Abstract
Renewable energy production is crucial for transitioning to a low-carbon economy, as there is a global push for sustainable energy sources. Integrating renewable energy, such as solar, presents economic challenges, including obtaining high efficiency and cost-effectiveness on a large scale. Solar energy (SE) is becoming a key component of national energy strategies to decrease CO2 emissions and address rising energy demand and climate change. This article analyses the economic problems of integrating solar energy for sustainable development, including cost-effectiveness, efficiency, reliability, resilience and minimising transmission losses to reduce carbon emissions in the Global South. This research adopts an in-depth methodology, mostly literatures from 2018 to 2025, to analyse these economic challenges and their impacts on solar energy integration, plus a survey as a primary data source. 71 (67.6%) stakeholders agreed that high initial investment influence SE integration to a very large extent, 55 (52.4%) stakeholders agreed that cost of storage solutions affect SE integration to a very large extent, while 27 (25.7%) stakeholders believed that incentives and subsidies influence SE integration to a very large extent. The study shows that policies must prioritise constant investment in solar energy, giving incentives and subsidies and lowering the initial investment to encourage solar energy investments, integration, installations, reliability and sustainability. Recommendations are made to mitigate these challenges in SE integration in terms of initial investments, storage solutions costs, grid capacities, return on investment, transmission losses and incentives and subsidies to ensure solar energy reliability, affordability, efficiency, resilience and sustainability.