Juliana Kainga, Africa WindPower director at the Global Wind Energy Council, opened the launch of the GWEC’s Status of Wind in Africa Report 2026 with a blunt observation: “South African corporates have signed wind contracts at a faster rate compared to the traditional state procurement route.” For the businesses and mining houses that keep South Africa’s factories running, the way electricity arrives at their gates has changed faster through private deals than through the state’s own procurement machinery.
The numbers back her up. In less than three years, more than 3,3gw of corporate power purchase agreements reached financial close in South Africa. Regulatory changes made this possible, letting mining and industrial companies buy renewable electricity directly from generators rather than waiting on the state. For those companies, and the jobs and production lines that depend on a steady power supply, the shift opened a route that simply did not exist before.
Meanwhile, the continent-wide picture is one of record highs and vast untapped reserves. Kainga’s report tracks the wind sector between December 2024 and December 2025. Africa added 1,53gw of installed wind capacity during that period, the largest annual increase yet, bringing the total to 11,1gw. That figure sits against an almost untouched reserve of technical onshore wind potential, measured at 58 400gw. “Less than 0,02% of Africa’s technical onshore wind potential of 58 400GW has been developed,” Kainga said. “It is clear that Africa has enormous potential, but it needs to turn this resource into operating projects.”
The gap between potential and delivery is not evenly spread. A planned pipeline of 186gw spans 260 projects, but development is heavily concentrated. South Africa, Morocco and Egypt account for 85% of the capacity actually built, even though they hold less than 10% of the continent’s technical potential. By contrast, Algeria, Libya and Sudan have the largest wind resources of all, yet together have built less than 200mw. “The difference is market conditions around this resource, including credible buyers, a bankable contract, access to the grid, and financing,” Kainga said. Wind alone does not attract investment; the surrounding conditions do.
Even where those conditions exist, the grid keeps surfacing as the familiar obstacle. “Transmission capacity is becoming a limiting factor in some of the strongest markets. South Africa is an example of this. A project can have the best wind resources, a buyer and financing in place but be unable to proceed due to constraints of the grid,” Kainga explained. The Cape provinces illustrate the problem plainly. They hold some of the country’s strongest wind resources, yet the transmission infrastructure there has not kept pace with the new generation projects being built around it. For developers and the communities positioned near those wind corridors, that bottleneck decides whether promised projects move from paper to construction.
Where projects do proceed, they are getting bigger. Kainga pointed to the Gulf of Suez project in Egypt, the first gigawatt-scale development on the continent at 1,1gw. The average turbine installed in 2025 was around 5mw, a sign, she said, of “increased sizing and technology that is being used. This gives a sense of how quickly projects are scaling.”
Looking ahead, the GWEC forecasts that Africa could reach between 30gw and 50gw of installed wind capacity by 2035. South Africa could exceed 15gw, while Egypt is expected to reach 8gw to 10gw and Morocco 5gw to 8gw. The resource exists, the report’s message runs; the task now is building the markets and grids to carry it, and whether the Cape provinces’ transmission bottleneck eases may decide who hosts the next wave of turbines.