Kenya''s Solar Market: Demand & Export Hub for East Africa
Beyond serving its domestic needs, Kenya has strong potential to become an export hub for solar modules to neighboring East African Community (EAC) countries and beyond.
This report presents Ember's analysis of Africa's imports of solar panels from China. The Chinese solar panel export data gives valuable insights because it includes imports up to June 2025, at a monthly granularity, and for every country in the world. The data can be found in Ember's China Solar Export Explorer.
With the increasing focus on renewable energy in the world market, Africa is gradually positioning itself to be a major market for Solar energy. Several African nations, which are blessed with enough sunshine have since then relied on this resource to fashion out and export solar power systems.
Africa depends heavily on imports because domestic solar panel manufacturing is still limited. Morocco recently doubled manufacturing to 1 GW per year, and South Africa has a similar capacity, and there are much smaller manufacturing lines in some countries including Egypt and Nigeria.
The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa is now here: The last 12 months saw a big rise in Africa's solar panel imports. Imports from China rose 60% in the last 12 months to 15,032 MW. Over the last two years, the imports of solar panels outside of South Africa have nearly tripled from 3,734 MW to 11,248 MW.
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