Sudan's Untapped Solar Potential: 3,000 Hours of Sunshine and a 2,190 MW Target

Originally published 28 February 2026. Updated 3 August 2026 with the findings of UNDP's Solar Energy Value Chain Study and current programme data.

An Abundance of Sun, a Scarcity of Power

Sudan receives over 3,000 hours of direct sunshine per year, among the highest solar irradiance levels on the African continent. Yet solar energy in Sudan supplies just 0.23% of electricity generation, from an installed photovoltaic capacity of roughly 190 MW as of 2023. The rest of the grid runs on hydropower (54.6%) and fossil fuel thermal generation (44.62%), with renewables of every kind accounting for 0.78%.

Long-term average of photovoltaic power output (PVOUT), Sudan, 1994-2018. Source: Global Solar Atlas 2.0, World Bank / Solargis.

One statistic captures the gap better than any other. Sudan has exactly one operational utility-scale solar plant: a 5 MW installation at El Fasher, commissioned in 2020. Nearly all of the country's remaining solar capacity is distributed, self-financed and invisible to the national grid, installed by households, farms and businesses solving their own power problems one system at a time.

A nation with some of the most favourable solar conditions on earth generates almost none of its electricity from the sun, and almost none of what it does generate is planned.

Sudan electricity generation by source. Source: An Analysis of Sudan's Energy Sector and Its Renewable Energy Potential, International Journal of Environmental Studies.

The Numbers Behind the Opportunity

Sudan's total installed electricity generation capacity sat at approximately 4.5 GW before the conflict that began in April 2023. Electricity consumption per capita was 0.294 MWh, less than one-tenth of the global average.

Access was uneven long before the war. Around 62% of the population had an electricity connection, but that headline figure hides the real distribution: 84% in urban centres against 49% in rural areas. Put plainly, more than half of rural Sudan had no grid connection at all, and the grid that did exist was concentrated in cities.

Pre-conflict electricity access rates. Source: An Analysis of Sudan's Energy Sector and Its Renewable Energy Potential, International Journal of Environmental Studies.

The government's pre-conflict target was ambitious: 2,190 MW of grid-connected solar PV and 50 MW of solar thermal by 2035. A memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development outlined 500 MW of new solar deployment, and two additional 10 MW projects were already under construction. World Bank projections put on-grid solar at roughly 810 MW by 2031, alongside a rural electrification programme targeting 1.1 million solar home systems over the same period.

Those targets have not become less relevant since 2023. They have become harder to reach through the grid, and easier to reach around it.

Installed solar capacity against national targets. Sources: Sudan Solar Market Report (PVKnowHow); World Bank projections; Sudan national renewable energy target.

Why Solar Economics Favour Sudan

The financial case is straightforward. Projected levelised costs for solar PV generation fall to approximately $35/MWh by 2025 and $25/MWh by 2035, roughly $0.0376/kWh. Diesel generation costs $0.10 to $0.12/kWh, and Sudan was spending $1.3 billion a year importing that fuel before the war.

Every megawatt of solar installed reduces foreign currency outflows and insulates communities from volatile global fuel markets. For a country whose Al-Jaili refinery has suffered $3 billion in damage and whose oil output has halved to 24,000 barrels per day, this is no longer an environmental argument. It is a question of whether hospitals keep their lights on.

Levelised cost of generation, solar PV against diesel. Sources: Renewable Energy in Sudan: Current Status and Future Prospects, Wiley Engineering Reports, 2025.

What Changed in 2026

Two developments since this article was first published are worth recording, because together they mark a shift in how solar in Sudan is being treated.

In March 2026, UNDP published its Solar Energy Value Chain Study, the first serious market-level assessment of Sudanese solar since the conflict began. Its conclusion was that solar has moved from an alternative to a lifeline for households, farms and small businesses as grid supply has collapsed. Its warning was equally direct: customs bottlenecks, weak quality controls and limited access to financing now risk undermining that role. Financing is the sharpest of the three, with available loan interest rates running between 20% and 35% and repayment periods as short as six to eight months. The constraint is no longer whether solar makes sense in Sudan. It is whether equipment can clear a port, whether what clears the port works, and whether anyone can pay for it.

The second is the GEF and UNDP solar mini-grid programme, running from 2022 to 2026 with a budget of about US$2.9 million under Sudan's Ministry of Energy and Petroleum. It targets 2 MW of new solar PV and 6.9 MWh of battery storage, largely by retrofitting existing diesel-based power stations rather than building from nothing, and is expected to benefit around 144,000 people directly. Alongside the hardware, it funds regulatory frameworks for low-voltage mini-grids and a digital monitoring platform.

That second point matters more than its budget suggests. Retrofitting diesel stations and writing mini-grid regulation are the unglamorous preconditions for private investment at scale.

The Engineering Challenges

Building solar at scale in Sudan is not a matter of putting panels in the desert.

High ambient temperatures reduce PV module efficiency, a constraint our team has studied directly through environmental chamber testing at London South Bank University, where controlled experiments showed that water cooling combined with fine sand surface treatments can measurably improve output in extreme heat. We covered that work in detail in solving solar efficiency loss in extreme heat.

Dust accumulation degrades yield between cleaning cycles. Rural grid infrastructure is thin or absent. Equipment has to be moved to remote sites across a country with damaged logistics. And there is a shortage of trained installation and maintenance technicians, which is the constraint that binds hardest over a system's twenty-year life, because a panel nobody can service is a panel that quietly stops earning.

These are engineering problems rather than insurmountable barriers. They are also the reason that specification decisions made at design stage, module temperature coefficients, mounting and airflow, cleaning access, spares availability, determine whether an installation is still performing in year ten.

Decentralised Solar as the First Step

The most immediate opportunity is not utility-scale solar farms. It is decentralised off-grid systems.

Mini-grids and standalone installations deliver electricity to rural health clinics, schools, agricultural operations and small businesses without waiting for national grid expansion. They can be commissioned in weeks. They fail locally rather than nationally. And in a country where the grid itself is contested infrastructure, that independence is a feature.

The African Development Bank and the World Bank's ASCENT-Sudan project are moving in this direction, targeting 500 renewable energy systems across public facilities, farms and telecom networks. UNDP's own programme has installed close to 300 solar water systems for irrigation and household use over the past five years, cutting diesel costs by as much as 70%.

Electricity consumption by sector, Sudan, 2022. Source: International Energy Agency, Sudan: Electricity.

What This Looks Like When It Is Actually Built

The case for decentralised solar in Sudan is usually made in the abstract. It does not have to be.

Since 2023 we have delivered the Sudan Solarisation Programme for UNDP, bringing reliable power to 110 healthcare facilities across six states. The programme has deployed 555 kW of Jinko panels and exceeds 1 MW of cumulative generating capacity, covering design, logistics coordination, installation and ongoing maintenance in conflict-affected regions. What that buys, in practice, is cold chain storage for vaccines, lighting in operating theatres and power for neonatal care in facilities that previously ran on intermittent diesel or nothing at all.

At a smaller scale, the Dongola integrated off-grid solar and pumping system, delivered for UNDP and the Global Fund in Northern State, runs a healthcare site entirely on a 25 kW off-grid array with lithium battery storage. It powers both a medical waste incinerator and the site's water pumping infrastructure, with no diesel generator and no grid connection.

Neither project waited for institutional recovery, transmission investment or a change in the security situation. Both are examples of the same principle: the right system, correctly specified for the conditions, installed where the need already exists.

What Comes Next

Sudan's solar trajectory will be defined by three factors: the speed of post-conflict institutional recovery, the availability of project financing, and the presence of engineering teams able to design, install and maintain systems in demanding conditions.

The first two are largely outside any single organisation's control. The third is not.

The sunshine is already there. The economics are already favourable. The question is execution.

MIMAH designs, installs and maintains renewable energy systems across Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt and the UK, with maintenance and operations teams on the ground in each market. If you are scoping a solar or hybrid project in Sudan, talk to our engineers.