Energy analysts never imagined in their wildest dreams that by the mid-2020s, solar energy would meet all global electricity demand growth. And this process is poised to conquer the entire planet.
In a rare occurrence, an energy analysis organization delivered good news about the environment last month: the world is set to install 29% more solar energy capacity than last year, according to a report by Ember.
"In one year, through one technology, we are providing as much new energy as all global growth in the previous year," said Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a nonprofit organization in the clean energy sector, to The Atlantic.
When Will We Get Rid of Fossil Fuels?
In the United States, solar panels provided more than half of all new energy last year. But the most dramatic growth is not happening here.
The most recent global report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that solar energy is set to surpass all other forms of energy by 2033. Worldwide use of fossil fuels has already entered a plateauing phase - the United States, for example, peaked in fossil fuel-based energy demand as far back as 2007.
Energy demand continues to rise, but renewable sources are stepping in to compensate.
For Bond, the truly interesting debate now is, in fact, another: when will we phase out fossil fuels? "And from our numbers, if solar continues to grow like this, it will be by the end of this decade," he said.
The advantages of solar energy speak for themselves. Systems can be built more quickly and with fewer permits than other forms of energy infrastructure, especially because panels are flat and modular (unlike, for example, a tall wind turbine or a huge gas plant).
They are also adaptable at any scale, from an individual installing a single panel to a utility company assembling a solar farm.
And now, thanks to significant price drops in photovoltaic panels, mainly from China, market forces seem to be leading to a total solar boom. "This is unstoppable," believes Heymi Bahar, a senior energy analyst at the IEA.
Africa Harnesses the Sun
Globally, about 40% of solar energy growth is generated by people powering their own homes and businesses, said Bahar.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Africa, where Joel Nana, project manager at Sustainable Energy Africa in Cape Town, led an effort to support countries in regulating and integrating small-scale photovoltaic systems.
Nana and his team were shocked when they began quantifying how many new solar sources existed. In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was estimated at around 500 megawatts, he said. But in the first quarter of 2023, when researchers used satellite images to count all solar installations in the country, they estimated that solar energy generated a total of 5,700 megawatts of energy - of which only 55% had been declared to the government.
Last year, the South African government began offering solar energy subsidies for the first time. This year, its energy plan envisions that small-scale solar will be the largest player in the country over the next decade.
The story of this rapid and invisible growth is found across the continent. Kenya now has about 200 megawatts of solar energy capacity installed on rooftops, approximately 9% of the country's total energy consumption, Nana said.
Namibia has about 96 megawatts of rooftop solar capacity, he continued - that is, 15% of its entire energy production. "It's been happening for three or four years, maybe five years, completely under the radar," Nana said of the unofficial development of solar energy.
Solar energy seems to have reached a tipping point: in many countries, the low cost of the technology is driving growth, despite minimal government assistance.
In South Africa, businesses like shopping centers and factories used diesel generators to cope with frequent power outages. Many still do, but now others are saving money by installing solar panels. Electricity from a diesel generator costs about 10 rand (0.57 dollars) per kilowatt-hour, Nana said; with solar panels, it drops to about 2 rand (0.11 dollars). "It's a no-brainer for a business owner."
Companies account for 80% of small-scale solar capacity generated in this country, according to his research.
Nana hopes that soon solar system matrices and batteries will become cheap enough so that more homeowners across the African continent can afford to transition to solar energy.
According to journalist Bill McKibben, some homeowners in African countries that were never connected to the grid are now receiving electricity for the first time through photovoltaic panel kits, thus completely skipping the fossil fuel consumption phase.
The Boom in the Southern Hemisphere and the Explosion in China
In the southern hemisphere, the solar sector is capturing an increasingly larger share of the energy market, unprecedentedly. Pakistan, for example, imported Chinese solar panels equivalent to a quarter of its total energy capacity in just the first six months of this year, according to Bloomberg.
Many countries in the southern hemisphere lack significant fossil fuel resources, and importing them is costly. "The easiest way to achieve economic growth in a country with plenty of sun and no fossil fuels is by far to exploit its own internal resources," said Bond.
Already, in countries like Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, and Uruguay, solar and wind energy hold a larger share of electricity generation than in northern countries. By 2030, RMI predicts that the southern hemisphere will quadruple its solar and wind capacity.
This estimate does not include China, which is experiencing an unparalleled solar boom. Besides filling the rest of the world with panels, China installed over half of the planet's new solar capacity on its territory in 2023, and the Ember report shows it is set to add a similar amount this year. Last year, Beijing doubled its solar capacity from one year to the next. "No one expected it to be this big," Bahar stated.
The Environmental Promise Closest to Being Fulfilled
Last year, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, 132 countries and the European Union pledged to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030.
It is the only promise among the many made in Dubai that is on track to be nearly fulfilled, says Baha: the world will increase its renewable energy capacity by 2.7 times by 2030, and 80% of this growth will come from solar sources.
To harness all this growth, the world will need to add much more storage and transportation capacity, and the issue is that neither of these is keeping pace with solar energy growth.
The IEA, where Bahar works, will advocate for new commitments on these two fronts next month at COP29.
A world largely powered by solar energy will also need other sources - such as hydro, nuclear, or geothermal energy - to generate power when the sun is not shining, especially at night and in winter.
Governments need to direct investments towards storage and alternative forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime, explains Jessika Trancik, MIT professor.
This way, the world can have an energy mix to rely on when 50 or 60% of electricity generation comes from solar and wind. It may seem like a distant goal, as solar energy represented about 5.5% of global energy in 2023, but the exponential growth shows that this will happen faster than it seems.
T.D.