“Datacentres in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Elon Musk said on X recently when questions were raised about the future of datacentres in the aftermath of a Democratic sweep of the US Congress and the Senate. Maybe, we can nudge Musk off this daft idea that multiply space debris via a report that solar panels could account for 10% of global power generation by end of this year.
The report was carried by BBC that said solar power generation across the world quietly overtook nuclear power in 2025 has grown even faster in the current year, possibly due to concerns over the crude prices and availability due to the Iran war with the US and Israel. The news organisation conducted an analysis with Ember data for the past 12 months to suggest that solar power outstripped nuclear by 13%.
The article quoted Dave Jones, co-founder of Ember research to state that solar generation was way more than all of the world’s nuclear power. This is a pretty insane state, he noted while highlighting China’s recent solar upsurge driven by escalating oil prices as a cause for the shift.
Compared to nuclear energy generation, which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally, the report noted that the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period. Professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford Jan Rosenow says, “solar is now the engine of the power transition.”
The report also noted another interesting trend whereby while China’s efforts resulted in a massive supply boost of solar power through a reduction in the cost of photovoltaic cells, similar efforts in the United States through the startup environment around nuclear energy haven’t borne fruit. Most efforts to commercialise nuclear fission aren’t going anywhere, the BBC says.
Quite the contrary in fact. Reports also noted that nuclear construction project costs have burgeoned by several times in recent years. Going forward, the issue with solar energy isn’t about access but to the development of balanced technologies in the realm of infrastructure. This is more so for the underdeveloped and overexploited countries of Africa.
Says Rosenow, “the bigger question is not about whether solar energy grows, but whether the power systems operated by countries and the institutions around them can keep up with the pace. Moreover, the technology has matured in the past 15 years and become the cheapest power in history way back in 2020. And since then, the tech has scaled and efficiencies have risen as the amount of silver and silicon that goes into the panels have reduced, causing the prices to fall further.
Why this news makes sense is that if datacentres rely on solar power for running them, Musk’s idea of shifting them into space won’t go very far. Not that it is going anywhere in the near future, given that the cost of deploying them via reusable rockets is still very high.
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