Analysis from Ember and the African Tech Futures Lab puts Africa’s 2026 solar installations at 17 gigawatts, a 45% rise on 2025 and the third consecutive record year.
The estimate is built from Chinese customs export data, calibrated against real-world installation rates in other markets, rather than waiting on national statistics that mostly don’t exist yet.
That gap between reality and reporting is why the report got written in the first place, says Joel Nana, research director at African Tech Futures Lab and project manager at Sustainable Energy Africa.
“There was this excellent dataset released by Ember last year on the imports from China,” he says. “The one question that has been lingering on everyone’s mind is how much of that actually gets converted into actual installations,” Nana said during an online briefing of the report.
Working with governments across more than 15 countries on integrating behind-the-meter generation, Nana says the same problem kept surfacing.
“Even in countries with robust data like South Africa, [the issue] is the visibility of this behind-the-meter data. It’s not appearing in any record, and when it appears, it vastly underestimates the true scale of deployment out there.”
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Official data undercounts by half
There is no hiding from the scale of the undercount. Ember’s 12GW estimate for 2025 installations is roughly double the IEA’s 6.2GW, and two and a half times IRENA’s 4.6GW.
“The problem is a lot of this isn’t being recognised,” says Dave Jones, chief analyst at Ember.
International agencies can only report what national governments give them, he says, and “national reporting of solar [is] quite poor… one of the reasons for that is because so much comes from distributed solar.”
Only 36 of Africa’s 54 countries publish any official solar capacity data at all. Just 14 of those cover 2025, and only three countries — South Africa, Tunisia and Tanzania — report quarterly or more often. Even those 14 countries appear to underestimate the recent surge, the report finds.
Planning is already behind reality
The consequences reach beyond statistics. The AU’s Continental Power Systems Masterplan forecasts just 23GW of solar installed across the whole continent by 2040 — a figure Ember estimates Africa has already exceeded in the past three years alone.
Grid planners working from numbers that undercount installed solar by half risk two opposite mistakes:
- overbuilding fossil generation capacity that then sits idle, or
- underinvesting in the grid and battery infrastructure needed to integrate rooftop solar.
South Africa’s IRP is one of the few national plans that explicitly accounts for distributed generation, the report notes.
Nana argues the shift underway is unlike anything utilities have planned for. “Across Africa, distributed energy resources are rapidly expanding, and in many cases overtaking grid capacity,” he says.
“This transition is chaotic and disruptive, and far from the orderly model planned in national strategies. Policymakers need to start responding to this shift.”
Jones is more optimistic about what’s possible for governments that move first. “Countries are already leapfrogging into faster, more secure, cleaner energy growth, and the governments that get ahead of it stand to gain all the benefits.”
Download the report: The take-off in African solar that official statistics can’t yet see
