The Daily Populous Friday August 22nd, 2025 night edition
Authored by wired.com and submitted by wiredmagazine

While overall sales to African countries are still small compared to these traditional export markets, the Global South appears to be at a turning point in how it thinks about energy. For decades, energy-starved countries largely had one default option when they wanted to add new power supply: import coal and gas. Now, for the first time, solar energy is emerging as the cheaper and greener way forward, so there’s no need to sacrifice the environment for development.

What’s happening in Africa right now might sound familiar, especially if you know anything about the global green energy industry. We’ve seen several versions of this story before, most notably in Pakistan last year.

In 2024, Pakistan installed about 15 Gigawatts of solar panels; for context, the country’s total peak electricity demand is about 30 Gigawatts. Households put so many panels on their rooftops that Pakistani cities now look visibly different on satellite maps. The trend is threatening the future of Pakistan’s national grid because people are using their own panels to generate power, reducing the need to buy electricity from the grid. And almost all of this happened because the country was mass-importing solar panels from its neighbor and ally, China.

A similar trend happened in South Africa in 2023. The utility infrastructure in both countries is not resilient enough to meet peak demand, causing consistent blackouts that pushed consumers to look for alternative energy sources. The government introduced policies that made solar especially attractive, like tax breaks for buying panels or paying people for transmitting excess energy to the grid.

But across the board, the main thing driving the popularity of solar is simple: the cost to purchase and install Chinese panels has gotten so low that the world has reached an inflection point. Even if a country isn’t particularly worried about climate change, it simply makes economic sense to generate energy from solar, says Anika Patel, China analyst at Carbon Brief, a climate policy publication.

“A lot of African nations right now just need more electricity. And the fact that there is this option to install solar plants at a fraction of the cost of building a new coal or gas plant is attractive,” she says.

Price is an especially important factor for African countries, because it’s harder to get a loan to fund a solar power plant project there than in developed countries, says Léo Echard, policy officer at the Global Solar Council and the author of a report on Africa’s solar market. Since Chinese solar companies have significant price advantages over manufacturers in other countries, they are always the go-to option for supplying Africa’s solar demand.

There are two types of demand driving the solar boom in African countries, Echard says. In North Africa, countries like Algeria and Egypt are building massive utility-scale solar power plants that require large numbers of panels. But in Sub-Sahara Africa, the panels are being imported by more rural communities in places that traditionally haven’t been connected to the grid at all.

Just like in Pakistan, this network of distributed rooftop solar panels is transforming the energy landscape. People are getting access to energy, and that access isn’t dependent on government spending or foreign loans. Instead, it spreads organically, household by household, as long as the panels are cheap enough.

Jerome_Eugene_Morrow on August 22nd, 2025 at 00:57 UTC »

… Good?

phiwong on August 21st, 2025 at 15:40 UTC »

If they get a good deal, go for it. Far better even to borrow money for power than poorly considered things like big government buildings or glory and ego boosting palaces.

China is basically dumping solar panels at or below production costs now. The ROI for commercial plants (done well) is probably over 10-20%. And it will at least promise to benefit regular citizens and the economy somewhat especially if this is followed by better distribution infrastructure.

While it takes a fair bit to make the panels, running solar power plants are not that complicated relatively speaking. Definitely need good engineers but not something that requires tons of PhDs and world class technicians and knowhow.

wiredmagazine on August 21st, 2025 at 15:14 UTC »

From Algeria on the Mediterranean coast to landlocked Zambia in the south, countries across Africa have been importing significantly more solar panels from China this year than in the past, which analysts say could be the start of a massive effort to help meet the continent’s power demands with renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

In May 2025, African countries imported a combined 1.57 Gigawatts of solar panels from China, an all time high. (Think of it as adding three-fourths of the capacity of the Hoover Dam in one month.) Dave Jones, chief analyst at the global energy think tank Ember, notes that the spike didn’t come from relatively affluent African countries like South Africa, but rather from nearly two dozen smaller nations.

Jones tracks the value of Chinese solar panels exported to different countries using Chinese customs data. In the first five months of 2025, he found at least 22 African countries imported more solar panels than they did during the same period last year, with most of them doubling the amount. One of the most striking examples is Algeria, which imported 0.76 GW of solar panels in the first half of 2025, a 6,300 percent increase from the year before.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/african-imports-of-chinese-solar-panels-increase/