Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa

Chinese panels are now so affordable that businesses and families are snapping them up, slashing their bills and challenging utilities.
Ismet Booley, a dentist in Cape Town, had a serious problem a few years ago. Patients showed up for appointments, only to find the power had gone out.

No power meant no X-rays, no fillings, no root canals. “I just couldn’t work,” Dr. Booley said.

South Africans like Dr. Booley have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun.

These aren’t the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once powered a lightbulb or TV in rural communities. Today, solar and battery systems are deployed across a variety of businesses — auto factories and wineries, gold mines and shopping malls. And they are changing everyday life, trade and industry in Africa’s biggest economy.

This has happened at startling speed. Solar has risen from almost nothing in 2019 to roughly 10 percent of South Africa’s electricity-generating capacity.

No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That’s forcing the nation’s already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate.

Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it “a bottom-up movement” to sidestep a generations-old problem. “The broken system is unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all,” he said. “We’ve been living in this situation forever.”

What’s happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China’s ambition to lead the world in clean energy.