For decades, pundits and politicos have been telling us that solar energy is right on the cusp of global dominance. For instance, way back in 1978, the year I graduated from high school, Ralph Nader claimed that “everything will be solar in 30 years.”
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter called for “a national commitment to solar energy” so that the US would “derive 20% of all the energy we use from the sun” by 2000. Twelve years later, three officials at the Worldwatch Institute claimed that “within a few decades” the US “might get 30% of its electricity from sunshine.”
In 1996, Senator Ted Kennedy said that “solar energy may well become the primary energy source for America and the world in the 21^st century.”
In 2021, President Joe Biden released a plan claiming that the US should obtain nearly half of its electricity from solar by 2050. Three years after that, the Energy Institute, which publishes the Statistical Review of World Energy, enthused that “China is establishing itself as a green energy leader with an unrivaled build-out of renewable energy and export of renewable technology.”
In April, Ember, the London-based consultancy, gushed that “Solar surge halts fossil electricity growth worldwide in 2025.” The article went on to say that solar met almost three-quarters of the growth in global electricity demand and that the increase in solar “drove clean power to meet all global electricity demand growth in 2025.”
Let me be clear: Solar is growing. It’s growing on rooftops and in utility-scale projects. I have 8.5 kilowatts of solar panels on the roof of my house in Austin. (I got three different subsidies to do the installation.) Over the past decade, global solar output has been growing by an average of 27% per year. That means solar is doubling every three years or so. That growth continued last year, when, according to the Statistical Review of World Energy, global solar production jumped by 30%.
Those are gobsmacking numbers. But amid the never-ending hype, it’s time for a reality check. And here it is: The deployment and use of solar energy is dominated by a handful of wealthy countries while the locations that desperately need more low-cost juice — and African countries in particular — are largely left in the dark.
I’ve spent several days crunching the latest numbers to give you the facts, not the spin, about solar energy. Here’s a sober look at solar with 11 charts.
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