East African rooftop photovoltaic panels

Scaling up application of rooftop solar PV in Africa still faces multi-faceted challenges as detailed earlier in the PESTLE analyses. African cities are not lacking solar resources but suffer from the deficit of technological capacity along with the limited financial and regulatory supports to utilise these.

Due to the limited research in this field it's difficult to come to a definite conclusion on the potential of the technology. For rooftop solar PV, the literature is plenty, albeit some countries in sub-Saharan Africa lack research in this field. For example, Somalia, Chad, Niger, Malawi among others.

Electricity produced by the rooftop solar PV is used by the building users and any excess generation is sold to the grid. In Uganda, research indicates that around 12.5 % reduction in the annual electricity purchase cost can be achieved for large scale rooftop solar PV through such systems . 3.5. Environmental aspects

This work reviewed solar PV potential in Africa for three generational time-scales: present, near future and far future. For the present, the potential of wide scale rooftop solar PV systems was reviewed, particularly in African cities.

Table 5. List of recommendations for solar PV systems in Africa based on the reviewed literature. Affordability of rooftop solar PV should be increased through government incentives such as appropriate FiT, subsidies, tax relief, public–private partnership, grants, loans (low/zero-interest), and community loan sharing programmes.

Successful financial methods may include 0 % interest loan schemes (community loan) supported by non-profits or government institutions, as implemented in South Africa. This stresses the need for comprehensive public–private partnership. A major challenge to the growing solar rooftop PV market is the e-waste disposal.