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US environmentalist and author Bill McKibben writes about the remarkable rise of solar energy and its potential to reshape our energy systems.
The numbers alone make for an astonishing story – after a number of decades as “alternative energy,” solar has suddenly broken out. A few years ago we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to generate electricity from the sun and wind than from burning fossil fuels. That came after long decades of work, constant iteration and marginal improvement since the day in 1954 when engineers at Bell Labs announced the invention of the first photovoltaic cell. Solar went from the most expensive power on earth to the cheapest in seventy years, and then it just took off.
If solar power is 'too cheap to meter' then….this is a bounty available to any country that does the work of building out this infrastructure.
In May of 2025, at the height of a building boom, China was putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. The planet, early in 2026, is generating a third more power from the sun than it was a year ago. If you count wind power as ‘solar’ (and you probably should, since the sun heats the earth differentially, creating the winds that turn those majestic turbines) the numbers are even gaudier – 90 per cent of new generating capacity on the planet last year was coming from ‘renewables’. A revolution is well and truly underway.
I would like, briefly, to explain why in this case what’s happening is more than mere substitution of one power source for another. That alone is remarkable news, of course – on a planet facing the unprecedented (in human times) danger of climate change, we finally have a scalable tool to deploy in the fight to cut greenhouse gases. Carbon emissions seem to have peaked in China in 2025, or come very close. That’s the best piece of news on the climate front in many years. And since nine million people a year die – about one death in five on this planet – from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel, this would be good news even absent global warming.
But it goes deeper than that. This feat of engineering could end up being one of those watershed moments, like the Industrial Revolution, where everything starts to change. To explain why, consider what will happen in Australia in June: by mandate of the federal government, residents of three of the country’s six states will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon, a guarantee that will be extended to all Australians in 2027. It’s possible because they’ve put up so many solar panels that there’s an afternoon bounty – one that Aussies will now be able to use to charge their cars, run their washing machines, and fill their storage batteries so they can power their homes all night.
The archaeologists tell us that humans first started setting things on fire somewhere more than 700,000 years ago – that’s what the evidence of fire rings in caves indicate. And since then we’ve been engaged in the hard work of providing ourselves with the energy we need to thrive, mostly through fire. It’s required real work – first, gathering wood or dung to set on fire. And then, with the 18^th century ability to control the combustion of coal, through the mixed miracle of fossil fuel. A barrel of oil gave each of us the equivalent of hundreds of servants, but at the cost of climate change, pollution, and the need to pay for the stuff. Too often that need to “pay for the stuff” took the form of wars over oil, a driving force in the geopolitics of the last century.
Though humans are excellent at thinking up reasons to fight wars, it will be difficult to figure out how to battle over sunshine.
But all of a sudden that equation is shifting. If solar power is, as the nuclear engineers once dreamed, “too cheap to meter,” then we’re entering a new era indeed. Australians really won’t be working for energy anymore – it will just arrive. And this is a bounty available to any country that does the work of building out this infrastructure. 
It’s also a bounty that can’t really be hoarded or held in long-term reserve (though the rapid development of batteries means that the sun doesn’t really set any more). And though humans are excellent at thinking up reasons to fight wars, it will be difficult to figure out how to battle over sunshine. The New York Times, on that 1954 day when Bell Labs announced the first solar cell, covered it like this: “It may mark the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realisation of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams–the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilisation.” We’re getting there. 
Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. 
 
The Engineer
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