Chapter 2
Most of Africa’s solar capacity is distributed – and statistics aren’t capturing it
National reporting is inadequate – only three countries produce solar capacity data quarterly or more often, and even where 2025 reporting exists it misses a large amount of installations. These missing installations are thought to be mostly distributed solar.
2.1 The solar boom isn’t in official data yet
Ember’s 2025 solar growth estimate is twice that of international statistics
Ember estimates Africa installed 12.0 GW of solar in 2025; that’s around twice that of the International Energy Agency (IEA) of 6.2 GW and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) of 4.6 GW.
Ember forecasts annual installations in 2026 will rise another 45%, potentially increasing this gap further.
IRENA published 2025 statistics initially in March, and then updated them in July. They show solar capacity stayed unchanged in 60% (32 out of 54) of African countries. The IEA published its renewables tracker last October. It has solar capacity data for 7 of the 54 countries, plus a total for Africa.
The biggest barrier to good international reporting is a lack of good national reporting. International reporting can only be as good as the national reporting beneath it – and the next section shows that it barely exists in many countries.
African countries need to improve their solar data reporting
Both the timeliness and quality of reporting are not fit for purpose in most countries.
In our analysis of national statistics, we could only find official reporting for national solar capacity for 36 out of 54 countries – and only 14 of those were for 2025. Even in those 14 countries reporting 2025 data, our estimates for what was installed in 2023-2025 alone far exceed the national cumulative capacity, suggesting that – where reported – solar capacity is not capturing all of the installations.
South Africa, Tunisia and Tanzania publish some solar data quarterly, and some even monthly. It’s increasingly common to do this internationally – Ember tracks 25 countries across the world that already report solar capacity monthly.
Why does accurate solar capacity reporting matter?
There are many implications of this underreporting solar growth.
First, in national and regional electricity planning. Distributed photovoltaic (PV) data is required to forecast net demand and future capacity needs. If it is excluded, planners may overestimate demand, procure unnecessary generation or select an unsuitable generation mix. The African Union’s Continental Power Systems Masterplan completely misses the solar trend: it shows 23 GW of solar forecast to be installed in Africa by 2040, which is less than the 26 GW estimated to have been installed in the last three years. South Africa’s IRP is perhaps the only national power plan in Africa that explicitly accounts for distributed generation.
Second, in system operation: System operators need the data for PV forecasting, dispatch, balancing and reserve planning. Without it, changes in midday demand and evening ramps become harder to predict and manage. Location-specific data supports assessments of hosting capacity, voltage, reverse power flows, congestion and protection requirements. Unregistered systems can therefore create technical and safety risks.
Third, in tariffs and utility planning: Reliable data is needed to assess changes in electricity sales, network use and utility revenues. Without it, tariffs and network charges may be based on incomplete assumptions.
Fourth, in policy monitoring: Registration allows governments and regulators to track market development, renewable energy (RE) targets and avoided emissions. Without consistent reporting, it is difficult to evaluate whether policies are working.
2.2 Most of the growth is in distributed solar – and no-one is measuring that
Three-quarters of Africa’s solar growth is likely from distributed solar
Africa installed an estimated 20 GW of distributed solar between 2023 and 2025.
Ember estimates Africa installed 26 GW of total solar between 2023 and 2025, yet only a quarter of new solar can be explained by utility-scale and off-grid solar, leading us to assume the rest is distributed solar. Global Energy Monitor (GEM) shows only 5.9 GW of utility-scale solar plants were built, and IRENA shows only 0.2 GW off-grid solar was installed. Utility-scale solar is fairly well-documented and visible through government procurement projects; therefore, there’s unlikely to be a big gap here. Off-grid solar is likely growing much faster than IRENA estimates, yet its scale would still be very small in the context of the gap.
In almost every country, over half of the solar is estimated to be distributed solar. Egypt added the second-most utility-scale solar, and yet 43% of its solar is still distributed.
Distributed solar is grid-connected solar on the customer side of the distribution network (i.e., “behind the meter”) and primarily for self-consumption. This is distinct from grid-scale solar farms interconnected into the high-voltage transmission network, and from any off-grid solar that isn’t connected to the electricity grid (like mini-grids or solar pumping irrigation systems). The vast majority of distributed solar installations are rooftop PV systems.
Explaining the rise in distributed solar
The rapid spread of distributed solar in sub-Saharan Africa is an underreported success story. Unlike in mature markets outside of Africa, where adoption has been concentrated in the residential sector and driven by generous government subsidies, adoption in African countries has been an organic response to falling technology costs, energy security, reliability needs, and, of course, compelling economics. Commercial and industrial customers have been the enthusiastic early adopters.
In most African countries, at least until recently, prosumers (households and businesses that both produce and consume their own power) would earn nothing for their exports, meaning systems get sized optimally for self-consumption. This explains why commercial and industrial customers — whose daytime load profile matches solar output — make up at least 80% of the total distributed solar installed capacity in most African markets with payback periods as short as 2-5 years.
The distributed solar boom has largely been on the back of China’s manufacturing glut, which drove module prices to record lows, together with the 2022 oil crisis linked to the Russia-Ukraine war. Where policy played a role, it rarely targeted distributed solar directly. South Africa lifted its generation licensing threshold in the middle of the worst loadshedding on record, and some 7 GW of distributed capacity followed, much of it through private wheeling, where businesses buy power directly from off-site generators.
Zambia opened its market to private supply in 2023 after drought cut its hydropower generation by nearly 90% – its worst in decades. Nigeria removed its fuel subsidy in May 2023 and sharply raised tariffs for its high-paying ‘Band A’ customers the following year, making self-generation the cheaper option for anyone with access to capital. Kenya, on the other hand, and the vast majority of African markets, needed no trigger at all, as expensive electricity and unreliable supply were sufficient to stir investments in these distributed assets.
African countries need expanded frameworks that anchor these unplanned, grid-edge distributed assets in a coherent national strategy, particularly in light of shrinking aid flows, mounting energy security pressures, fragile utilities, and the unfinished business of universal electrification. This all starts with gaining visibility.
Why so little distributed solar is visible – and why that’s changing
The lack of visibility on distributed solar is not unique to Africa, but a combination of factors makes it worse here. Many installations are carried out informally. This is compounded by the absence of distributed generation regulation, which leaves privately owned assets with no formal route into the market, and therefore no incentive to register themselves. And even where such regulations exist, they are often not operationalised.
Countries with even minimally operational regulation, licensing and permitting do have some visibility, although rarely much. About 12 report an official or semi-official distributed solar figure — net-metering registers, captive-power licences, or utility estimates, according to research from Sustainable Energy Africa. In some of them, Ember’s estimate of the capacity added in just the last three years exceeds the entire official stock recorded across all years. Tunisia and South Africa, which have among the oldest and most robust policies, regulations and permitting procedures on the continent, are also the two countries showing the smallest share of unrecorded distributed capacity.
That tide is now shifting, as governments take notice and system operators are stepping up to streamline registration and permitting for this increasingly important market segment. At least 15 African countries have registration and permitting procedures at an advanced draft stage, with several more in force or running as pilots. These are mostly reactive, and still behind the pace of the market, but are nonetheless expected to start closing the statistical gap. South Africa has gone a step further, building a digital platform for small-scale embedded generation, now used by more than 55 municipal distribution utilities, which moves permitting online and captures each installation’s geolocation. Eswatini and Namibia will launch theirs in early September 2026.
2.3 Further evidence on the ground
A surge in companies, registries and licences shows the solar rise is real
In Nigeria, 370 new solar companies registered in 2025, almost seven times higher than the 56 registered in 2019. In South Africa, GreenCard installer certifications show 638 installation companies certified in 2023 alone as solar installations boomed from chronic loadshedding. In Kenya, EPRA’s register of licensed solar firms in 2023/2024 was around six times that of 2019/2020.
2.4 What next for policy?
Distributed solar is driving the biggest disruption of Africa’s power system from the bottom up, funded by private investment. Fundamentally about access, affordability and reliability, these assets also help defer new infrastructure upgrades and free up capacity on already overloaded transformers and substations in urban nodes. On the other hand, forcing businesses into self-generation at two to four times the all-in cost of utility-scale capacity is a hard foundation for industrial competitiveness. And every large customer that reduces its dependence on the grid takes with it the revenue that cross-subsidises poorer households, worsening the position of an already precarious supply industry.
If anything, Africa needs better planning — planning that constructively embeds these distributed assets so that they support the grid, and so that the benefits are shared across a wider base.