Africa (55 countries)

Ember Yearly Electricity Data

Open, country-level grid intensity for Africa, including Nigeria, where no government publishes a usable factor.

Overview

No African government publishes a grid electricity factor that a company inventory can use. Ember's Yearly Electricity Data does: generation and emissions by country, from which it publishes an emissions intensity in g CO₂e per kWh.

Slate imports the total-generation rows for all 55 African countries from 2019 onward, one release per calendar year, plus a "latest" release holding each country's most recent year. Nigeria's intensity went from 505.9 g/kWh in 2019 to 451.8 in 2025.

The obvious official alternative, the IFI harmonised grid factors hosted by the UNFCCC, was considered and rejected. Its operating margin reflects the costliest fossil generation, which suits Nigeria's grid but overstates hydro and geothermal grids five to nine times: Kenya 574 against Ember's 96.

At a glance

Publisher

Ember (independent energy think tank)

Code in Slate

EMBER

Covers

Grid electricity emissions intensity for every African country

Publishing schedule

Updated monthly. Yearly figures firm up the following year.

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)

Bulk download

Permitted by the licence, from the publisher

Official files

These go straight to the publisher, never to a copy hosted by Slate. Where a page holds several files, the note names the exact one Slate imports.

• Data filerelease_generation_yearly_global.csv

  Published Page last updated 15 Sep 2026. 215 countries, 2000–2025. Slate extracts the 55 African countries.

  Get file↗

• MethodologyEmber electricity data methodology

  95 pages, including per-country sources. Nigeria comes from the US EIA and the Transmission Company of Nigeria.

  Open↗

Releases in Slate

A release is one immutable published edition. Slate keeps the publisher's file unmodified, records its checksum, and selects a release by the date of each activity, so a 2022 record is always priced on 2022 data.

What Slate uses it for

How Slate handles it

The decisions that change numbers, and why they were made the way they were.

1. 01

   A life-cycle figure on AR2

   Ember's intensity includes upstream emissions and converts methane at GWP 21. Slate records that basis, so rows for an organisation on AR5 are flagged as mixing GWP vintages. That is correct, not an error.

2. 02

   No upstream or loss rows

   Upstream is already inside the figure, and Ember publishes no grid-loss factor. Slate writes neither.

3. 03

   A missing year is a gap

   Lesotho's latest year is 2022, so a 2024 Lesotho record gets a clear "factor not found" error instead of borrowing 2022. Carrying a country's last year forward only happens in the "latest" release, which records the data year it used.

4. 04

   Checked on import

   Every row must satisfy emissions ÷ generation × 1000 = intensity, or the import fails.

Check a figure yourself

1. 1

   Download the global CSV.

2. 2

   Filter to the country, the year and the "Total generation" row.

3. 3

   Read "Emissions intensity (gCO2e/kWh)" and divide by 1,000 for kg/kWh.

Licence and attribution

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)

Attribution

Ember, Yearly Electricity Data.