Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Ember energy consultancy reports that in the first half of 2025, the world put in 380 gigawatts of new solar capacity. That compares to 232 gigs in the first half of 2024, for a 64% increase.
By the end of June, 2022, the world had only installed 90 new gigawatts of solar, so in three years the pace has more than quadrupled. If new solar goes on quadrupling every three years, before too long solar will just generate all the power the world needs. See below.
By the end of 2024, total global solar generation capacity was a little over 2 terawatts, or 20% of the whole. Global power generation capacity is on the order of 10 terawatts or 10,000 gigawatts.
The bad news for dirty old backward Trumpian America is that this story is a Chinese story, raising the possibility that the 21st will be the Chinese Century. About two-thirds of this new solar capacity was implemented in China — some 256 gigawatts.
The whole rest of the world put in 124 gigawatts of new solar in the first half of 2025, 15% more than these countries had installed by the end of June last year.
Solar farms are increasingly being paired with large-scale battery storage, so that the energy they absorb can be stored for release at night or at peak usage times. California, for instance, now has 15 gigawatts of utility battery capacity, which doesn’t count all the household battery plus solar panel systems. In 2024, California was able to run on 100% renewables for 51 of 365 days, and on three-fifths of the days the grid ran on 100% clean energy for some portion of the day. The state is beating those records this year, and has reduced natural gas usage 25% in H1 year over year.
Because Trump and his stooges in Congress are deep-sixing incentives for renewables (on the instructions of Exxon-Mobil and Saudi Arabia, their true masters), the growth of solar in the pollution-ridden and increasingly sweltering United States is expected to slow substantially for the next three and a half years. The US installed 21 new gigawatts of solar in H1 of this year, up 4% over last year, but that surge may have been businesses rushing to take advantage of the old Biden incentives before they expire.
Since solar is an inexpensive source of power and its cost keeps falling while efficiencies increase, it will likely continue to grow in the US, though it will face headwinds from the retrograde government massively subsidizing coal and gas. It won’t grow by leaps and bounds the way it does in China, where the government has a pro-solar industrial policy. When historians look back on how the world averted the worst chaos of climate breakdown, they will laud China and deplore the US. Economically, America is dooming itself to irrelevance, since the whole world is going to China for solar panels. Beijing has cornered 80% of the market.
Interestingly, Ember finds that solar may be beginning to take off in Africa, with panel imports up 60%, with 15 new gigawatts landing on African grids. China over-produced solar panels last year so that their price plummeted, and villagers around the world took advantage of the low prices to buy these discount panels. National grids in the global south are often inadequate, expensive and unreliable, so rural hamlets have just been installing their own solar electricity. Batteries are also cheaper and better, so solar electricity can be stored for use at night. Battery costs in places like India have declined 80% in the past decade and battery-powered energy exchanges are now profitable.
Image by Adolfo Cj from Pixabay
The idiocy of American policy is illustrated by a tweet from Trump’s Secretary of Fracking — I mean, energy, — Chris Allen Wright, which swiftly attracted a community note:
- “Secretary Chris Wright @SecretaryWright
Even if you wrapped the entire planet in a solar panel, you would only be producing 20% of global energy.
One of the biggest mistakes politicians can make is equating the ELECTRICITY with ENERGY!
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“Readers added context
Earth gets ~1.5M TWh/day of solar energy—over 3,000× global energy use (~165K TWh/year). Covering just 1% of land with panels could -— theoretically -— power the planet. Electricity is energy, and electrification replaces fossil use in transport, heat, and industry.”
Either Wright, who is a mechanical and electrical engineer, is owed a refund by MIT, or he is lying to help his own hydraulic fracturing interests, which would be a form of corruption. Of course, that would never happen in the Trump administration.
Fracking, which Wright has made his career, is one of the most dangerous and destructive activities in which Big Oil engages, with serious deleterious impacts on public health — which is why New York state has banned it.
The Trump administration is not only dedicated to making us ignorant, sick and hate-filled, but also to making us poverty-stricken, second-place losers to China.
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