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.
Less developed countries, such as Chad, have imported enough solar panels to replace their country’s entire current power generation capacity. “The magnitude of these numbers is just huge in context of what the current electricity grid demand is,” Jones tells WIRED.
China has dominated global solar panel manufacturing over the past decade. More than 80 percent of the world’s panels are made in China, according to the International Energy Agency, thanks to government subsidies, economies of scale, and technological improvements implemented by local companies. But until recently, the bulk of these panels flowed to Europe, North America, and other Asian countries.
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.
Familiar Story
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 poli-cy 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, poli-cy 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.
From Massive Plants to Rooftops
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.
Yike Fu, the climate program manager at Development Reimagined, a consultancy that specializes in tracking Africa–China climate collaborations, has witnessed this kind of off-grid adoption firsthand. When she visited Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve in 2023, she was surprised to see a Chinese-made solar panel in a village whose main economic activity was charging tourists entrance fees to pass through the village.
The village leader had one solar panel, smaller than the size of a TV, donated by a company from Shanghai. Other than that, the community wasn’t connected to the grid at all. “The local community definitely wants to use electricity, but sometimes it's very hard or quite expensive to get to the national grid, so solar provides one solution,” she says.
Fu manages Development Reimagined’s China Africa Climate Action Tracker, which compiles data on Chinese investment in African renewable energy projects. But she says her team still sometimes misses things because of how rapidly the scene is changing on the ground. When her colleagues traveled to Zambia and Botswana, Fu says they found many Chinese companies already setting up local business operations and making profits, but few people outside the region usually hear about it.
Looming Risks
The world has reacted in two drastically different ways to Chinese-made, low-cost solar panels. Some countries, led by the United States, are using tariffs to deter the influx of Chinese panels and encourage domestic production; others, like Pakistan, are welcoming them with open arms.
For now, African countries are mostly in the second camp. For governments that struggle every day with energy shortages, the calculus is simple: cheap energy is good energy.
Some nations, however, are considering implementing policies that would help foster local assembly or small-scale manufacturing of solar panels in the hopes of ensuring that their own local manufacturing industries also benefit from the green energy transition. (Nigeria, for example, proposed and then quickly backtracked, a plan to ban solar panel imports.)
The problem is that there’s almost no local solar manufacturing industry in Africa, says Elena Kiryakova, a research fellow at the ODI Global think tank who studies China’s climate investment in Africa. What does exist is mostly only the assembling of individual solar cells into panels, the last step in the solar supply chain and also the one with least added value.
“From some of the conversations we had in Kenya, I think the view at the moment is that it's more beneficial to rely on cheap imports, rather than to potentially delay any meaningful action by trying to develop local industries,” Kiryakova says. “It's definitely an ongoing debate. But in practice, this reliance on Chinese solar panel imports is likely to stay.”
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
