Energy-starved countries on the continent have reluctantly turned to coal and gas for decades. Cheap Chinese solar panels are now finally changing the calculus.
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 ofZeyi YangandLouise Matsakis’Made in China newsletter. Read previous newslettershere.
