What a 1987 treaty on refrigerants has to do with keeping the lights on across Africa and beyond
Every September 16, the world marks the anniversary of the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 treaty that phased out the chemicals eating away at the ozone layer. It’s widely regarded as the most successful environmental agreement in history. More than 99% of nearly 100 ozone-depleting substances have been phased out globally.
This year’s UN theme is “Global action for a cooler planet.” It marks ten years since the Protocol’s Kigali Amendment, adopted in 2016, which extended the treaty to cover hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the refrigerants used in most air conditioners and cooling systems today. HFCs don’t harm the ozone layer directly. Still, they’re extremely potent greenhouse gases, and demand for cooling in the developing world is rising fast enough that the UN thought it deserved a treaty amendment of its own.
That’s the part of the story worth pausing on, because it connects directly to what we build.
Unreliable grids push people toward the very things Kigali is trying to phase down
In Nigeria, the numbers on grid inefficiency are hard to ignore. Regulatory reporting for the first quarter of 2026 put the national Transmission Loss Factor at just under 8%, above the 7% regulatory benchmark (BusinessDay, 2026). In plain terms, for every 100 megawatt-hours put into the grid, close to 8 never reach a distribution company at all.
That’s before power even reaches a household or business meter. Once it does, unreliability compounds the problem in a different way. National Bureau of Statistics data has put the share of Nigeria’s electricity consumption that is self-generated at close to half (Punch, citing NBS), largely through diesel and petrol generators bought because the grid can’t be relied on. A separate International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) report found that well over 80% of Nigerian urban households and a similar share of companies own or share a backup generator, and that the cost of self-generated power makes locally made products meaningfully more expensive than imports (21st Century Chronicle, citing IRENA).
Every outage-driven generator hour is a double loss. It burns fossil fuel directly, and because generators struggle to run air conditioning as efficiently or as cleanly as grid power does, it pushes more load onto exactly the HFC-based cooling systems Kigali is trying to phase down. Refrigeration and air conditioning already account for over 40% of total electricity consumption in developing countries, a share expected to keep climbing with urbanisation, rising incomes, and hotter average temperatures (SEforALL). The same report notes that ozone-depleting substances were also potent warming agents, and that the Montreal Protocol had already prevented an estimated 135 billion tonnes of carbon-equivalent emissions between 1990 and 2010 alone. The Kigali Amendment is the next chapter of that story, aimed squarely at cooling.
Why this matters for BPS
This is the problem Beacon Power Services (BPS) was built around. Our products and services give utilities the visibility to catch faults early, forecast load more accurately, and cut the outages and distribution losses that force households and businesses to fall back on their own power. These are the same losses that push people toward diesel gensets and less efficient cooling in the first place.
The pattern isn’t unique to the Nigerian market. Across much of the African continent, the same combination of unreliable grids, heavy reliance on backup generation, and rising cooling demand shows up wherever power supply can’t be counted on. We haven’t put a verified number on how much fossil-fuel and HFC-driven demand our work displaces. Still, the direction is the point: every outage avoided and every loss reduced is pressure taken off the systems the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol is trying to move the world away from.
Reliable power reduces demand for both fossil-fuel backup generation and the HFC-heavy cooling equipment the Kigali Amendment now targets. That link is worth remembering on a day set aside to mark exactly this kind of global cooperation.
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