The African continent is showing promising signs of solar adoption at scale.
Imports of Chinese solar panels into Africa jumped 60% in the past 12 months, surpassing 15 gigawatts, according to a new recent report by energy think tank Ember. This is happening across the region, with 20 countries, including Algeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria, importing an unprecedented number of solar panels in the 12 months leading up to June 2025.
The data is sourced from the General Administration of Customs of the People’s Republic of China. According to Dave Jones, lead author of the report, China’s export data provides a good window into the continent’s solar adoption, given that local manufacturing capacity is still limited, and the overwhelming majority of the panels present in Africa comes from China.
“This is big,” Jones added in an interview with Latitude Media. “Electricity demand within Africa is so low compared to elsewhere in the world that this amount of solar panels might look trivial. But in a country-specific context, it’s huge, and it can make a big difference to how that electricity system is being run.”
If Sierra Leone installed all the solar panels imported in the past 12 months, for example, they would generate as much as 61% of the country’s total reported electricity generation for 2023.
The spike in imports appears to be driven by distributed generation. While Africa’s utility-scale solar is rising, with 10 GW of utility solar projects announced to come online in 2025, data suggest that most of those projects haven’t started construction yet.
“What we’re seeing is solar panel imports going far beyond the requirements of the utility projects that are listed out there,” Jones said. “We believe that actually a lot of this growth is not coming from utility projects, but from distributed solar, especially within big cities like Lagos.”
More research is needed to determine why imports spiked so dramatically since mid-2024 specifically, he added. But many African countries share a series of characteristics that explain the broader uptick in demand for solar panels in recent years.
Aging infrastructure, widespread electricity deficits, and weak national grids together lead to frequent power rationing, and even national blackouts. At the same time, prices for diesel power — which remains an important part of overall generation capacity on the continent — have been increasing; a 2022 report by consultancy Wood Mackenzie found that generator capacity surpassed on-grid power plant capacity in at least 17 African countries. This makes cheap Chinese solar panels an attractive alternative.
“In Nigeria and other countries, solar panels retail for around 60 dollars,” Jones said. “Sixty dollars hits that price point where it becomes affordable for an awful lot of people to generate their own electricity on the roof, with a panel that’s going to be there for years or even decades.”
As a result, the low cost of Chinese solar panels appears to be a key driver of the demand.
In fact, there’s no evidence that China is selling them below cost to find an outlet for its oversupply issues. When Jones first noticed the pick-up in African Chinese imports in November and December of last year, he thought it was a sign of Chinese manufacturers aggressively trying to sell discounted solar panels to meet their year-end targets.
“But the elevated levels continue through all the first six months of this year, and we have enough confidence now that this is part of a new trend,” he said. In April and May, China saw a surge of domestic solar installations as well, as developers rushed to wrap up projects before new regulations ending its fixed pricing mechanism for renewable energy. Now that the rush is over, Jones expects imports to Africa to increase even further.
Of course, imports do not equal installations. There’s not a lot of data available about how many of these panels are actually ending up generating power, or how soon; many may be put in storage, as has happened elsewhere. In 2023, for example, Europe was estimated to have 80 GW of solar panels in warehouses.
“Eventually, almost all of them were installed somehow,” Jones said. “But it’s very clear that we need a lot more data and a lot more research.”
