While overall sales for African countries are still small compared to these traditional export markets, the global South seems to be a turning point on how it thinks of energy. For decades, the hungry countries of energy had largely a predefined option when they wanted to add a new power supply: import coal and gas. Now, for the first time, solar energy is emerging as the cheapest and green way, so there is no need to sacrifice the environment for development.
Family history
What is happening in Africa right now might seem familiar, especially if you know something about the global green energy industry. We have already seen several versions of this story before, in particular in Pakistan last year.
In 2024, Pakistan installed about 15 Gigawatt of solar panels; For the context, the total demand for total electricity of the country is about 30 Gigawatt. Families put so many panels on their roofs that now the Pakistani cities it seems visibly different on satellite maps. The trend is threatening the future of the Pakistani national grid because people use their panels to generate energy, reducing the need to buy electricity from the network. And almost all this happened because the country was importing the solar panels from its neighbor and ally, China.
A similar trend took place in South Africa in 2023 The government has introduced policies that have made the solar particularly attractive, as tax breaks for the purchase of panels or by paying people to transmit excess energy to the network.
But throughout the line, the main thing that guides the popularity of the sun is simple: the cost for the purchase and installation of Chinese panels has become so low that the world has reached an inflexion point. Although a country is not particularly worried about climate change, it simply has an economic sense to generate energy from the sun, says Anika Patel, Chinese analyst of Carbon Brief, a publication on climatic policies.
“Many African nations at this moment only need more electricity. And the fact that this option exists to install solar systems at a fraction of the cost of building a new coal or gas system is attractive,” he says.
The price is a particularly important factor for African countries, because it is more difficult to obtain a loan to finance a project of a solar plant there than in developed countries, says Léo Echard, head of policies at the Global Solar Council and the author of A Report on the Solar Market of Africa. Since Chinese solar companies have significant advantages of prices compared to producers of other countries, they are always the reference option to provide African sunrise.
From huge plants to roofs
There are two types of demands that guide the solar boom in African countries, says Echard. In North Africa, countries such as Algeria and Egypt are building huge solar plants on a utility scale that require a large number of panels. But in sub-Sahara Africa, the panels are imported from several rural communities to places that have traditionally not been connected to the grid.
Just like in Pakistan, this network of solar panels on the distributed roof is transforming the energy panorama. People have access to energy and that access does not depend on public spending or foreign loans. Instead, it spreads organically, the family per family, as long as the panels are quite cheap.
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