Crocodile Economics Comes to Africa: Trade, Solar, and the New Energy Map – CleanTechnica

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When I was invited onto UK energy regulator Ofgem’s eight-part Inside Energy podcast to discuss where the next great shift in the global energy system might come from as part of the closing episode, due to drop in January, the hosts likely expected an answer rooted in Europe or Asia. The theme was “crocodile economics,” that widening gap between economic growth and emissions. The metaphor is simple but powerful: GDP rises as emissions fall, creating the jaws of a crocodile.

Much of the global economy is already showing those jaws opening. Over 80% of world GDP and 70% of global population now live in countries where emissions have either decoupled absolutely from growth, as in most of Europe and North America where emissions have been falling, or relatively, as in China, India, Indonesia and Brazil where emissions are growing less slowly than GDP. China is about to shift to the absolute column, as emissions have been flatlined for 18 months, per Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder, Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and senior fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute in Carbon Brief, one of my go-to sources for accurate and nuanced information on what’s actually happening in China, along with David Fishman of the Lantau Group. The question was where the next big movement would come from. My answer was Africa.

The African Continental Free Trade Area is no longer an aspiration. Fifty-four of fifty-five countries have signed and forty-eight have ratified. It is now being implemented. The bloc represents about 1.4 billion people and a combined GDP of $4.3 trillion. What that means in practical terms is the start of predictable trade across borders and the rise of continental supply chains. It mirrors the way the European Coal and Steel Community created a framework for industrial scale and policy stability in Europe leading to the EU, the euro zone, and internal labor mobility.

Kishore Mahbubani, author of Has China Won? and Has the West Lost It? and former lead ambassador for Singapore, argued that the most important political trend of our century is the spread of governance focused on citizen welfare and problem solving rather than ideology, providing examples from around the developing and non-western world. AfCFTA is an example of that. It gives African economies a platform for collective growth and a common standard of rules of origin, tariffs and digital trade systems. The potential economic multiplier is enormous. It enables Africa to stand with North America, Europe, China, ASEAN and India as a more unified major economy on the global stage.

While this integration has been unfolding, Africa has begun importing solar hardware on an unprecedented scale. In the twelve months to mid-2025, African countries imported around 15 GW of solar panels, a 60% increase from the previous year. South Africa alone imported about 3.8 GW of panels and 3.8 GWh of batteries in 2024. The numbers are uneven across the continent, but the direction is clear. Chinese domestic installations are expected to fall by roughly 100 GW in 2025 due to internal market reforms. That overcapacity is already looking for export markets, and Africa’s open trade corridors make it an attractive destination. The energy transition is arriving as a containerized commodity. Much of this will echo Pakistan’s 17 GW of deployments in 2024, non-utility scale commercial, industrial and residential solar deployments. Quite a bit of sub-Saharan Africa’s grid is currently unreliable and with scant coverage, so grid-detached microgrids are a feature of development there, and cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries will accelerate this deployment.

Those containers do not move in a vacuum. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been creating the physical backbone to move heavy energy equipment across the continent. China has financed or built over 12,000 km of roads and railway, about 20 new or modernized ports, and more than 80 power-sector facilities. In 2023 alone, Chinese investment in Africa totaled around $21.7 billion, much of it in transport and logistics. These corridors are now the arteries for the solar and battery trade. The revitalization of the 1,860 km Tanzania–Zambia Railway, once a Cold War project, is being recast as a clean-energy supply line, carrying goods from coastal ports to inland markets. Leapfrogging into distributed energy does not mean skipping infrastructure. It means using better infrastructure to distribute new technologies faster.

Alongside these corridors, Chinese and African researchers have been mapping out what big-grid connectivity might look like in the coming decades. A 12-country high-voltage direct-current super-grid concept has been developed, stretching from Mali and Nigeria in the west across the continent to Ethiopia and Kenya in the east and then to South Africa in the south. The study projects that by 2035 sub-Saharan Africa could require 700 to 800 TWh of electricity annually, and the cheapest way to supply it is through interconnected renewable grids linked by HVDC lines. This work fits neatly into the framework of the China-founded, funded and led, UN affiliated, Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization, or GEIDCO, which promotes large-scale renewable interconnections globally. China’s grid technologies are already being deployed in Africa, and this will accelerate in the coming decade. It is a reminder that distributed solar and batteries will dominate rural and industrial development, but high-capacity transmission is still part of the picture. Big grids and microgrids will coexist, each filling the gaps the other cannot.

None of this logistics buildout happens without people who know how to move products and make deals. Over the past 20 years, roughly a million Chinese nationals have settled in Africa as business owners, contractors and professionals. Between 350,000 and 500,000 of them live in South Africa, with significant communities in Kenya, Nigeria, Angola and Ethiopia. They run construction firms, trading houses and import agencies that connect Chinese supply chains with African buyers. Howard French’s book China’s Second Continent describes how these networks act as informal economic bridges. They are the soft infrastructure that complements the hard one. When solar panels or battery packs leave Chinese factories, they often pass through companies owned or managed by Chinese expatriates already embedded in African markets.

The next phase is industrial. Chinese and regional manufacturers are starting to build onshore capacity. Firms such as BYD and Chery are assessing battery-pack and EV assembly plants in South Africa. JA Solar and Sungrow have opened or planned facilities in Egypt and Kenya. CATL has partnered with African mining firms to explore lithium refining and pack assembly close to resource sites. AfCFTA’s unified trade rules make these investments more valuable because they can serve the whole continent rather than a single domestic market. The pattern mirrors East Asia’s earlier industrial migration: production follows market scale and predictable rules.

The energy mix shaping these developments has also changed. In 2021, China pledged to stop financing or building new coal-fired power plants abroad. That decision led to the cancellation or suspension of nearly 90% of planned Belt and Road coal projects. The remaining ones are being completed but not replaced. New energy investment through the BRI has shifted toward ports, rail, grid reinforcement, and renewables. That change is critical for Africa. The continent is expanding its generation capacity but avoiding the carbon lock-in that accompanied earlier waves of industrialization elsewhere, with only about 12.4 GW of coal generation built on the continent under BRI. The pipeline of new coal projects financed by China is now largely closed.

At street level, the transformation looks different but is just as significant. Electric two-wheelers are spreading quickly through cities and rural towns, powered by solar microgrids. Startups in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ghana are deploying tens of thousands of electric motorcycles and charging points. Companies such as Ampersand, Spiro and Ecobodaa have built business models around local assembly and battery swapping. Chinese manufacturers like Yadea, Sunra and Aima are supplying parts or forming joint ventures. These vehicles provide affordable mobility, create demand for local solar generation and establish a new market for battery recycling and maintenance. Electrified transport is reinforcing the economics of distributed power.

The governance question always follows. Yuen Yuen Ang’s book How China Escaped the Debt Trap argues that good governance does not precede markets, it follows them, countering the arguments in by Nobel Prize winning economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail. Her African example is Botswana, where good enough governance, competent administration and a willingness to learn from markets created a feedback loop: growth fostered institutions, and better institutions preserved growth. That dynamic is visible across Africa. AfCFTA and clean-energy investment are building markets that reward predictability, transparency and stability. Mahbubani’s broader argument, that governance in the developing world is increasingly citizen-centric, fits the same pattern. As countries integrate and trade, the incentives for corruption and exclusion diminish, and the incentives for efficiency and rule-based systems grow.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond attributed Africa’s poverty to geography, poor soils, and ecological limits, while giving little attention to the centuries of colonial extraction that shaped modern economies. Botswana’s post-independence record shows why that view falls short: despite arid land and limited fertility, sound governance and deliberate policy choices have delivered stability and sustained growth. Geography mattered, but markets and institutions have mattered more.

All of this fits within the global picture of decoupling of growth and emissions. The world’s largest economies have already opened the jaws of the crocodile, some more widely than others. Europe’s emissions are falling even as its GDP grows. China’s emissions per unit of GDP are dropping sharply, and it is looking as if annuals emissions will be falling shortly. India and Indonesia are beginning to separate their energy use from their economic expansion. Africa’s contribution to global emissions remains small, but its growth potential is massive. If it expands on a foundation of solar, storage and electrified industry, the global lower jaw of the crocodile—the fossil energy line—will decline faster than most forecasts predict.

The implications are straightforward. Internal trade under AfCFTA reduces dependence on high-carbon exports and long-haul shipping. Distributed solar and batteries provide resilience in grids that have long been overstressed. The Belt and Road’s physical corridors and the manufacturing migration of Chinese firms supply the equipment and finance. Governance improves as markets deepen. Together these elements create the conditions for Africa to become the first continent to industrialize primarily through clean energy.

When we talk about decoupling growth and emissions, the conversation usually turns to Denmark, California or Guangdong. But the most consequential divergence between economic growth and fossil fuel use may be unfolding under the equator. Africa is building the infrastructure, governance and market systems for prosperity without pollution. The crocodile’s next wide-open jaw may stretch from Lagos to Nairobi to Cape Town.