Sudan is fighting two crises that are usually discussed separately and are, in fact, one problem. Its electricity system has partially collapsed, and its economy has been unable to convert the end of conflict into durable development for as long as anyone can remember. Reliable power is the precondition for reviving agriculture, restarting industry, and running clinics and schools. The institutions, financing, and investment climate needed to build that power system are themselves casualties of the same decades of conflict that broke the economy. Treating energy reconstruction as a technical side project, separate from the harder political-economy questions, is how Sudan ends up rebuilding the same fragile system twice.

The Numbers Behind the Blackouts

IndicatorFigure
Installed generation capacity, pre-war~4.5 GW
Population with electricity access, pre-war~62%, concentrated in Khartoum
Generation capacity lost since April 2023up to 40%
Thermal plants still fully operational (of 15)2
Renewables’ share of the pre-war mix~1%
Estimated national reconstruction costup to $1 trillion
Near-term generation target~6,000 MW
2035 installed-capacity target8.4 GW (7.5 GW grid-connected)

Even before the current war, Sudan’s power sector was thin: about 60–70% of the population, mostly in rural and conflict-affected regions, had no electricity at all, while Khartoum absorbed close to half the national supply and still suffered regular blackouts. Per-capita electricity consumption in 2022 was a tenth of the global average. The war has since destroyed transformers, transmission lines, and fuel depots on a scale that has pushed millions further into darkness.

A Resource Base Sudan Has Barely Touched

What makes this more than a story of wartime destruction is how little of Sudan’s actual energy endowment has ever been developed. This is not a country short on resources.

Solar is the most obvious case. Irradiance of 5.8–6.8 kWh/m² a day puts Sudan among the best solar territory on Earth, and the levelized cost of solar power there — about $0.0376/kWh — already undercuts diesel generation by a wide margin. Yet only around 10 MW is installed today, against an official target of 2,190 MW of grid-connected PV by 2035.

Wind is even further behind: a single 0.8 MW turbine constitutes the country’s entire installed base, despite at least four sites identified as viable for utility-scale farms and a 1,550 MW target for 2035.

Geothermal is the resource almost nobody talks about. The Red Sea Coastal Plain near Suakin shows heat flows of 85–130 mW/m² and gradients up to 81°C/km, with hot springs reaching 65–85°C — direct evidence of active rifting. In Darfur, Jebel Marra, Sudan’s only recently active volcano, hosts the Deriba caldera with its crater lake, fumaroles, and hot springs, and further surface indications appear at the Tagbo and Beidob hills and the Bayuda volcanic field. These are mostly low-to-moderate-temperature resources that older flash-steam technology could not use economically. Modern binary-cycle plants can now generate from resources as cool as 90–180°C — which is why the government’s own plan, modest as it is, targets 54 MW of geothermal capacity by 2030 from a starting point of zero.

Hydropower still supplies roughly 55% of current generation through the Merowe and Roseires dams, but its reliability is increasingly hostage to sedimentation and erratic rainfall — a single-point dependency, not a long-term answer. Bioenergy, mainly sugar-industry cogeneration, is a comparatively mature 199 MW, expanding toward 270 MW by 2032. Further out, plans exist for 1,200 MW of nuclear capacity by 2030 and for tidal projects along the Red Sea capable of roughly 1.2 TWh a year — both realistic only once the financing and institutional prerequisites below are in place.

Why the Lights Still Aren’t On

None of this is primarily a technology problem. Sudan’s electricity sector is a centralized state monopoly under the Sudan Electricity Holding Company, with no clear legal framework for power purchase agreements or private participation, and overlapping mandates split across the Directorate of Renewable Energy, the Sudanese Hydro Generation Company, and the distribution utility. Tariffs sit well below cost recovery, which protects consumers in the short run but starves the sector of the investment it needs and pushes the burden onto an already strained public budget. External debt of roughly $58 billion and years of sanctions have closed off most of the financing that would otherwise flow toward exactly this kind of infrastructure.

Capacity has drained out with the people who used to run the sector: qualified engineers and technicians have emigrated for better opportunities elsewhere, leaving utilities short of the skills needed to keep even existing renewable installations running. The failures are documented and specific — a utility-scale solar plant in Darfur underperforming on grid losses, a hybrid photovoltaic-diesel plant in El-Fasher struggling with fuel and integration problems, the 2011 Doha Document’s solar electrification commitment to 70 Darfur villages left largely unmet by weak institutional follow-through.

And access has never been distributed on the basis of need. Greater Khartoum receives close to half the national electricity supply; Darfur, Kordofan, and the eastern states, despite large populations and significant agricultural output, remain disproportionately off-grid. This is not an accident of geography — it is the electricity sector reproducing the same center-periphery pattern that has shaped Sudanese infrastructure investment since the colonial period, and it is precisely the kind of exclusion that has fed grievance and conflict before.

The Older Problem Underneath the New One

Sudan’s difficulty turning energy potential into energy sufficiency is a specific case of a much older pattern: the country’s repeated failure to convert the end of conflict into development that holds. Ali Abdel Gadir Ali’s 2004 paper On the Challenges of Economic Development in Post-Conflict Sudan — written around the negotiations that produced the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ending the second civil war — remains one of the clearest diagnoses of why. Drawing on the Collier-Hoeffler economic theory of civil war, Ali makes the case that grievance supplies the language of rebellion, but it is the financial viability of insurgency that best predicts whether conflict actually breaks out and recurs — and that societies emerging from civil war face roughly double the risk of relapse in the first post-conflict decade compared with their pre-conflict baseline. Sudan lived that statistic: the 2005 peace agreement was followed by South Sudan’s secession in 2011, renewed fighting in Darfur and the Two Areas, the 2021 coup, and full-scale war from April 2023.

Ali identifies four priorities for post-conflict economic management: raising the investment rate, managing the expenditure surge that reconstruction inevitably brings without triggering inflation or currency instability, navigating the central bank’s role under a dual banking system, and building social safety nets. Two decades later, these read like a diagnosis of the energy sector specifically — an investment rate too low to fund generation capacity, a subsidized tariff structure that cannot absorb a reconstruction-scale expenditure surge without fiscal strain, and financing mechanisms that have never been built to reach a fragile state credibly. The current numbers make the stakes plain: even under an optimistic scenario of peace in 2026, modelling puts Sudan’s cumulative GDP loss at roughly $18.8 billion by 2043, with extreme poverty reaching nearly 60% of the population — about 34 million people — by 2030.

Energy as the Test Case

Read together, the two literatures point in the same direction. Energy access in Sudan is a governance and equity question before it is an engineering one, and it is also a useful test case for whether post-conflict Sudan can break its own pattern. A distributed, geographically dispersed build-out — solar and eventually geothermal reaching Darfur, Kordofan, and the east rather than concentrating again in Khartoum — is both more resilient to continued instability and more capable of addressing the exclusion that has repeatedly turned into grievance. Redirecting even part of the roughly $1.3 billion Sudan spends annually on imported fuel toward distributed renewables would ease foreign-exchange pressure, create rural jobs, and reduce reliance on the biomass fuels driving deforestation — while directly answering the investment-rate and expenditure-management questions Ali identified twenty years ago.

Sudan is not short on sunlight, wind, or heat in the ground. It has been short on the institutions and financing needed to turn any of it into electricity — the same shortage, in a different sector, that has defined its post-conflict record since the 1970s. Getting energy right this time would not just keep the lights on. It would be evidence that this round of peace can produce something the last ones didn’t.

Further Reading — Kandaka Library