African Nations Promote Locally Produced Solar Panels

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The message at COP 30 this year is that countries in the global south are tired of all the platitudes and empty promises being shoveled their way every year at these international confabs. And so, they are making plans to chart their own course forward instead of waiting for others to act. “Africa is no longer the ‘terrain of aid’ but the front line of solutions” in areas like renewable energy, said Carlos Lopes, the special envoy for Africa for the president of COP30.

Give someone a fish and they will eat for a day. Teach them how to fish and they can feed themselves forever. That axiom is appropriate in the context of renewable energy in Africa. Chinese-made panels have jumpstarted the renewable energy revolution in Africa, according to a report in Japan Times. But African climate leaders say the continent, which holds more than 30 percent of the world’s critical minerals, should be an industrial actor — not an importer — in the clean energy transition.

Between June 2024 and June 2025, Nigeria imported about 1,721 MW of solar panels from China, making it the second largest importer in Africa after South Africa, according to data from the energy think tank Ember. China supplied about 60 percent of Africa’s solar imports during the same period, the report said.

Carlos Lopes said money spent on importing panels, turbines, and software could be used to fund African clean energy design labs and create regional research hubs where local engineers could adapt foreign technology.

The most recent example of how this works is automobile manufacturing in China. More than 20 years ago, US and European companies were mesmerized at the prospect of selling millions of cars to Chinese customers. The kicker was that China required those companies to form joint ventures with Chinese companies.

That led to a massive transfer of knowledge to those Chinese companies, who soon learned how to build cars, trucks, and buses, better, faster, and cheaper than the western companies they were allied with. As a result, Chinese workers are now building cars for local consumption and export domestically and keeping the profits in the country. Africa wants to do much the same thing with solar and and other renewables.

Africa Rising

Countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, Zimbabwe, which has massive lithium supplies, and Gabon, with its manganese resources, should not only be exporting raw materials but building technologies locally. “When processing happens where the minerals lie, jobs stay, emissions drop, and dignity grows,” Lopes said.

Several African countries are making that transition, including Morocco, South Africa, and Egypt. All of them are ramping up production with solar assembly plants and manufacturing facilities. Egypt is developing three manufacturing plants in collaboration with several Asian cleantech companies, including a Singaporean manufacturer, EliTe Solar, which is set to start a 3-gigawatt facility this year. In October, Nigeria signed a deal with Chinese solar PV manufacturer LONGi to build a 500 to 1,000 megawatt solar panel production factory in that country.

Just as with western automakers in China, the wheel now has turned as African enterprises learn to lean into solar manufacturing. China’s dominance in solar manufacturing is not going away any time soon. After decades of investment that have led to low production costs and a skilled workforce, China is the big dog in renewable energy, and that is not about to change.

But there are opportunities for Africa to insert itself into the solar manufacturing space according to Dave Jones, energy analyst and co-founder of Ember Energy in the UK. By importing Chinese battery cells but assembling other components locally, manufacturers can keep 60 percent of the value chain within their economy. “The cells cost about 40 percent of a panel’s price. So if you’re able to manufacture and do the panel assembly, you’re saving over half and keeping half of that value within the country,” he said.

Salpha Energy Growing In Nigeria

One of the companies that is making that happen is Salpha Energy in Nigeria, which manufactures solar systems and electrically operated consumer products like fans and residential energy storage devices in a factory in the city of Calabar near the southern coast of the country. On its website, it says, “The clean energy era isn’t a distant dream; it’s happening now, and it’s our partners who are making it real. Distributors who take light to the edges of the map. Investors who don’t just fund, but believe. Together, we’re not just talking about a sustainable future — we’re building it.”

In its factory, dozens of young technicians swarm around a production line, picking out solar-powered batteries, fans, and lamps to test for quality. They package the tested products for shipment from Salpha Energy’s solar assembly plant to customers throughout the West African country.

“I can see the same pride I see on the faces of engineers in factories in Tokyo and the United States, where they build things,” said Salpha Energy’s founder, Sandra Chukwudozie. “Except now it’s happening here at home.” That’s a beautiful thing, when you think about it.

She said the assembly plant is a testament to Africa’s ability to produce its green technologies and even export them, as it did last year to Ghana. “We shipped out some batches of our products to Accra — by road,” says Chukwudozie. “For us, it was just to test this idea of Africa-led exports. It carries the Made in Nigeria stamp, and we can sell that across West Africa.”

Since starting up in 2017, Salpha Energy has made solar power systems for more than 2 million Nigerian homes and businesses, and it aims to assemble up to 300,000 units a year, she said. Salpha Energy is part of the green leadership in Nigeria, and the continent overall. African representatives attending COP30 in Brazil are keen to showcase and promote Nigeria’s manufacturing prowess on the global stage.

Renewables In Nigeria

Nigeria has a plan to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and generate 30 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030 while developing local manufacturing capacity. Its national grid is now powered 75 percent by gas and 20 percent by hydropower. Other clean energy sources like solar, wind, and biomass account for less than 2 percent.

One intriguing possibility is that much of Nigeria could skip right over building out a national energy grid just as many African countries bypassed a telephone network composed of wires and went straight to cell phones.

That is not to say that energy grids will not be important in cities, but large portions of Nigeria are quite rural and are not serviced by an electrical grid at all. They are ideal candidates for distributed energy resources composed of microgrids and virtual power plants. In March, Nigeria signed a $200 million agreement with the World Bank and other partners to develop solar grids in rural areas as part of its efforts to meet its renewable energy targets.

Is Africa a renewable energy manufacturing powerhouse? Not yet, but it is moving in the right direction, due in part to the transfer of expertise to local companies by Chinese companies. That transfer of information and technology is an inevitable part of a global commerce system. To the extent that African countries can leverage that transfer, they will be better able to chart their own course to a sustainable future, rather than waiting on others to do it for them.