Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this [unprecedented expansion in solar energy production] is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:
- It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.
- That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
- Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.
- In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.
- Meanwhile, battery-storage capability has increased seventy-six per cent, based on this year’s projected estimates; at night, those batteries are often the main supplier of California’s electricity. As the director of reliability analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation put it, in the CleanTechnica newsletter, “batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.” As a result, California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.
- Texas is now installing renewable energy and batteries faster than California; in a single week in March, it set records for solar and wind production as well as for battery discharge. In May, when the state was hit by a near-record-breaking early-season heat wave, air-conditioners helped create a record demand on the grid, which didn’t blink—more than a quarter of the power came from the sun and wind. Last week’s flooding tragedy was a reminder of how vulnerable the state is to extreme weather, especially as water temperatures rise in the Gulf, producing more moisture in the air; in late June, the director of the state’s utility system said that the chances of emergency outages had dropped from sixteen per cent last summer to less than one per cent this year, mostly because the state had added ten thousand megawatts of solar power and battery storage. That, he said, “puts us in a better position.”
- All this is dwarfed by what’s happening in China, which currently installs more than half the world’s renewable energy and storage within its own borders, and exports most of the solar panels and batteries used by the rest of the world. In May, according to government records, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. The pace was apparently paying off—analysts reported that, in the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased; emissions linked to producing electricity fell nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal. In 2024, almost half the automobiles sold in China, which is the world’s largest car market, were full or hybrid electric vehicles. And China’s prowess at producing cheap solar panels (and E.V.s) means that nations with which it has strong trading links—in Asia, Africa, South America—are seeing their own surge of renewable power.
- In South America, for example, where a decade ago there were plans to build fifteen new coal-fired power plants, as of this spring there are none. There’s better news yet from India, now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and most populous nation, where data last month showed that from January through April a surge in solar production kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter. But even countries far from Beijing are making quick shifts. Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.
- Over the past fifteen years, the Chinese became so skilled at building batteries—first for cellphones, then cars, and now for entire electric systems—that the cost of energy storage has dropped ninety-five per cent. On July 7th, a round of bidding between battery companies to provide storage for Chinese utilities showed another thirty per cent drop in price. Grid-scale batteries have become so large that they can power whole cities for hours at a time; in 2025, the world will add eighty gigawatts of grid-scale storage, an eightfold increase from 2021. The U.S. alone put up four gigawatts of storage in the first half of 2024.
So astonishingly positive of a story I'm still looking for cracks thinking they got to be there, right?
What about the Chinese dominated rare earth minerals, lithium, mining elements I really know nothing about but thought I understood were essential to solar panel production? Isn't their scarcity a big obstacle? (Isn't their scarcity why Grump is talking about taking over Greenland and Canada?) Nope. Some think with rapid gains in solar technology all the minerals needed will be mined and circulating in the global economy by 2050. To produce the solar power needed will require transitioning about half the corn fields of the midwest to solar but this would not threaten food security and is quite doable, infers McKibben; depending on how the voters in Iowa feel about this, I cautiously suppose.
One of the most striking parts of this explosion in solar technology story is how wrong the forecasters have gotten this growth. Fifteen years ago conventional economic wisdom said solar would never be cheap enough to be viable in free markets. McKibben shares that the closest forecasts to the meteoric growth in solar have come not from industry, who have obstructed green energy development at every step, but from environmentalists and even they underestimated the scales of the growth noted above.
China is obviously leading this boom and transition. Maybe one of the most hopeful aspects of this story is how in the real economy there's all kinds of evidence of open trade and cooperation between China and the US and other parts of the world expanding solar together.
That's not what we get from the current gov and in a lot of media, which tends to framing the relationship between the US and China as always adversarial, win/lose, zero sum, the new cold war 2.0 battle of world superpowers.
For instance, the republicans are actually doubling down on drill baby drill, as if in direct opposition to China's green energy boom. But is there any long game to this strategy beyond garish TV/online spectacle fueled by Big Oil? I did semi-recently learn in some Vaclav Smil books that some material production will likely resist or be more difficult to transition off fossil fuels, like heavy metals, steel, military weapons, airplanes. If this still holds, maybe Grump's braintrust figures they've lost the coming green energy economy so they are banking instead on fossil fuels to retain significant power in the coming century, particularly because of their likely long-run importance to military production.
It would certainly make sense the US would have to maintain a solid position in fossil fuel production until the relevant national security questions are resolved. Still not clear why this strategic position would require hostile attacks on alternative energy production that benefits everyone?
Except as a crony capitalist gift to Big Oil!
So much of Grump 2.0 appears so incompetent and destructive, so obviously fueled by hysterical racist panic that it is hard to imagine how it can last or even survive the disasters it only seems to know how to make worse. Like attacks on FEMA?! Why would anyone oppose FEMA helping people in weather disasters?
I don't know but on the bright side it appears solar energy production is booming in spite of all the opposition and beyond anyone's predictions. And decarbonizing our energy system remarkably quickly.
Yay for our side: Future humanity!
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