Africa’s solar installations rose by a record 54 percent in 2025, and 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – more than two-thirds of the total for the whole of the previous year. In this article, Carlos Martinez looks at what lies behind those numbers.
The projects driving the continent’s green transition are overwhelmingly built and financed by China, from the Benban Solar Park in Egypt and the Adama wind farms in Ethiopia to De Aar in South Africa and a solar plant with battery storage in every one of Zambia’s 156 constituencies. What has made them viable is two decades of sustained Chinese public investment, which has driven the global cost of renewable energy down to a fraction of what it was 15 years ago.
Carlos also takes on the charge, increasingly fashionable in parts of the Western left, that this amounts to a new “green imperialism”. Market share, he argues, describes a trade relationship, not domination and coercion – and the function of the accusation, whatever the intention behind it, is to manufacture consent for the New Cold War.
A report in the South China Morning Post on 7 September highlights the contrast in energy policy between the United States, where, particularly under the present administration, the watchword is “drill, baby, drill”, and China, where the national strategy is to “walk towards the light”. Two energy behemoths, two approaches to the future of the planet, and the resulting choice facing the people of Africa.
The SCMP article observes that, for African governments seeking to expand access to electricity, the principal deciding factor is cost. And on cost, the argument is now over.
Africa’s solar installations rose a record 54 percent in 2025, adding 4.5 gigawatts of new photovoltaic capacity, and that record is likely to be broken again this year. The International Energy Agency reports that 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – against $600 million for the whole of 2025.
“Africa’s solar revolution is here,” says Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “Growth is spreading to new markets across the continent, and rooftop and distributed systems are putting power directly into the hands of households and businesses.”
What Chinese engineering has built
The projects behind these numbers are, for the most part, built and financed by China.
In Egypt, the 1.8 GW Benban Solar Park at Aswan, completed in 2019, was built with the state-owned China Energy Engineering Corporation and the equipment manufacturer TBEA.
In Ethiopia, the Adama I and II wind farms, with a combined capacity of 204 MW, were funded by China Exim Bank and built by HydroChina and the CGCOC Group, marking the beginning of a country tapping wind potential estimated at up to 1,300 GW. Together with the 5,150 MW Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Ethiopia is heading towards complete reliance on green power.
In South Africa, the 244 MW De Aar wind project, developed and operated by China Longyuan Power Group and China Energy Investment Corporation, serves more than 300,000 homes in the Northern Cape. South Africa is now the continent’s largest importer of solar equipment, enough to generate 3 GW annually.
Morocco hosts China’s most ambitious industrial footprint on the continent, including a $1.3 billion electric vehicle gigafactory and battery component plants that can supply a million vehicles a year.
In Kenya, Chinese firms have built solar generation for rural communities that previously ran on diesel. In Zambia and Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), China has funded and built major hydroelectric projects; Zambia will also receive a solar plant with battery storage in every one of its 156 constituencies.
Nigeria is perhaps the clearest illustration of the potential impact of affordable solar panels. In Africa’s most populous country, the average household receives only around seven hours of grid electricity a day, and households and businesses run on petrol and diesel generators at enormous expense (both economic and environmental). Under a policy change announced in April, the government has adopted a decentralised model built on off-grid solar and interconnected mini-grids, with new business models in property, generation and distribution emerging to take advantage of it.
It is noteworthy that, on a continent where hundreds of millions still lack reliable access to electricity, an estimated 40 percent of Chinese lending to Africa has gone to power generation and transmission, and crucially, these investments have been shifting towards renewable sources for the last decade, to a point where 59 percent of China’s energy projects in Africa are now solar and wind projects.
Why it is affordable
Africa’s green transition has been made viable largely because China has driven the global cost of renewable energy down to a fraction of what it was 15 years ago.
China manufactures over 80 percent of the world’s solar modules and around 70 percent of its wind equipment. Its own installed photovoltaic capacity passed 1,286 GW in July, overtaking coal for the first time. Such figures are a manifestation of two decades of sustained public investment, systematically building a complete green industrial chain without parallel anywhere else in the world.
Africa holds 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources: a majority of the locations with the highest intensity and reliability of sunlight on Earth are found on the African continent. Until recently, it was too expensive to leverage this natural wealth. The International Energy Agency puts the investment needed for a continental clean energy transition at $190 billion a year between 2026 and 2030. Chinese manufacturing has brought that target within reach, with the consequence that Africa can leapfrog the fossil-fuel stage of development altogether and go straight to a renewable future.
The charge of “green imperialism”
It has become fashionable in some Western left circles to describe all this as a new “green economic imperialism”: China plundering critical minerals and binding African states into dependency through resource-backed loans.
The evidence offered is invariably based on market share, describing nothing more than a trade relationship. Imperialism, in any meaningful Marxist sense, involves domination and coercion, the political subordination of peripheral economies to a metropolitan ruling class. The figures show that African governments are opting to do business with Chinese state-owned enterprises rather than Western mining majors, because Chinese finance comes without structural adjustment conditions or political demands, and at substantially lower interest rates.
Nor is China looking to leave African countries at the bottom of the value chain. Sinomine Resource Group has committed $400 million to a lithium sulphate processing plant in Zimbabwe, in support of the Zimbabwean government’s policy of ending exports of unprocessed lithium. On 1 May this year, China implemented unconditional zero-tariff access to its market for all 53 African countries with which it maintains diplomatic relations.
Criticism can legitimately be made of working conditions on particular projects, or of the environmental impact of mining wherever it takes place. But the function of the imperialism charge, whatever the intention behind it, is to manufacture consent for a New Cold War, a clear purpose of which is to keep the Global South dependent on the imperial core.
The real story is that China is helping Africa break out of underdevelopment in an environmentally sustainable way, while enhancing its sovereignty and reducing its dependence. This is not, by any reasonable definition, imperialism.
