Africa's solar revolution is vast and speedy

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.

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

Solar is crazy cheap from China it’s a 4 year payback at $0.045/kwh.

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.

Was this scale of solar revolution inevitable or did China willed (subsidized) it?

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

Actual title: China's solar revolution is vast and speedy

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.

Things change quickly when the economics make sense.

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...

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.

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