irrigation expanded to 81 farms around Taiba Ndiaye, supporting 488 hectares under cultivation and year-round income for 535 farmers. In Egypt, field skills training equipped local people to staff the bird monitoring programme at West Bakr – environmental protection at that site that is combined with quality community jobs.
The same principle carries into projects still under construction. At the 200 MW Ras Ghareb Wind Project, expected to supply clean electricity to more than 359,000 homes and avoid around 404,000 tonnes of CO₂ each year once operational, the impact extends beyond generation. As part of the project's wider commitments, a certified internship programme for young engineers in the region is being launched, with a particular focus on increasing women's participation in the energy sector.
Expanding clean electricity creates the opportunity; ensuring communities can participate in and benefit from it is what turns energy investment into development.
SDG 4: Quality Education
SDG 5: Gender Equality
SDG 10: Reduce Inequality
Operating with integrity, and delivering standards of energy excellence
Our impact, in turn, depends on how projects are financed, governed and delivered.
Large-scale renewable energy brings together governments, utilities, investors, development finance institutions, contractors and local communities. The complexity of that ecosystem is precisely why responsible delivery cannot be improvised. Environmental and social considerations have to be embedded from due diligence through construction and into operations, with stakeholder engagement continuing across the life of the asset.
In 2025 we built the machinery for that at group level. We rolled out an enhanced Environmental and Social Management System aligned to international lender standards, brought several assets into in-house management to improve consistency of oversight. Health and safety remains the clearest test: we recorded a lost time incident frequency rate of 0.31 per 200,000 hours worked. We received seven minor community grievances during the year and no serious ones.
Ras Ghareb illustrates how the capital side influences this work. A nexus of environmental and social commitments agreed between the EBRD, the Green Climate Fund, JICA and Proparco, to be implemented by ourselves over the project’s 25-year life-span.
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth.
SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals
Embedding Sustainability in the energy transition
Looking across the portfolio, the environmental, social and governance dimensions of renewable energy are not separate outcomes. Reducing emissions contributes to climate action. Protecting biodiversity strengthens environmental resilience. Investing in local capability creates the conditions for people to participate in the transition rather than simply live alongside it. Strong governance and partnership create infrastructure capable of delivering value over decades.
This is the real connection between environmental, social and governance and the SDGs. They are not separate commitments sitting alongside our renewable energy activities. They are how we understand the wider impact of responsible development, and a framework for making that impact measurable rather than asserted.
In practice, it means looking at every project and asking: what environmental value can it create? What opportunities can it unlock? How can it strengthen the communities around it? And what partnerships are needed to make that impact last?
Scaling what matters across Africa
Africa's energy transition will require scale. But scale should not be measured only in megawatts added. It should also be measured by the quality of the infrastructure built, the emissions avoided, the ecosystems protected, the opportunities created, and the communities and economies strengthened along the way.
Our operating portfolio stands at 1.3 GW across Egypt, South Africa and Senegal, with a total pipeline of 16 GW and around 3 GW in advanced development. But the significance of that scale is best understood through what happens around individual projects.
At West Bakr, generation runs alongside active, transparently reported biodiversity monitoring. At Perdekraal East, restoration connects renewable investment with Western Cape catchment area health. At Ras Ghareb, clean power is being built alongside skills development, safeguards and international partnership.
The opportunity is not simply to use the continent's solar and wind resources to generate more electricity. It is to turn those resources into stronger energy systems, greater economic opportunity, deeper local capability, and a more resilient future.
Because the success of Africa's energy transition will not be measured only by how much clean power we generate. It will be measured by what that power makes possible.