Africa Solar Energy

Africa is often considered and referred as the “Sun continent” or the continent where the Sun’s influence is the greatest.

According to the “World Sunshine Map”, Africa receives many more hours of bright sunshine during the course of the year than any other continent of the Earth: many of the sunniest places on the planet lie there.

Despite the large solar potential, penetration of solar power in Africa’s energy sector is still very low.

The whole continent has a long duration of sunshine, and excluding the large areas of tropical rainforests (the Guinean Forests of West Africa and much of the Congo Basin), since desert and savannah regions of Africa stand up as Earth’s largest cloud-free area.

Africa is dominated by clear skies even beyond deserts (ex : Sahara, Namib, Kalahari), however, the regions located along the equator are considerably cloudier than the tropics and subtropics.

The eastern Sahara/northeastern Africa is particularly noted for its world sunshine records. The area experiences some of the greatest mean annual duration of bright sunshine, as the sun shines bright during approximatively as much as 4,300 hours a year, which is equal to 97% of the possible total.

Under such circumstances Africa is the ideal continent to develop and use solar powered energy. Only limited projects are being developed in South Africa, Kenya and Morocco mainly with smaller ones in other countries.