Rural and Renewable Energy Agency’s 887 kwp solar photovoltaic modules in Greenville City, Sinoe County, photo credit: RREA Facebook page
Summary
- Liberia is experiencing a solar boom, with record imports of Chinese-made solar panels helping expand electricity access in one of the world’s least electrified countries. Solar companies say falling prices, government tax waivers and international funding have transformed the market.
- The government is betting heavily on solar power, rolling out projects ranging from health-centre electrification and solar street lighting to a new 20-megawatt solar farm at Mount Coffee. Officials say solar is helping fill gaps left by an overstretched national grid.
- Experts warn solar alone will not solve Liberia’s energy crisis. While imports are rising rapidly, concerns remain over substandard equipment, electronic waste, fire risks and the country’s wider shortage of electricity generation capacity.
By Nemenlah Cyrus Harmon, climate and environment reporter with New Narratives
Every morning before sunrise, Karrus Hayes loads a pickup truck in Paynesville and points it toward the interior. The road to Bapolu County is long. The road to Sinoe is longer. But he goes to those rural counties anyway because people there are waiting for light.
Hayes is the executive director of Sunstar Green Energy, one of Liberia’s growing crop of solar distribution companies. Between 2020 and 2025, his company distributed over 3,000 solar home systems to households across six counties – Montserrado, Bomi, Bong, Nimba, Sinoe, and Gbarpolu. He calls 2025 the best year his company has ever had.
“This has been the highest number of distributions in a year,” Hayes said in an interview at his Paynesville office. “Before, we didn’t have capital. But now things have changed.”
Sunstar is not the only company that is thriving.
A new report by Ember, a global energy think tank, found that Liberia is among 25 African countries that imported at least 100 megawatts of solar panels in 2024–25, up from 15 countries the year before. Africa’s solar imports from China, which manufactures roughly 80 percent of the world’s panels, rose 60 percent in 2024–25. Over half of Africa’s new electricity capacity this year will come from solar.
Liberia, long ranked among the least electrified countries in the world, is part of that surge.
“Light Is Life”
To understand why solar is taking off in Liberia, experts say, you must understand the price of darkness.
Liberia’s national grid, a network of wires strung from pole to pole and operated by the Liberia Electricity Corporation, reaches barely half the urban population and a fraction of rural residents — a gap rooted in decades of setbacks. Civil war destroyed the country’s electricity infrastructure almost entirely, and Liberia’s scattered rural settlements make grid extension costly. The main power source, Mount Coffee Hydropower Plant, loses more than three-quarters of its capacity every dry season, forcing reliance on imports and diesel.
The national grid generates no more than 126 megawatts of power. Demand is expected to triple by 2030. The government’s aspirational goal is universal access by 2030 with 100,000 new connections annually. But the grid – – is far behind that.
“Most of the country is dark,” Hayes said. “Everybody needs access to power. Light is life. People want to charge their phones. They need light to prepare their children for school. They need it to do business.”
Without access to the grid, solar becomes the only option.
Karrus Hayes connecting a small home solar system in Bensonville, Montserrado County, photo credit: Sunstar Green Energy
The government of President Joseph Boakai has recognized this. For the past three years, the government has issued annual executive orders removing import duties on solar products. That single policy change, industry players say, has transformed the economics of the sector.
“The duty waiver helped companies to be able to import products into the country,” Hayes said. “Before, a 30-watt solar panel cost US$300 or US$350. Now, a 60-watt panel can go for as little as US$95.”
That price drop, combined with World Bank-backed subsidy programs and a wave of development financing from Germany, the European Union, and USAID, has unlocked a market that operators say was just waiting for the right conditions.
Government Embraces an Ambitious Plan to Bring Solar Power to All Liberians
Samuel B. Nagbe, Jr., executive director of the Rural Renewable Energy Agency, the government agency responsible for expanding electricity access outside the areas served by the main national grid, explained the scale of what the government is trying to do.
Nagbe said his agency is in the middle of solarizing 90 health centers, with another 100 in the pipeline. Solar streetlights have been installed in four secondary cities — Barclayville, Grand Kru, Harper, Maryland, Kanweaken, River Gee, and Voinjama, Lofa — 117 lights in each. Plans are in motion to connect 10,000 households in Lofa County, 12,000 in Buchanan, 5,000 in Greenville, and thousands more in River Gee and Bong counties.
Solarization of the Manolu Community Clinic in Maryland County by Rural and Renewable Energy Agency, photo credit: Facebook
At the center of it all is a newly dedicated 20-megawatt solar farm at Mount Coffee Hydropower facility in Harrisburg, Montserrado, which during an interview in May, Nagbe described as the first substantial new power generation capacity Liberia has added to its grid since a 38-megawatt heavy fuel oil plant was commissioned years ago.
“This is the first time that we are having substantial power being injected,” said Nabgbe.
The Agency also runs the Results-Based Financing for Businesses program, a partnership with the World Bank and other development partners provides companies like Sunstar with upfront capital to purchase and distribute solar home systems. It was through this program that Hayes received an initial US$60,000 to buy inventory and another US$104,000 line of credit from a Dutch company called SPARK Energy, a renewable energy company that provides off-grid solar home systems, technology, and financing solutions to expand electricity access in underserved communities across Africa, allowing him to finally deploy products that had sat warehoused for years.
“The project was something that really helped us,” he said. “They gave us money to be able to acquire products and deploy them in the market.”
Challenges to Full Coverage Remain
Nanlee Johnson, an energy expert and Liberia’s focal point for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, welcomed the solar surge with careful caveats.
“Liberia has been progressing steadily when it comes to renewable energy,” Johnson said. “But I think solar could address maybe 15 to 20 percent of our overall national energy needs at the current scale.”
That number could rise, he said, if Liberia moves aggressively into large utility-scale solar farms of 20, 30, even 50 megawatts and feeds that power into the national grid. But for now, most of the solar panels being imported are small home systems: enough to charge a phone, power a lamp, maybe run a fan; not enough to run a business, power a hospital, or sustain a rice mill.
“The standalone systems are easily deployed in far-to-reach areas,” Johnson said. “But for the bigger energy demands – industry, urban centers – you need the bigger systems on the national grid.”
Rural and Renewable Energy Agency solar PV installation for Lofa County mini – grid power plant, photo credit: RREA Facebook page
The Risks Nobody Wants to Talk About
Experts warn that, as with every boom, this one carries risks. Liberia’s borders with Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire are porous. Substandard solar equipment, uncertified panels, cheap batteries with shortened lifespans, undersized charge controllers flow across those borders daily, sometimes installed by untrained technicians.
“There are people who bring solar products through the border that have not been checked,” Hayes acknowledged. “Those products could destroy the whole market.”
Johnson was blunter. “The porosity of our border is giving a major problem,” he said. “People can just walk through. And most consumers don’t even know the different kinds of solar equipment being used. They go for anything, and it becomes to their own detriment.”
Both the Renewable Agency and the Liberia Standards Authority require that solar products imported under the duty-free program meet international certification standards – including the Minimum Energy Performance Standards adopted with ECOWAS in 2020. But those rules apply to companies working through official channels. They do little to stop informal traders.
Samuel Nagbe said one of the sector’s challenges is finding people with the right skills and competence, and that when installation isn’t done by professionals, solar systems become hazardous — people lose their investments and properties.
Substandard equipment and unqualified installers have already produced electrical fires, underperforming systems, and lost customer investment, prompting Liberia’s electricity regulator to issue the country’s first solar installer license in November 2025.
Johnson’s message to consumers was direct: “Use certified installers. If not, one of the biggest risks is that your house gets burned.”
There is also the looming question of electronic waste. High-quality solar panels can last 15 to 25 years. Substandard ones may fail in a few. With tens of thousands of units now in the market, Liberia’s few existing e-waste facilities may soon be overwhelmed.
“We need to properly dispose of these materials,” Johnson warned. “If we are overwhelmed by a massive influx of substandard products, the turnaround for our e-waste facilities will become very high.”
Nagbe did not sugarcoat where Liberia stands.
“This country still remains the least penetrated country in the energy sector in the sub-region,” he said. “And it is the most expensive in terms of cost per kilowatt hour.”
In Monrovia, consumers pay an average of 20 to 22 cents per kilowatt hour more than in Accra, Abidjan, or Freetown. For a small business owner running an air conditioner on national grid, electricity can consume a significant share of profit.
Against that backdrop, Nagbe said the government is assembling what it hopes will be a transformational package: US$50 million from an Arcelor Mittal mining signing bonus earmarked for the energy sector; a proposed Millennium Challenge Corporation compact with energy as the sole focus; independent power producer agreements for up to 200 megawatts of new solar-plus-storage capacity; and hydropower construction on three separate rivers — the Sino River in Sinoe County, the Gee River in River Gee County, and the Bading Falls in Bong County.
“It may not be by 2030 that we get 75 or 80 percent penetration,” Nagbe conceded. “But clearly there are plans to expand penetration not just in urban areas, but also in off-grid areas.”
“People Want Solar”
A technician from Hayes’ Sunstar connecting a home in Panama Town, Kpayan District, Sinoe County, photo credit: Sunstar Green Energy
Back in his office in Paynesville, Karrus Hayes is already thinking about next year’s distribution. The Results-Based Financing program has given his company a taste of what is possible when capital, policy, and demand align. He still faces real obstacles: customers who promise payment and then disappear when his agent arrives; communities so remote that the cost of traveling there to collect a US$5 monthly payment outweighs the income; mobile money networks that simply do not reach the villages where his panels sit on rooftops.
But demand, he said, has never been stronger.
“Everybody is asking for solar,” he said. “Even in Monrovia, almost every home wants it. If it were easy for people to pay upfront, I could tell you every house in this city would have solar on their roof.”
This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia Project. Funding was provided by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The funders had no say in the story’s content.
