The continent’s fastest-growing energy resource is not a mega-dam. It is the aggregation of thousands of rooftop arrays, mini-grids and commercial installations: generation that sits where demand sits. For hospitals, factories and farms, a solar-plus-storage system is frequently the cheapest kilowatt-hour available, and increasingly the most reliable one.
What holds the sector back is not technology or demand; it is paper. Small distributed assets struggle to be securitised, guarantees remain expensive, and local currency financing is scarce. The opportunity for the next five years is financial engineering: portfolios, warehouse facilities and credit enhancement that let small assets add up to institutional scale.