Between 2023 and 2025, Africa installed an estimated 20GW of distributed solar — rooftop systems built behind customers’ meters, largely without government incentives.
That is 75% of everything the continent added in solar over the period, according to new analysis from Ember and the African Tech Futures Lab.
“We were finally able to pin down a number on it, which is amazing,” says Joel Nana, research director at African Tech Futures Lab and project manager at Sustainable Energy Africa.
“There have been no subsidies that have necessarily incentivised this growth. It’s basically a power crisis or energy crisis, and people just wanting to work around broken systems or broken infrastructure to find ways for themselves.”
The comparison that strikes Nana most is South Africa’s own record. “You look at places like South Africa, which have had government procurement processes for quite a number of decades, and yet they’ve not matched this pace of growth,” he said during the report’s online briefing.
Roughly 80% of the continent’s distributed solar capacity sits with commercial and industrial customers rather than households, Nana added — businesses with the capital and the daytime load profile to make the economics work immediately.
According to Nana, the main drivers behind this growth are:
- the forces of economics,
- the forces of physics,
- the need for energy security, and
- the power crisis in almost every single African country.
Utilities can’t plan for what they can’t see
For utilities and regulators, the implications go well beyond a missed data point. Nana points to Kenya, where the report estimates 55% of grid capacity is now distributed solar.
“How do you possibly, as a utility, plan your grid without that sort of visibility or control over so much capacity?” he asked.
The same uncertainty complicates long-term power purchase agreements with independent power producers, he argues.
“How do you sign a 20-year PPA contract and not even be sure that you will need that amount of energy or power just in the next five years, because there’s so much being built behind the meter that you have no visibility on?”
There is a revenue risk too. The report notes that self-generation typically costs businesses two to four times as much as grid-supplied utility-scale power, yet reliability concerns make it worthwhile anyway.
Every large customer that shifts to self-generation also takes with it the revenue that cross-subsidises poorer households, tightening the financial position of utilities already under strain.
Also covered in the report:
Solar and batteries, the new diesel generator in Africa
Africa’s official solar power data is missing half the boom
Private capital is doing the work
For Nana, the implication is what the numbers prove is possible without state funding.
“For once we’re able to show that actually the problem of universal electrification that we’ve been talking about for decades is actually solvable, and we don’t always have to rely on public coffers to do that,” he says.
Private money can deploy that capital at scale, and very rapidly, to solve the issue.”
He also floats a policy idea regulators have yet to test. “If there is now so much cheap solar available during the day, why do we continue subsidising electricity for those who cannot afford it the most?” he asked.
“Why can’t we use some of this excess electricity that’s being fed back during the day to actually provide free basic electricity to those who do not have — without necessarily [involving] financial exchanges, but simply energy exchange happening between those who have the solar and those who do not.”
Download the report: The take-off in African solar that official statistics can’t yet see
