If Africa has abundance of electricity, they can become consumers of Chinese EVs, and more.
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
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.
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.
It’s amazing :)
Great for everyone and will change everything if allowed to continue
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?
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.
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.
https://asiatimes.com/2026/03/oils-monopoly-kaput-china-to-b...
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.
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.
BC, Canada.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
So you either need surplus in some way, to over cover the peak, or storage.
Both are still more expensive than fast gas turbines.
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.
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.
Please be specific
This would never ever could have happened in Africa, had the West held exclusive control over green tech
* 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/ ?
"enormous embassy/sovereign territory" or not, when the politics or the institutions change your legal right to ownership may not exist.