Nigeria races to build a homegrown solar industry from scratch
Nigerian startups are racing to build a domestic solar manufacturing industry as the country's blackout-driven solar boom continues to be met almost entirely by Chinese imports.
A handful of Nigerian startups are trying to build a domestic solar manufacturing industry as the country's solar boom continues to be met almost entirely by Chinese imports. Nigeria's national grid has collapsed roughly 22 times in the past two years, pushing homes and businesses toward solar as a more reliable alternative — but nearly every panel installed comes from abroad, with China supplying most of the roughly 2.9 million panels Nigeria imported last year.
At LPV Technologies, one of the few local manufacturers, production runs at about 180,000 panels a year — nowhere near enough to meet demand. The company still has to import up to 17 components per panel, including solar cells, which eats into its margins and undercuts its ability to compete on price with imports. Government-backed manufacturing projects, including a planned 1,000-megawatt facility with Chinese firm LONGi, aim to close that gap and boost Nigeria's assembly capacity roughly tenfold.
Experts say Nigeria's more realistic path is partnering with Chinese manufacturers to transfer technology and build up expertise, rather than trying to compete with China's decades of scale, and that a genuinely competitive African solar industry may need to be regional rather than Nigeria-only.
Based on reporting by Vivian Chime for Climate Home News. Read the original: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/09/11/made-in-nigeria-the-race-to-build-an-african-solar-industry-from-scratch/
This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by an editor before publication.
