Africa purchases a record number of Chinese solar panels

While the total sales of African countries are still small compared to these traditional export markets, the global south appears to be a turning point in how it thinks about energy. For decades, the countries that have been subjected to a large extent were a single virtual option when they wanted to add new energy supplies: importing coal and gas. Now, for the first time, solar energy appears as the cheapest and most green road forward, so there is no need to sacrifice the environment for development.

Familiar

What is happening in Africa may now seem familiar, especially if you know anything about the global green energy industry. We have seen several versions of this story before, most notably in Pakistan last year.

In 2024, Pakistan was installed about 15 GB From the solar panels for the context, the total demand for peak electricity in the country is about 30 GB. Families have put a lot of panels on the roofs of homes, even Pakistani cities now It looks differently different On satellite maps. This trend threatens the future of the national network in Pakistan because people use their own power -generating plates, which reduces the need to buy electricity from the network. Almost all of this happened because the country was solar panels imported from its neighbor and ally, China.

A similar trend occurred in South Africa in 2023. The facilities infrastructure in both countries is not flexible sufficiently to meet the peak of demand, causing consistent power outages that prompted consumers to search for alternative energy sources. The government has provided policies that made solar energy in particular attractive, such as tax exemptions to buy panels or push people to transfer excessive energy to the network.

But in all areas, the main thing that leads the popularity of solar energy is simple: the cost of purchase and the installation of Chinese panels has become so low that the world has reached a turning point. Annika Patel, a carbon analyst in the climate policy, says even if it is not a particularly concerned country about climate change, it is simply the economic logical power generation from solar energy.

“There are many African countries at the present time only need more electricity. The fact that there is this option to install solar plants at the cost of building a new coal or gas factory is attractive,” she says.

The price is a special factor in particular for African countries, because it is difficult to obtain a loan to finance the solar power plant project there are more than developed A report on the solar market in Africa. Since Chinese solar companies have significant advantages in manufacturers in other countries, they are always the mobile option to provide solar energy demand in Africa.

From huge plants to roofs

There are two types of demand that lead the solar mutation in African countries. In North Africa, countries like Algeria and Egypt build huge solar power plants on the scale of benefit that require large numbers of panels. But in sub -Saharan Africa, the panels are imported by more rural societies in places that are traditionally not connected to the network at all.

Just as in Pakistan, this network of solar panels distributed on the surface transforms the energy scene. People get energy, and this access does not depend on government spending or foreign loans. Instead, it is spread organically, the family by family, as long as the panels are cheap enough.