Solar power in Africa
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. This region also has the highest mean annual values of solar radiation (the maximum recorded being over 220 kcal/cm2).
The low latitude of the landmass is another asset: much of the continent lies in the intertropical zone, where the intensity and the strength of the sunlight are always high. The area contains lots of vast sun-drenched arid and semi-arid expanses in the north, in the south, and to a lesser extent in the east. About two fifths of the continent are desert, and thus continuously sunny.
The combination of all these geographical and climatic factors is the cause of the large solar potential of Africa. This gives solar power the potential to bring energy to virtually any location in Africa without the need for expensive large scale grid level infrastructural developments.
The distribution of solar resources across Africa is fairly uniform, with more than 85% of the continent's landscape receiving a global solar horizontal irradiation at or over 2,000 kWh/(m2 year). Also, the theoretical reserves of Africa's solar energy are estimated at 60,000,000 TWh/year, which accounts for almost 40% of the global total, thus definitely making Africa the most sun-rich continent in the world.
Declining solar equipment costs are expected to significantly increase solar installations in Africa with an industry projection forecasting that the continent's annual PV market will expand to 2.2 GW by 2018. Future installations for harvesting solar energy in Africa will tend not to be found within the equatorial and subequatorial climate zones, that are located in the western part of Central Africa usually near the equator but that extend as far north and south as the 8th or 9th parallel in both hemispheres, since they are systematically linked with almost permanent cloud cover and only intermittent bright sunshine. Therefore, countries that entirely lie in this wet-humid zone such as the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Liberia and Sierra Leone are by far the least favoured in solar power of all the continent and except for these eight quoted nations, each other African country experiences over 2,700 hours of bright sunshine on at least a part of its territory. Many perpetually sunny African nations like Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Niger, Sudan, South Africa and Namibia for instance could rely on developing their tremendous solar ressources on a large scale thanks to the immense surface of their territory and at reduced prices.
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Wikipedia