Katie Auth
Deputy Executive Director, Energy for Growth Hub · Non-resident Fellow on US-Africa Relations, Carnegie Endowment · Former Acting Deputy Coordinator, Power Africa (USAID)
“The modern energy minimum bumps that threshold of consumption up to 1,000 kilowatt hours [per person per year]... only about a third of that energy is being consumed within the home. The rest is being consumed in hospitals, manufacturing, industrialization.”
“If you think about the African countries that are very mineral rich and the US wants to partner with them to expand their production of critical minerals and diversify those supply streams — that's a very energy intensive process. And right now a lot of countries are actually having to cut back their minerals industries because of a lack of electricity. Zambia is a great example... South Africa is another.”
“You can actually see the imports of Chinese solar PV skyrocketing in countries like Pakistan, South Africa and elsewhere... it's all bottom up driven. I don't really see a world in which we either can or maybe even want to compete against China for selling solar PV panels to countries.”
Katie Auth
One-line summary: Energy for Growth Hub deputy ED; development-energy expert. Tracked in stock-market for the energy-as-binding-constraint-on-critical-minerals point (Zambia/South Africa cutting mineral output for lack of power) and China's solar-PV dominance in the developing world.
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Said
Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On us-critical-mineral-independence:
"The modern energy minimum bumps that threshold of consumption up to 1,000 kilowatt hours [per person per year]... only about a third of that energy is being consumed within the home. The rest is being consumed in hospitals, manufacturing, industrialization." — 2026-05-26-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-katie-auth-on-how-the-modern-energy-minimum-can (2026-05-26)
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On us-critical-mineral-independence:
"If you think about the African countries that are very mineral rich and the US wants to partner with them to expand their production of critical minerals and diversify those supply streams — that's a very energy intensive process. And right now a lot of countries are actually having to cut back their minerals industries because of a lack of electricity. Zambia is a great example... South Africa is another." — 2026-05-26-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-katie-auth-on-how-the-modern-energy-minimum-can (2026-05-26)
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On us-critical-mineral-independence:
"You can actually see the imports of Chinese solar PV skyrocketing in countries like Pakistan, South Africa and elsewhere... it's all bottom up driven. I don't really see a world in which we either can or maybe even want to compete against China for selling solar PV panels to countries." — 2026-05-26-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-katie-auth-on-how-the-modern-energy-minimum-can (2026-05-26)
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