Energy

Solar Soars Above Coal as World’s Biggest Source of Electricity

- Adam Clare

Solar panels on grass

Believe it or not there are places love coal so much that they seem to despise their citizen’s health and wellbeing. The rest of the world is moving to renewables rather quickly and this year marks is the first that solar is now the biggest single source of electricity. That’s right: just one source of renewable electricity has overtaken the most harmful source of electricity. The future is 100% renewable!

Solar power delivered the lion’s share of growth, meeting 83% of the increase in electricity demand. It has now been the largest source of new electricity globally for three years in a row.

Most solar generation (58%) is now in lower-income countries, many of which have seen explosive growth in recent years.

That’s thanks to spectacular reductions in cost. Solar has seen prices fall a staggering 99.9% since 1975 and is now so cheap that large markets for solar can emerge in a country in the space of a single year, especially where grid electricity is expensive and unreliable, says Ember.

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Solar is Powering the Syrian Rebuilding Process

- Adam Clare

Syria has started the rebuilding of infrastructure, culture, communities, and more now that the civil war has concluded. The video above shows how Damascus is rebuilding their trains and other core infrastructure. The most interesting thing in the video is the prevalence of solar panels in the city, seemingly every roof has an installation on it!
The future is renewable and that’s made clear as Syria needs to rebuild quickly and efficiently so they can heal and improve the entire nation.

Solar Surges Around the World

- Adam Clare

Solar panels are wonderful: you install them and then you get free energy from the sun. The expensive part of solar panels is buying and installing the panels; after that the costs of operation are basically zero. This is the opposite of fossil fuels since with fossil fuels you buy a cheap fuel tank and pay forever for the fuel. The global economy has finally caught on to the genius of solar energy and are increasing panels at a fantastic pace. Countries that don’t embrace free renewable power will find themselves left behind.

Outside China, all other countries together installed an estimated 124 GW in the first half of 2025 — 15% higher than the first half of 2024. India recorded the second highest installations with 24 GW, a 49% increase over the already strong 16 GW added in deployment in H1-2024. The United States ranked third with 21 GW, up 4% year-on-year, despite recent moves by the US government to restrict clean power deployment. Deployment dipped slightly in Germany and Brazil. The remaining countries added 65 GW in H1-2025, 22% more than in H1-2024.

Growth in Africa is also beginning to take-off, as the amount of solar panels it imported from China rose 60% in the last 12 months, as Ember reported. However, lack of access to official installation data still obscures the actual pace of solar deployment on the continent.

With deployment surging across key markets and China’s rapid scale-up pushing global installations to new highs, 2025 is on track to become another historic year for solar power. The numbers highlight not only solar’s momentum, but also its pivotal role in reshaping the global energy system.

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China Leads Renewable Investments

- Adam Clare
A graph showing increasing investment in renewables with China outpacing other countries.
The country has nearly tripled spending on renewables since 2015

China is clearly winning the global race to renewable energy, with a near trebling of investment into the sector over the last decade. China’s manufacturing industry is primed to produce solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, and so on for the rest of the world. There’s a lot of profit to be made as the globe gets fully electrified and moves away from fossil fuels. The Republicans in the USA have guaranteed victory to China in their recent budget. Of course, other nations can all vie for second and ought to as the future is green power and whichever nation can produce renewable energy in the most economical way will dominate the later half of the century.

China is on an absolute tear installing wind and solar power. The country reached nearly 900 gigawatts of installed capacity for solar at the end of 2024, and the rapid pace of building has continued into this year. An additional 198 GW was installed between January and May, with 93 GW coming in May alone.

For context, those additions over the first five months of the year account for more than double the capacity of the grid in California. Not the renewables capacity of that state—the entire grid.

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How Microgrids in Puerto Rico Help During Hurricanes

- Adam Clare

A picture of a microgrid setup in Puerto Rico

Back in 2017 Puerto Rico was hit hard by Hurricane Maria and lost power for an extended period of time and led to nearly 3,000 lives lost due to the loss of power. Puerto Ricans decided that they would never let that happen again, so they started a massive roll out of renewable energy. The island now has a series of microgrids that won’t lose power when the main grid goes down. Renewable energy means a sustainable planet and a sustainable connection to energy.

At the end of March, LUMA reported over 1.14 gigawatts of grid-connected distributed solar capacity, with an additional 2.34 gigawatt-hours of distributed batteries connected to the grid. Solar power produces over 2 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, which accounts for more than 12.5 percent of Puerto Rico’s total residential electricity consumption annually. The majority of that power is generated from residential solar, and capacity continues to grow as more residents install systems with private financing.

Adjuntas, which has a population of about 18,000, took a more experimental approach. The town’s local environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo teamed up with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop a way to connect multiple microgrids to exchange power with one another, all without having to be hooked up to Puerto Rico’s grid. The strategy, called grid orchestration, ensures that if power is knocked out on one of the installations, the others aren’t compromised. It’s what kept multiple areas in Adjuntas electrified during April’s island-wide blackout.

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