AFSIA’s Africa Solar Outlook 2025 report says C&I, both for captive generation and through wheeling projects, continues to grow in the continent.
“The three-year rolling pipeline has grown by another 15% this year. 2024 has been a particularly proficient year with almost 6GW of captive C&I projects and 1.7GW of wheeling projects newly announced.”
The report says South Africa remains the “absolute leader” for wheeling projects, with 21 out of the 22 identified wheeling projects currently under development in Africa based in SA (the other project is in Namibia).
“But interestingly, the same cannot be said about captive C&I projects. Indeed, the lion’s share of these captive projects is located outside of South Africa.”
South Africa “only” hosts a pipeline of 1GW of projects, while the remaining 5GW of pipeline are being developed elsewhere on the continent.
In terms of large-scale projects (also often referred to as “utility-scale“), the report says this segment had suffered greatly during the COVID-19 period.
“The world came to a halt then and the DFI activity, which is what mostly drives large scale solar projects in Africa, had been severely interrupted.
“During the period 2021-2023, our annual report repeatedly highlighted how prevalent the C&I segment had become in the African solar eco-system.
“This period now seems to be behind us and figures indicate a solid come-back from the large-scale segment in 2024 and for the years to come.”
The report notes that large-scale projects represented 72% of the newly installed capacity in 2024, which is a significant boost from 2023’s 32.4%.
“And the growth is even more striking when looking at absolute figures: 521MW of large-scale projects were installed in 2023 while 1,783MW were recorded for this year. That is a growth of almost 350%!”
Looking forward, the report says the number and the size of new large scale projects that have been announced also boomed in 2024.
“If we exclude green h2 [hydrogen] projects from the development pipeline, large scale now represents more than 80% of all the solar capacity planned to be added in the coming years.”
“With almost 81GW worth of projects all across the continent, this segment [C&I] is poised to become the engine of the African solar growth once again, attracting significant foreign investment and injecting lots of MWh into the grids to address the ever-growing electricity demand across the continent.”
Access the Afsia Africa Solar Outlook 2025 report
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