Highlighting Ethiopia’s exceptionally low motorization rate, CleanTechnica reminded that Ethiopia has a population of 126 million people with the total number of vehicles registered in Ethiopia is around 1.2 million.
Citing the reports and announcements from the Ethiopian government, CleanTechnica reported that Ethiopia had a plan to catalyze adoption of electric vehicles in Ethiopia with a 10 year target to see 148,000 electric cars and close to 50,000 electric buses on Ethiopia’s roads by 2030.
However, Ethiopia has made incredible progress on this path to the extent that the Ministry of Transport and Logistics recently said that this target of over 100,000 electric vehicles has already been met in just the first 2 years of this plan, the report underscored.
Due to this incredible progress, the target has since been bumped up to close to 500,000 in the 10-year period, CleanTechnica’s report noted.
In just 2 years, locally assembled EVs and imported EVs have added almost 10% of Ethiopia’s current total ICE vehicle registrations, the report indicated. “Let us say that all the vehicles in the current fleet stay on the road for the next 8 years (highly unlikely) and the total fleet will then be 1.7 million. If the target is met, it would mean the penetration of electric vehicles in Ethiopia’s total fleet will be close to 30% at that time,” the report noted.
This will be quite a remarkable feat. Of course, the actual number will be more than 30 percent, as a lot of the vehicles in the current ICE fleet will be retired by then. Also, given the extremely low motorization in Ethiopia, vehicle sales should grow at a much faster rate going forward, and probably the penetration of EVs in the country’s total fleet will hit close to 50 percent by then.
Another factor that will accelerate the population of EVs is the move by the Ethiopian government to push for restrictions on all ICE vehicle imports. Late last year, the Ethiopian government announced that it was finalizing the process to ban all ICE imports in the extremely near future, the report indicated.
CleanTechnica further indicated that Ethiopia spends over $5 billion annually on petrol and diesel imports, precious foreign currency it does not have. Ethiopia has also recently started generating electricity from the first units at the 5-gigawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), adding to its other hydro and renewable energy resources.
MG/abj/APA