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The same panel is not worth the same amount in two places, and the gap is not the sunlight. A kilowatt earns its keep by offsetting a retail bill, so its value is the sunlight it makes multiplied by the price it displaces. Read that product, market by market, and the sunniest places are rarely where a kilowatt is worth the most.
Solar economics has a demand side that the resource maps leave out. Irradiance decides how many kilowatt-hours a panel makes; the local retail tariff decides what each of those kilowatt-hours is worth to the person who avoids buying it. Multiply the two and you get the annual grid-offset value of one installed kilowatt: the decision variable, not the sunlight alone.
Across these markets the two inputs pull in wildly different ranges. Modelled specific yield spans only about 1.9 to 1, from the cloudiest temperate city to the clearest desert. Residential retail price spans close to 19 to 1. The product therefore tracks the price far more than the sun, which is why a kilowatt in dim, high-tariff Berlin outearns one in brilliant, subsidised Cairo by more than ten to one. Switch the ranking below from value to sunlight and watch the order scramble.
Value of a kilowatt spans 13.4x across 28 markets: from $545 in Los Angeles down to $41 in Cairo. Sunlight alone spans barely 2x; retail price sets the ranking.
| # | Market | Value ↓ | Sunlight | Retail price | USD / kW / yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Los AngelesUSA · BSh | $545 | 1,800 | $0.303 | |
| 2 | MadridSpain · BSk/Csa | $481 | 1,619 | $0.297 | |
| 3 | BerlinGermany · Cfb | $461 | 1,058 | $0.436 | |
| 4 | AthensGreece · Csa | $432 | 1,656 | $0.261 | |
| 5 | LondonUK · Cfb | $425 | 1,103 | $0.385 | |
| 6 | SantiagoChile · BSk | $398 | 1,746 | $0.228 | |
| 7 | NairobiKenya · Cwb | $377 | 1,721 | $0.219 | |
| 8 | PerthAustralia · Csa | $377 | 1,791 | $0.210 | |
| 9 | SydneyAustralia · Cfa | $357 | 1,507 | $0.237 | |
| 10 | ParisFrance · Cfb | $354 | 1,166 | $0.303 | |
| 11 | New YorkUSA · Cfa | $352 | 1,388 | $0.253 | |
| 12 | StockholmSweden · Dfb | $322 | 1,066 | $0.302 | |
| 13 | TokyoJapan · Cfa | $311 | 1,370 | $0.227 | |
| 14 | BogotaColombia · Cfb | $288 | 1,390 | $0.207 | |
| 15 | PhoenixUSA · BWh | $265 | 1,803 | $0.147 | |
| 16 | HelsinkiFinland · Dfb | $257 | 993 | $0.259 | |
| 17 | Sao PauloBrazil · Cwa | $239 | 1,456 | $0.164 | |
| 18 | Cape TownSouth Africa · Csb | $219 | 1,809 | $0.121 | |
| 19 | JohannesburgSouth Africa · Cwb | $216 | 1,786 | $0.121 | |
| 20 | CasablancaMorocco · Csa | $204 | 1,689 | $0.121 | |
| 21 | SeoulSouth Korea · Dwa | $176 | 1,389 | $0.127 | |
| 22 | DubaiUAE · BWh | $138 | 1,724 | $0.080 | |
| 23 | JakartaIndonesia · Am | $128 | 1,420 | $0.090 | |
| 24 | OsloNorway · Dfb | $123 | 1,024 | $0.120 | |
| 25 | RiyadhSaudi Arabia · BWh | $98 | 1,888 | $0.052 | |
| 26 | ShanghaiChina · Cfa | $94 | 1,238 | $0.076 | |
| 27 | LagosNigeria · Aw | $49 | 1,365 | $0.036 | |
| 28 | CairoEgypt · BWh | $41 | 1,769 | $0.023 |
Berlin, Germany ranks 26th of 28 for sunlight but 3rd for the value of a kilowatt, on a tariff that ranks 1st. Click any market to compare.
Value = climate-modelled specific yield (TOPCon, the 2025 volume leader) x latest observed residential tariff. Yield from NASA MERRA-2 (1994 to 2024); price from the 92-city retail panel. A self-consumption lens: one kWh offsets one retail kWh.
The value is what one installed kilowatt saves a retail customer who uses its output on site, one avoided retail kWh per generated kWh. It is not a wholesale price, an LCOE, or an export feed-in tariff, and it says nothing about install cost or payback years on its own: it is the annual benefit, the numerator of a payback calculation.
Switching PERC to TOPCon to HJT moves each market's yield a few percent and the 13-to-1 spread hardly at all. The cell technology is a rounding error against a tariff range this wide, which is the uncomfortable finding for anyone selling on efficiency points in a cheap-power market.
The bottom of the range, Cairo, Riyadh, Lagos, Dubai, are subsidised-power markets. Their low value is a true statement about private rooftop payback, where cheap grid power is the competition, even though the same sun would be extremely valuable to an exporter or the grid. USD conversion of subsidised and high-inflation tariffs adds distortion, flagged per row by confidence grade.
The join covers the baseline markets that carry a matched retail tariff. The other twelve are resource-benchmark sites with no retail city (the Atacama, Alice Springs, Lhasa, the Sahel) or cities outside the 92-city price panel. Prices are the latest observed value, 2025 where available, 2024 where 2025 is not yet in.
This is the join that sits under the reports. The demand side is documented in Global Residential Electricity Prices, and the same product, stacked with the full climate penalty, is the finale of the production-climate series in The Compound Trajectory. The method behind every figure is on the methodology page.
Underlying figures are named to their public sources and free to reuse with attribution to Solar Analytica. For the full per-market series or a licensed extract, the data desk is on the about page.