The current geopolitical climate is becoming a blessing for Africa, and much of the developing world. With China's ties with the US all but severed, it is incentivized to redirect most of its resources into building Africa. That in turn will reinvigorate the Chinese economy.
If Africa has abundance of electricity, they can become consumers of Chinese EVs, and more.
And huge mineral wealth and quite a few countries with poor governance. Also far away enough from China that they don’t have any long standing disputes.
>That in turn will reinvigorate the Chinese economy.
Not if margins are well below expectations. Factories built to produce goods for developed markets might barely (or not at all) earn a return on capital invested if they’re selling to developing nations instead. It’s a great windfall for developing nations though, that’s for sure
Africa being China's China is not a new talking point at all. You're well over a decade late to the party.
You also severely underestimate the amount of work it would take to have better cooperation across the African continent, let alone turn it into a consumer-driven market like the USA.
Africa is a complicated part of the world and it's massive. I really do mean massive.
Decentralised power generation is the future for Africa, many of whose countries cannot rely on central government to efficiently operate a national grid. I am thinking primarily of South Africa, where many businesses and (rich enough) home owners have back up diesel generators to fill in in moments of load shedding. Solar of course is the most decentralised form of power of all. Positive stuff for Africa. This is where China overcapacity really does lead to more equitable power (literally) distribution, so congrats to them also
African grid infrastructure can be highly variable.
There's an optimal efficiency of sorts where a few hundred houses (depending on usage) mostly all have panels and share a common half or full shipping container sized battery - with those clusters being either fully isolated or linked in a smart grid like fashion to other similar groupings.
That's decentralised, robust, and allows for alternative pathways when swapping out batteries, etc.
That kind of thing can grow upwards from individual houses having individual panels and their own batteries, and then communities going together and pooling common elements.
We moved to a new house earlier this year in Kenya and it has solar. Very convenient, as there are electricity outages every few weeks for various reasons (usually trees falling on power lines), not to mention the cost savings. We are basically on the equator so we have sun for 12 hours in theory.
There are parallels here to the way much of Africa fixed land-lines phones and went straight to mobile. Which has also been powered by Chinese hardware.
Both, in the sense that it was absolutely inevitable (and predicted 20 years past in various looking forward forums), and that China made an informed high level plan to be first on the ground to make things happen in their favour.
Is it smart or stupid business to lose money upfront (subsidise) to establish and secure a market for years to follow?
Closely followed by, is China deeply sinister and evil for having long term plans and seeing them through, or are some simply upset to see China getting there first and doing it better?
> Is it smart or stupid business to lose money upfront (subsidise) to establish and secure a market for years to follow?
Well like most business decisions its a risk. If it works out it looks genius; if it fails it is a cautionary tale.
I think one part people sometimes miss, is that they assume the plan is subsidize, and then hike prices once you have driven everyone out of business. Which is of course one way to do it, and may very well be part of China's plan. But the other way to do it is subsidize until economies of scale and R&D kick in and you are legitimately cheaper than the competition.
The second way is my default thinking, I grew up in a remote part of the world where the economics made it prohibitive for small business to start anything big, so the government (ie. the people we all elected to make decisions about common resources and challenges) started state power, state rail and state telecoms companies and ran them until they could be privatised after all "the hard stuff" had been put in place.
> Is it smart or stupid business to lose money upfront (subsidise) to establish and secure a market for years to follow?
If we see it purely as a business decision. But it was also driven by energy sovereignty, pollution. So I think it was smart even if they are never able to recover initial cost.
its not that China subsidized it, it is that USA had made it the only choice that makes sense. Kudos to USA for destroying the petrodollar and boosting the green technology, backed by the BRI
It's inevitable, but China accelerated it (as did a few others). And solar isn't alone. Any professor in physics will say that EVs, heat pumps and LEDs are all inevitable.
Make no mistake, this is happening all over the globe with enormous success.
Australians now get free power for three hours a day.
India, Pakistan and many other developing countries are deploying solar and batteries insanely fast because it’s so cheap direct from China.
China themselves add more solar capacity in a few months than the entire US grid.
There really is only one country with prohibitively expensive solar and batteries thanks to tariffs. Fingers crossed that will change soon.
Solar is also unique in that it is both affordable and practical to deploy locally.
Part of the difficulty in estimating growth is that a significant chunk of installed supply is not a "power station" that is easily counted and measured.
Residential solar is a few kw here, a few there. But it adds up quickly to mw and gw.
And yes, this results in a larger variable demand on the grid. Which makes planning harder. But it's cheap enough for any established business with a roof to install. It's cheap enough for residential. And from decision to power flowing can be measured in months not years.
Running a 6 foot line from a existing transformer to a box took 2 years. Getting the solar permitted and feeding was another 12 months. Permit review for generator install was another 12 months.
Labor and permitting was > 50% of solar project cost and of generator install.
Permitting and “engineering” was > 90% of grid hookup price, but dwarfed by the cost of the delay (had to run gas generator for about a year as a workaround).
If it was compatible with getting a mortgage, we’d ge 100% off grid and probably $20-50K richer.
What do panels cost in the US? I can order a 500W panel from amazon.de for a little under 100€. It looks like amazon.com only has panels for $300+. Is Amazon just very expensive?
I bought 40 solar panels 2 years ago from Santan Solar that came out to about $130 including shipping and tax. These were 450 W panels. Looks like they now have 400 W panels for $145 + shipping/tax.
I know you didn't ask for it, but in case it's helpful to anyone, here's what I spent (this was all DIY installed):
- $4200 for solar panels (I only kept 33 of the panels and resold the other 7, so this is my net cost).
Yes. Someday I plan on setting up a blog and going through the entire process and sharing my site plans and everything. I tracked every little item I purchased and made tons of notes.
It’s more like $200 if you buy them from a local distributor. It’s definitely expensive for Amazon to ship them if it’s just one or two. Usually a local business buys pallets worth of them and people pick them up.
People need to realize this is going to make a massive difference for developing countries to not have to rely on expensive alternatives like LNG. There is a tremendous cost when you have to build very labor + resource intensive infrastructure versus just buying solar panels + batteries.
Will follow a similar path of preferring cellular networks to fiber lines.
An interesting podcast series that goes over just this from earlier this year:
Sweden's grid is already mostly decarbonized thanks to abundant hydro, but they participate in the European market for electricity and the rest of Europe is still behind Sweden.
Sweden used to have twice as many nuclear reactors as it does today. There's also more export capacity, and for Germany anything from Sweden is considered cheap.
In the US, it’s to make sure shortsighted investments in fossil fuels pay off (they cap rooftop solar below what makes financial sense for individuals so that rates stay high) or to shelter investors from criminal negligence. (e.g., when PG&E embezzles maintenance funds then burns towns down or blows up city blocks, its customers pay for damages. Lots of people die, but no one goes to jail.)
Sweden's most expensive SE4 Nordpool zone now has almost as expensive electricity as most of northwestern Europe in winter.
EU energy consumption was (_still_ is!) very dependent on cheap Russian natural gas. Moscow leadership abused that geopolitical leverage to the max.
Heavy industry is in tatters in traditional European core industrial areas. EU regions with less expensive energy like northern Sweden pull in some heavy industry investment. It remains to be seen how durable that is. Cluster effects are a thing, and those haven't materialised yet.
At the consumer level, some short to medium term relief will come from HVDC interconnects, more solar, wind and intraday battery storage.
Putin kicking the bucket might not be Europe's get-out-of-trouble card, but chances are it will help.
Even back then gas was the most expensive (except for a little bit of oil). Europe is in trouble because it chose gas as transition fuel. As China and India show, this was completely avoidable. Especially for someone like Germany who had a lot of options.
Answering this question would take too much of a leap of faith. I want to assume you are human and asking this question in good faith, but I can't. Sorry.
I think the prices would always skyrocket in Sweden in the winter - y'all use about 1.7x as much electricity in the winter as you do in the summer, and that's gonna cost you.
* Africans initiating contracts to purchase phones, EVs, solar panels, etc for themselves, and
* performative influencers raising funds to drop in wells all over the place while filming themselves being congratulated for it by other non Africans.
Kind of hard to pin that one down really, bit like nailing jelly to a wall.
Still, to address the claim that wells don't survive .. what are the actual numbers on this?
eg: https://waterwellsforafrica.org/ has put in 600 wells since 1996 ( average 20 wells a year for 30 years ) - how many of these wells have failed and are no longer used? How many "failed wells" provided water for a decade and then had to be moved?
Africa is enormous. Some of the arid regions don't have much infrastructure or population. One of my projects would benefit from owning some "sovereign" land, do you think it would be possible to buy approximately a square mile (2.56 square kilometers), 258 hectares/640 acres, about five times the size of the vatican, from one of the countries, like in the middle of the dessert with nothing there, and allow it to be used like an enormous embassy/sovereign territory? Which country would be best for that? Should be sunny, arid, have some cheap dessert land with pretty much nothing there. I'd just order a starlink and some solar panels and have a sovereign data center there.
The project is registered with the United Nations, but some of the requirements for full sovereignty are internationally recognized land. Do you think it's possible? (Like an embassy.)
Your comment made me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil. I know it's not precisely what you're talking about, but interesting nonetheless :)
History doesn't always have to be linear. Africa can leverage modern technology to leapfrog many stages—much like how many elderly people in China never used a computer in their lives, yet became hooked on short videos powered by smartphones and AI. For Africa, solar energy and TikTok are profound transformations. Then there are cheap Chinese goods. The driving force behind all these changes is primarily China.
The current geopolitical climate is becoming a blessing for Africa, and much of the developing world. With China's ties with the US all but severed, it is incentivized to redirect most of its resources into building Africa. That in turn will reinvigorate the Chinese economy.
If Africa has abundance of electricity, they can become consumers of Chinese EVs, and more.
And huge mineral wealth and quite a few countries with poor governance. Also far away enough from China that they don’t have any long standing disputes.
Couldn’t be much better for the Chinese.
Yeah, it's the belt and road. It's been in the works for a while..
>That in turn will reinvigorate the Chinese economy.
Not if margins are well below expectations. Factories built to produce goods for developed markets might barely (or not at all) earn a return on capital invested if they’re selling to developing nations instead. It’s a great windfall for developing nations though, that’s for sure
If solar really replaces oil, the geopolitical ramifications are going to be immense. Half the middle east would collapse overnight.
At this point it's a question of when, not if, BEVs will replace combustion engines and heat pumps replace fossil heat. The technology is just better.
Africa being China's China is not a new talking point at all. You're well over a decade late to the party.
You also severely underestimate the amount of work it would take to have better cooperation across the African continent, let alone turn it into a consumer-driven market like the USA.
Africa is a complicated part of the world and it's massive. I really do mean massive.
Decentralised power generation is the future for Africa, many of whose countries cannot rely on central government to efficiently operate a national grid. I am thinking primarily of South Africa, where many businesses and (rich enough) home owners have back up diesel generators to fill in in moments of load shedding. Solar of course is the most decentralised form of power of all. Positive stuff for Africa. This is where China overcapacity really does lead to more equitable power (literally) distribution, so congrats to them also
Why decentralized? Solar power panels have shared lifecycle maintenance concerns, and most people live in towns.
African grid infrastructure can be highly variable.
There's an optimal efficiency of sorts where a few hundred houses (depending on usage) mostly all have panels and share a common half or full shipping container sized battery - with those clusters being either fully isolated or linked in a smart grid like fashion to other similar groupings.
That's decentralised, robust, and allows for alternative pathways when swapping out batteries, etc.
That kind of thing can grow upwards from individual houses having individual panels and their own batteries, and then communities going together and pooling common elements.
We moved to a new house earlier this year in Kenya and it has solar. Very convenient, as there are electricity outages every few weeks for various reasons (usually trees falling on power lines), not to mention the cost savings. We are basically on the equator so we have sun for 12 hours in theory.
There are parallels here to the way much of Africa fixed land-lines phones and went straight to mobile. Which has also been powered by Chinese hardware.
it's a known phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging#Examples
With EVs providing transportation, lots of countries not just in Africa, are seeing rapid deployment of solar and batteries.
It’s amazing :)
Great for everyone and will change everything if allowed to continue
Was this scale of solar revolution inevitable or did China willed (subsidized) it?
Both, in the sense that it was absolutely inevitable (and predicted 20 years past in various looking forward forums), and that China made an informed high level plan to be first on the ground to make things happen in their favour.
Is it smart or stupid business to lose money upfront (subsidise) to establish and secure a market for years to follow?
Closely followed by, is China deeply sinister and evil for having long term plans and seeing them through, or are some simply upset to see China getting there first and doing it better?
> Is it smart or stupid business to lose money upfront (subsidise) to establish and secure a market for years to follow?
Well like most business decisions its a risk. If it works out it looks genius; if it fails it is a cautionary tale.
I think one part people sometimes miss, is that they assume the plan is subsidize, and then hike prices once you have driven everyone out of business. Which is of course one way to do it, and may very well be part of China's plan. But the other way to do it is subsidize until economies of scale and R&D kick in and you are legitimately cheaper than the competition.
The second way is my default thinking, I grew up in a remote part of the world where the economics made it prohibitive for small business to start anything big, so the government (ie. the people we all elected to make decisions about common resources and challenges) started state power, state rail and state telecoms companies and ran them until they could be privatised after all "the hard stuff" had been put in place.
> Is it smart or stupid business to lose money upfront (subsidise) to establish and secure a market for years to follow?
If we see it purely as a business decision. But it was also driven by energy sovereignty, pollution. So I think it was smart even if they are never able to recover initial cost.
its not that China subsidized it, it is that USA had made it the only choice that makes sense. Kudos to USA for destroying the petrodollar and boosting the green technology, backed by the BRI
https://asiatimes.com/2026/03/oils-monopoly-kaput-china-to-b...
This is recent, but investment is going on for decades. Look into solar in Pakistan in last 3-4 years.
It's inevitable, but China accelerated it (as did a few others). And solar isn't alone. Any professor in physics will say that EVs, heat pumps and LEDs are all inevitable.
Probably both. Sunlight is all around us. Once the tech became good enough, it just needed growth capital and strategic willpower.
[dead]
Things change quickly when the economics make sense.
Make no mistake, this is happening all over the globe with enormous success.
Australians now get free power for three hours a day. India, Pakistan and many other developing countries are deploying solar and batteries insanely fast because it’s so cheap direct from China.
China themselves add more solar capacity in a few months than the entire US grid.
There really is only one country with prohibitively expensive solar and batteries thanks to tariffs. Fingers crossed that will change soon.
Solar is also unique in that it is both affordable and practical to deploy locally.
Part of the difficulty in estimating growth is that a significant chunk of installed supply is not a "power station" that is easily counted and measured.
Residential solar is a few kw here, a few there. But it adds up quickly to mw and gw.
And yes, this results in a larger variable demand on the grid. Which makes planning harder. But it's cheap enough for any established business with a roof to install. It's cheap enough for residential. And from decision to power flowing can be measured in months not years.
From the day I ordered all the parts for my residential 7.3kw system until it was fully permitted and back feeding the grid was three weeks.
BC, Canada.
Running a 6 foot line from a existing transformer to a box took 2 years. Getting the solar permitted and feeding was another 12 months. Permit review for generator install was another 12 months.
Labor and permitting was > 50% of solar project cost and of generator install.
Permitting and “engineering” was > 90% of grid hookup price, but dwarfed by the cost of the delay (had to run gas generator for about a year as a workaround).
If it was compatible with getting a mortgage, we’d ge 100% off grid and probably $20-50K richer.
SF Bay Area.
IE: in a badly broken country.
Wow, I’m sorry to hear it’s so painful there.
What a shame it’s super simple and quick in Canada with less solar potential, and dysfunctional and slow in California with abundant solar potential.
Amazing this hasn’t been fixed.
What do panels cost in the US? I can order a 500W panel from amazon.de for a little under 100€. It looks like amazon.com only has panels for $300+. Is Amazon just very expensive?
I bought 40 solar panels 2 years ago from Santan Solar that came out to about $130 including shipping and tax. These were 450 W panels. Looks like they now have 400 W panels for $145 + shipping/tax.
I know you didn't ask for it, but in case it's helpful to anyone, here's what I spent (this was all DIY installed):
- $4200 for solar panels (I only kept 33 of the panels and resold the other 7, so this is my net cost).
- $4850 for EG4 18KPV inverter.
- $6800 for 2x EG4 14.3 kWh indoor batteries + conduit boxes.
- $1900 for EG4 GridBOSS.
- $1700 for Tigo optimizers (TS4-A-O + CCA + TAP).
- $825 for permitting.
- $2575 to redo some siding on my house because I hard to replace my meter box and main panel.
- $4000 for wire, conduit, junction boxes, PV DC disconnect, AC disconnect, meter box, main service panel, etc.
- $3200 for racking and roof stuff.
- $2000 for misc things, tools, etc.
Net (including 30% tax credit and 2% credit card cash back), I spent $21,228.47 for everything.
Did you do the install by yourself?
Yes. Someday I plan on setting up a blog and going through the entire process and sharing my site plans and everything. I tracked every little item I purchased and made tons of notes.
It’s more like $200 if you buy them from a local distributor. It’s definitely expensive for Amazon to ship them if it’s just one or two. Usually a local business buys pallets worth of them and people pick them up.
[dead]
People need to realize this is going to make a massive difference for developing countries to not have to rely on expensive alternatives like LNG. There is a tremendous cost when you have to build very labor + resource intensive infrastructure versus just buying solar panels + batteries.
Will follow a similar path of preferring cellular networks to fiber lines.
An interesting podcast series that goes over just this from earlier this year:
https://thepolycrisis.org/electric-world-order-ep-1-the-quie...
China truly has been a blessing for Africa.
Meanwhile in Sweden we have skyrocketing prices each winter since the war started, even though we rank 3rd in the world for nuclear power per capita.
Price of electricity is set by the last most expensive power generation. If peak power requires expensive gas… that’s normal.
But why can't we get away from needing the most expensive form of power generation, even at peak power?
Because most of Africa is great for solar, while Sweden is not.
Solar is also a great match for countries that need A/C during the day (like Africa), and less so for those that need heating at night (like Sweden).
Sweden's grid is already mostly decarbonized thanks to abundant hydro, but they participate in the European market for electricity and the rest of Europe is still behind Sweden.
Sweden used to have twice as many nuclear reactors as it does today. There's also more export capacity, and for Germany anything from Sweden is considered cheap.
In the US, it’s to make sure shortsighted investments in fossil fuels pay off (they cap rooftop solar below what makes financial sense for individuals so that rates stay high) or to shelter investors from criminal negligence. (e.g., when PG&E embezzles maintenance funds then burns towns down or blows up city blocks, its customers pay for damages. Lots of people die, but no one goes to jail.)
Because the peak requires on-demand power.
So you either need surplus in some way, to over cover the peak, or storage.
Both are still more expensive than fast gas turbines.
The old system with a nuclear surplus was evidently cheaper. If you don't care about emissions, coal is also cheaper.
Accept you'll have to work with China for solar and batteries.
I'm working with China for everything else already.
Sweden's most expensive SE4 Nordpool zone now has almost as expensive electricity as most of northwestern Europe in winter.
EU energy consumption was (_still_ is!) very dependent on cheap Russian natural gas. Moscow leadership abused that geopolitical leverage to the max.
Heavy industry is in tatters in traditional European core industrial areas. EU regions with less expensive energy like northern Sweden pull in some heavy industry investment. It remains to be seen how durable that is. Cluster effects are a thing, and those haven't materialised yet.
At the consumer level, some short to medium term relief will come from HVDC interconnects, more solar, wind and intraday battery storage.
Putin kicking the bucket might not be Europe's get-out-of-trouble card, but chances are it will help.
Here's an illustration of German wholesale prices in 2018:
https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
Even back then gas was the most expensive (except for a little bit of oil). Europe is in trouble because it chose gas as transition fuel. As China and India show, this was completely avoidable. Especially for someone like Germany who had a lot of options.
how did Russia abuse its status of gas supplier with Sweden ?
Please be specific
Sweden is ofc not very dependent on gas at all, but we are indirectly coupled via the grid to gas prices, this is well known.
Answering this question would take too much of a leap of faith. I want to assume you are human and asking this question in good faith, but I can't. Sorry.
I need facts, not your handwringing and emotions
I think the prices would always skyrocket in Sweden in the winter - y'all use about 1.7x as much electricity in the winter as you do in the summer, and that's gonna cost you.
not "even though" but "because of" nuclear power is expensive, in Sweden per kilowatt hour it's the most expensive part of the energy mix.
Thank you, China for affordable green revolution.
This would never ever could have happened in Africa, had the West held exclusive control over green tech
Solar is crazy cheap from China it’s a 4 year payback at $0.045/kwh.
What makes anyone think solar will survive when wells won’t?
There's some kind of subtle difference between
* Africans initiating contracts to purchase phones, EVs, solar panels, etc for themselves, and
* performative influencers raising funds to drop in wells all over the place while filming themselves being congratulated for it by other non Africans.
Kind of hard to pin that one down really, bit like nailing jelly to a wall.
Still, to address the claim that wells don't survive .. what are the actual numbers on this?
eg: https://waterwellsforafrica.org/ has put in 600 wells since 1996 ( average 20 wells a year for 30 years ) - how many of these wells have failed and are no longer used? How many "failed wells" provided water for a decade and then had to be moved?
Ditto for https://waterforafrica.com.au/ and for https://thewaterproject.org/ ?
Africa is enormous. Some of the arid regions don't have much infrastructure or population. One of my projects would benefit from owning some "sovereign" land, do you think it would be possible to buy approximately a square mile (2.56 square kilometers), 258 hectares/640 acres, about five times the size of the vatican, from one of the countries, like in the middle of the dessert with nothing there, and allow it to be used like an enormous embassy/sovereign territory? Which country would be best for that? Should be sunny, arid, have some cheap dessert land with pretty much nothing there. I'd just order a starlink and some solar panels and have a sovereign data center there. The project is registered with the United Nations, but some of the requirements for full sovereignty are internationally recognized land. Do you think it's possible? (Like an embassy.)
Your comment made me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil. I know it's not precisely what you're talking about, but interesting nonetheless :)
How large is your mercenary army ?
"enormous embassy/sovereign territory" or not, when the politics or the institutions change your legal right to ownership may not exist.
We don't have a mercenary army, we'd be reliant on the security provided by a host nation. It sounds like you're saying that's hard to find.
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History doesn't always have to be linear. Africa can leverage modern technology to leapfrog many stages—much like how many elderly people in China never used a computer in their lives, yet became hooked on short videos powered by smartphones and AI. For Africa, solar energy and TikTok are profound transformations. Then there are cheap Chinese goods. The driving force behind all these changes is primarily China.
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Actual title: China's solar revolution is vast and speedy