Pacific solar: The installation is the easy part. Sustainability is the hard one

A few months ago, during a field visit to Funafuti, a senior government official made a remark that stayed with me. Indicating toward non-functional solar panels awaiting disposal, he said (half joking): Maybe we can use these solar panels to fence the airport.

Photo 1: Funafuti International Airport runway: community members use the runway daily for volleyball, football, and social gatherings. The airport has no perimeter fence. 

Funafuti’s airport runway is unfenced. The community walks, cycles, plays volleyball, and holds gatherings on the same strip of tarmac where the plane lands. Dogs occasionally wander onto the runway. It is charming, deeply Pacific and a real operational hazard. The official’s joke landed because everyone in the room understood what he was actually saying: we are accumulating solar infrastructure we cannot maintain, and we do not know what to do with it. 

Having worked across more than 10 Pacific Island countries over 3 years, I want to share some honest field observations. Not to criticize any stakeholder but because these patterns are consistent enough that they need to be named, discussed, and addressed.

1. The Solar Systems installed and abandoned

Travel through the outer islands of any Pacific Small Island Developing State (SIDS), and a pattern emerges. Solar panels on rooftops faded, cracked, or heavily corroded. Inverters with error lights that most don’t know how to reset. Batteries that have long exceeded their design life. Systems installed with genuine good intentions, now contributing at sub-optimal or nothing.

In Tuvalu, a solar system installed at Princess Margaret Hospital the national referral hospital is non-operational. The hospital experiences power outages 2-3 times per month, sometimes lasting up to 12 hours and there is no functional backup system. The government plans to remove the old system  and install a new one. This is an improvement, but at what point does replacing a solar system become the expected lifecycle of donor-funded energy infrastructure?

Photo 2: Non-functional solar system at the Mayor's office, Abaiang, Kiribati, panels present, system offline.

Non-functional solar installation, Mayor's office, Abaiang, Kiribati. When asked about maintenance, the Mayor's response was candid: "We need to include a maintenance budget line in our annual allocation." The island currently has no trained solar technician. 

Abaiang Island in Kiribati has about 1,000 solar home systems and several institutional solar installations but not a single resident technician with solar knowledge. When something fails, the only option is to wait for a technician to travel from South Tarawa.

This is not unique to Abaiang. Across most of the Pacific, the technicians live only in the main island. Capacity building for outer island communities has consistently lagged behind the pace of installation.

2. Nobody plans for maintenance

The most consistent finding across every Pacific energy assessment I have conducted is that the operation and maintenance is the most important factor in whether a solar system delivers value over its 20-year design life. And it is almost always the last thing addressed in project design.

The cycle is familiar to anyone who has worked in this space. A handover ceremony takes place, a ministry receives the asset, but nobody is aware whose budget covers maintenance. The technician who received training moves to a different post or island. An inverter fails, but there is no spare part and no repair budget. The system gets gradually abandoned in less than 5 years.

Photo 3: Solar system installed at a school, Abaiang, Kiribati with visible mounting deterioration, no dedicated O&M arrangement.

Most solar projects do not include a provision for long-term Operations and Maintenance (O&M). The asset is handed over and the project is closed. Without a structured tariff collection mechanism or an O&M fund, there is simply no money available when the system needs repair. This is a design failure and it is one that the international development community has the power to fix.

Photo 4: Nurse at outer island clinic. She said, Solar is the lifeline here, it powers the vaccine refrigerator, the ECG machine, the nebulizer, the water pump, the lights, and the fans. For similar communities, the stakes of a non-functional system are not inconvenience; they are vital.

3. You get what the donor brings

Another sensitive issue is that equipment quality and technical standards often depend not on what’s appropriate for the site, but more on which donor is funding the project.

In Kiribati alone, during an assessment mission recently, we encountered solar systems procured under at least four separate donor programmes. Each programme had its own specifications, its procurement process and quality assurance mechanism. The resulting equipment was often technically incompatible. The installed systems varied considerably in quality and configuration.

A regional body already exists, the Sustainable Energy Industry Association of the Pacific Islands (SEIAPI) and its guidelines cover system design, installation, and operation and maintenance. However, there is a notable gap: SEIAPI does not currently define the minimum technical specifications that solar components themselves must meet before they can be imported and promoted in the region. This is the missing piece and a question worth asking openly: why are component-level standards not being consistently required or enforced across the Pacific? Without a clear product quality standard covering modules, inverters, batteries, and balance-of-system equipment, the quality of installed systems continues to depend largely on the internal procurement policies of individual funding agencies, which vary considerably from one programme to the next. 

Technical note on system sizing: In Kiribati, we found that 2.6 kWp off-grid solar array systems had been marketed as off-grid inverter size of 6.2 kW systems. This reflects a common and misleading practice: in off-grid solar, system size should be stated by solar array capacity (kWp), not inverter rating. The inverter size is determined by connected load, not solar array output. For grid-connected systems, the system size can be stated by inverter size but not in off-grid. Usually on-grid inverters are 10–25% undersized from solar array capacity. Using inverter size to represent total system capacity in off-grid system is technically incorrect and inflates apparent system size.

Photo 5: 2.6kWp Solar System installed at outer island health clinic

4. Where is the private sector?

In most Pacific SIDS, the private solar sector functions as a vendor not a developer. Companies win contracts, install systems, and move on to the next project. This is a rational business model given current market conditions, and it is important to understand why it persists.

When we discussed a bundled supply-installation O&M model with a private solar company in South Tarawa, their position was unambiguous: “We will not put our own money into a government project and wait years for tariff repayments. We do not trust that payments will come.” They were, however, open to a different conversation: if a credible payment guarantee was in place, a multi-year O&M cost were factored into the original contract, and if remote monitoring were built into the system to reduce their field call-out costs, they said the model could work.

Interestingly, Tuvalu’s Department of Public Works already operates a comparable model for its desalination plants, a contractor is responsible for supply, installation, and multi-year maintenance under a single performance contract. That arrangement has worked well. There is no structural reason it cannot be replicated for solar systems.

Photo 6: Inter-island travel, Kiribati, Twin Otter aircraft connecting South Tarawa to Abaiang, with passengers then transferred by boat to reach the islet.

Reaching outer islands in the Pacific often requires air and/or boat travel. This is the logistical reality that any private O&M provider must price into their contracts. The structural barriers to private sector investment are real:

• Small market size: Island communities are too small to generate the scale of demand that makes solar investment commercially attractive.

• No bankable revenue: Without an established, enforced tariff framework for solar service provision, there is no predictable revenue stream for a private investor to underwrite.

• High logistics cost: Serving outer islands with maintenance teams requires boat or flight access, dramatically increasing cost per kW/hour delivered.

• Weak policy environment: Very few Pacific countries have enabling regulatory frameworks for private energy service provision. Without legal certainty, investment recovery is not possible.

Donor-funded programmes have brought solar energy to communities that would have waited decades without them. But an installation that stops working after five years is only half a success. The current model, where projects remain largely donor-driven, government-executed, and dependent on external technical assistance, has served well as a starting point. It is not, however, a model that scales, and on its own it will not produce the long-term sustainability that communities need and that donors ultimately want to see. Installing well is only half the job. Keeping systems running is the other half.

5. What would actually help

None of this is beyond reach. The Pacific has exceptional solar resources, committed governments, and a growing community of experienced practitioners. A few things, done consistently, would change the story:

• Fund O&M from Day 1, not as an afterthought. Performance-based contracts covering supply, installation, and 3-5 years of O&M with payments linked to system uptime, cost more upfront but dramatically reduce lifecycle failure rates. Donors should treat O&M funding as a core project component during their programme tenure. Or a dedicated O&M fund held in a joint bank account, accessible only with dual signatures from both the contractor and the government counterpart. This ensures the money is ring-fenced, protects both parties, and removes the ambiguity over who pays when something goes wrong. During the first five years, donor funding covers this cost. After that, tariff collection or government dedicated O&M fund can be arrangement toward financial self-sufficiency. 

• Make remote monitoring standard. Internet connectivity with Starlink or other means now available across most Pacific outer islands, real-time solar system monitoring is feasible and cost-effective. Remote diagnostics reduce the need for physical technician visits, lower O&M costs, and allow semi-skilled local staff to execute targeted repairs guided by remote experts.

• Establish national solar product quality standards. Governments, supported by development partners, should define minimum technical parameters that all imported solar products must meet and make those standards publicly available. Compliance should be verified through independent sampling and certification validation. 

• Require IEC-certified products in every procurement. IEC certification should be mandatory conditions in every donor-funded solar tender.

• Replicate models that already work. Tuvalu's performance-based contract model for desalination plants where a single contractor is responsible for supply, installation, and multi-year maintenance demonstrates that this approach is viable in a Pacific context. It can be adapted and scaled for solar systems across the region.

• Build private sector confidence through risk mitigation. Payment guarantees, advance payment provisions for local companies, clear licensing frameworks, and net-metering policies are all practicalsteps. 

• Invest in local technical capacity beyond the capital. Institutions such as the Kiribati Institute of Technology can train outer island solar technicians but only if the curriculum is resourced and graduates are deployed and retained in their communities. Training a technician who then moves to main island does not solve the outer island maintenance problem.

• Specify for the environment. In high-salinity coastal environments, standard galvanized steel mounting structures can corrode significantly within two years. Specifications for any Pacific solar installation should require Hot-Dip Galvanized steel with a marine-grade topcoat, or SS316 marine-grade stainless steel.

6. A glimpse of life on the islands

To understand why getting energy right matters so deeply in these communities, it helps us to understand what daily life looks like in the places where these systems are installed.

Photo 7: Motorbike frame corroded after 18 months of exposure in Funafuti, Tuvalu,  illustrating the severity of the marine salt environment.

Photo 8: Outer island nurse inspecting the water well, Kiribati: Rainwater harvesting from rooftops is the primary  source of fresh water on many atolls. Rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion make this increasingly vulnerable. 

Photo 9: Ward at Abaiang Health Centre, Kiribati, admitted patients rest here and nurse provides care. For serious cases, patients get referred to the main island hospital or evacuated by an air ambulance. Reliable power for diagnostics, refrigeration, and lighting is a luxury here.

Photo 10: Community sea-weed farming, Kiribati, main income source for outer island households. crops are processed for use in cosmetics and food products.

Photo 11: Typical residential house, Funafuti, Tuvalu, showing roof-mounted rainwater harvesting system -the household's primary water source.

Photo 12: UNDP TCAP reclaimed land project, Funafuti, Tuvalu. With Tuvalu facing sea level rise, land reclamation is one of the country's adaptation strategies.

Photo 13: Funafuti from above. The narrow land mass, bounded on both sides by ocean and lagoon, illustrates why climate resilience including resilient energy systems is an existential priority.

Closing thought

It is worth pausing to acknowledge what solar technology has made possible for communities that had nothing before. Without it, children on outer islands would be studying by kerosene lamp or firelight. Health workers would be diagnosing without equipment. Vaccines would spoil. Communities would remain in energy poverty for a generation longer. Solar energy is transformative for Pacific Island communities. That is why it is worth being honest about the ways we are falling short in sustaining it.

Solar is partially failing, because the institutional and financial systems built around the hardware, the procurement frameworks, the O&M arrangements, the regulatory environment, the financing models have not kept pace with the pace of installation.

I am sharing these observations in the hope of contributing to an honest, constructive conversation. I would particularly welcome thoughts from colleagues working on similar challenges in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and other SIDS. What is working for you? 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author in a personal capacity and do not represent the official position of any organization. Country-specific observations are drawn from field assessments and are presented for professional discussion purposes only.

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