Solar Power Is Growing Exponentially

A recent essay in The Economist speaks of solar power in glowing terms, declaring that the technology’s exponential growth will do no less than “change the world.” That claim might sound fantastical, but statistics certainly bolster the argument.

For one, solar panels, which “occupy an area around half that of Wales,” will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity in 2024, or three as much electrical energy as the United States consumed 70 years ago, the magazine notes.

And that’s just the start. Installed solar capacity doubles every three years or so and increases ten-fold every decade, The Economist adds. The next ten-fold increase, according to the magazine, “will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.”

With this kind of growth, solar energy is likely to become the globe’s largest source of electrical power by the mid-2030s, The Economist projects.

And milestones are coming even sooner. In January, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released an outlook that projected solar to be the leading source of growth in the U.S. electric power sector. The EIA added that solar will supply “almost all” growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025, as hydropower and natural gas make smaller gains and as coal falls. That increase will boost solar’s share of the total U.S. electricity generation from 4% in 2023 to 7% in 2024. And the EIA previously predicted that solar’s annual electricity generation would surpass that of hydropower in the United States in 2024.

The good news keeps coming: A July 2023 report by RMI predicted that wind and solar projects will generate at least 33% of global electricity by 2030, if the growth follows the S-curve typical of technological revolutions. If growth continues at the faster exponential rate, though, then solar and wind generation will quadruple to 14,000 terawatt hours by 2030 and surpass fossil fuel supply, RMI says.

Either way, it seems the COP28 goal to triple renewable energy generation capacity to at least 11,000 gigawatts by 2030 — thus limiting greenhouse gas emissions and putting us closer to Paris Agreement benchmarks — is attainable. And, as RMI notes, recent Systems Change Lab research shows that Denmark, Lithuania, and Uruguay have ramped up solar and wind generation at a rate faster than what’s needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Even better, the increase in solar energy capacity comes amid a decrease in solar energy costs. Solar power is already the cheapest form of electricity production, according to RMI, but the organization predicted that solar’s cost will fall from $40 per megawatt hour (MWh) to as low as $20/MWh.

“Exponential growth of clean energy is an unstoppable force that will put more spending power in the pockets of consumers,” RMI senior principal Kingsmill Bond said in a press release. “The benefit of rapid renewable deployment is greater energy security and independence, plus long-term energy price deflation because this is a manufactured technology—the more you install, the cheaper it gets.”

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a co-founder of Global Optimism, added that the target of a tripling of renewable electricity investment by 2030 is deliverable. “But only by removing barriers to faster renewable deployment, from streamlining permitting to redirecting subsidies for polluting energy,” she added. “Otherwise, the exponential growth we are seeing and the benefits that come with it could be derailed unnecessarily.”

This solar power revolution comes with challenges, of course. Some of those challenges are infrastructural and technological: There’s a terawatt of solar capacity waiting to be connected to the U.S. grid, and solar power also needs storage solutions to get the grid through hours without daylight, The Economist notes. Others are geopolitical: China produces the vast majority of solar panels, and the U.S. has put tariffs on China-made solar equipment, the magazine adds.

But as RMI notes, barriers haven’t stopped solar’s exponential growth so far. “This is a clear signal to policymakers, businesses and investors,” Figueres said, “to seize the opportunity of accelerating the energy transition.”