Rooftop solar can be torn out of capital’s hands

Solar power is expanding across the global south, growing faster in China, India and Brazil than in older, richer solar developers like the US, Japan and Germany.  

Big, corporate-owned solar farms now account for most of the world’s solar capacity, but decentralised rooftop solar comes a close second.

Rooftop panels are often owned by households, especially in rich countries, but overall are more likely to be owned by businesses – energy companies that lease the rooftops, or industrial firms that generate electricity for their own use.

Nevertheless, I will argue here, because of its scale and simplicity, decentralised solar has the potential to support co-operative, municipal and other forms of community ownership and control. 

It can play a role in struggles to supercede the domination of capital with a socially just society, and to forestall disastrous climate change. 

Household

I surveyed the available information on rooftop solar worldwide, and found that: 

1. The world’s runaway number one owner of rooftop solar is the Chinese state. Four-fifths of China’s giant fleet of rooftop solar – which in 2022 generated around 120 terawatt-hours of electricity, about the same as the Netherlands’ total – belongs to state-owned energy companies. The last fifth belongs to households.

2. Capital elsewhere is struggling to catch up with China not only in manufacturing panels, inverters and other equipment, but also in installation. India’s federal government in 2017 started offering subsidies to electricity customers who install rooftop solar, and in 2019 and 2024 amended the scheme to make it more attractive. But even now, most household systems are installed by wealthy homeowners, or by businesses who retain ownership of the panels. 

3. Claims that market forces, without state support, can drive a transition to renewables have always been overblown – but in 2022-23, they jolted rooftop solar forward in parts of the global south. Global fuel prices leapt up in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just as prices of Chinese-made panels hit new lows. Middle-class households and small businesses saw that rooftop panels could free them from reliance on erratic, and now expensive, grid electricity, and pay for themselves in years rather than decades.

4. In Pakistan, shops, factories and middle-class homes have been installing panels at breakneck speed – an estimated 5 gigawatts (GW) of off-grid solar, and up to 3 GW with a grid connection, went up in 2024. By June 2024, 158,000 grid-connected customers were selling spare solar electricity back to the state-owned distribution companies that supply it, more than double the number a year earlier.