This is specifically Nairobi not Africa
So not off-grid, exactly. (Although the grid in any poor country’s cities will not be up bougie, Western specs on reliability)
Solar used to have a very high upfront cost and a very long ROI time, but for use cases such as this, where the power draw is predictable and relatively low, solar is a no-brainer nowadays, with the price of both the panels and the batteries being so much lower than it used to be.
Only thing in solar that worries me is the reliability. It almost always needs some auxialary power to reliable smooth the lows and ups.
That said Afrika as a continent is pretty reliable for solar power all year around. Average is something like 325 days of bright sunlight annually. Cell network is pretty critical system tough, so as long as there is some fallback plan in case of failure i think this is excelent use for solar.
If they also install batteries, the only way for it not to work would be a volcano erupting and hiding the sun for a couple of weeks. Even on rainy days you have come light and thus some production, so as long as the maximum wattage of the panels is like double of what the tower needs, it should woek smoothly.
That’s really a western prospective where you are used to a reliable power grid. If you’re living in the global south, blackouts are more common (depending on your country, of course). And if you can’t rely on your power system to provide you power at all times, you have already adapted. And that also means that you can use solar without much hassle
Guess my view is little unreasonable. I mean building something new and expect it to work is demanding awful lot.
But stopping with the snark. Africa has it problems with countries weaponizing cellphone and internet connections and that would not be solved even if every tower had its own nuclear reactor powering them.
You say it would take a volcano eruption to cloud the sky. Intense Sahara dust events can lower the PV output and the soil landing on the panels can make them useless. Cleaning these panels is laborius and uses water that can be hard to get in some areas. These are happening more frequently as climate change is doing its thing. There has been studies showing solar energy drop up to 50% as far as Greece because of the sand in atmosphere.
I think using solar for powering those towers is a great. I just dont see logic behind building a system that can with a bad luck just stop working, when you could instead build some failsafe option.
This news reminds us that solar power has been chosen as an alternative energy source amid the power crisis in Myanmar during the civil war.
“It is not like we are using them for clean energy or for some environmental reasons. We are a country with civil war. We are just using them out of necessity,” said a resident in the Bago region.
War-torn Myanmar embraces solar to tackle power crisis | Reuters (2025-11-14)
Nukecels seething
