Global growth in solar "the largest ever observed for any source"

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ttambourine_man 4 days ago 39 commentsRead Article on arstechnica.com

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tristanj•4 days ago

I've always found it amusing that the primary driver for solar innovation stems from China's goal ending its civil war with Taiwan. Any conflict with Taiwan would involve the US, which would blockade the Straits of Malacca and halt Chinese oil imports, putting on enough economic pressure to drive the war to a halt after several months. Any attempt to reclaim Taiwan would end in failure.

This was a P0 national security issue, So China hyper-invested into alternative energy technologies, subsidizing and overproducing solar technologies at a loss, while investing in electric transportation and moving away from fossil fuels. It's paying off. Over the past 25 years, this strategy is proving to be very successful and by the end of this decade, the Malacca weakness will be overcome.

As a result, the rest of the world gets to enjoy cheap solar energy and cheap EVs.

wahern•4 days ago

The fact China had a huge smog problem, with hundreds of millions of people choking on coal emissions like it was 19th century London, also had something to do with it.

unixhero•4 days ago

And Shenzen as an example would be an absolute hellhole if they hadn't mandated all electric vehicles, from tuktuks, motorbikes (must be electric) and taxis. This would have impacted ability to engage in the rapid economic growth seen there.

latentframe•4 days ago

Solar scaling this fast looks to be less about the green against fossile but to be more about changing the cost structure of energy => fossil fuels are strongly marginal-cost, solar is capex heavy with almost zero marginal cost so that change alone has big impacts for how energy comes into the inflation

soco•4 days ago

Double whammy, we could say? This is a lesson for any positive change: ethics only brings you so far, but find the economical way to do it and the change will work by itself.

bryanlarsen•4 days ago

Finding the economical way to do it costs a lot of money. The economies of scale that solar needed to reach before it became the low cost option were built on enormous subsidies from Germany, China and others.

soco•4 days ago

Then let's also add the state-owned coal/fossil companies kept artificially afloat, producers tax expenditures, publicly funded rail transport or handling infrastructure or water systems, subsidized coal electricity prices... then indeed we can discuss apples to apples.

fch42•4 days ago

can't help but wonder if the aggregate of the solar PV subsidies made in the last 25 years are higher or lower than the aggregate of energy price subsidies made when the Ukraine and/or Iran wars made fossil fuel prices spike...

Anyone got verifiable references?

benj111•4 days ago

True, but ethics got us to the point where solar was economical. It's never just been about ethics, it's been about getting it to this point where it's cheaper.

y0eswddl•4 days ago

Only in an environment where we continue to let a handful greedy people at the top control everything for the other 8B of us...

Animats•4 days ago

Big pie chart is labelled "The share of each source that was used to meet changes in energy demand vs. 2024". What does that mean?

abdullahkhalids•4 days ago

My guess. Total energy consumption in 2024 was x. Total energy consumption in 2025 was x + y. For example, solar PV was installed and led to increased electricity consumption. Or more oil was extracted and used to drive cars around more.

They broke down y into all these different energy sources and made a pie chart. So roughly 25% of y was solar PV.

deepfriedbits•4 days ago

Correct.

perilunar•4 days ago

> Overall, solar generated over 2,700 terawatt-hours last year,

Terawatt-hours per year is a ridiculous unit — it contains three different units of time embedded in it (seconds, hours, and years)

2700 TWh/yr = 309 GW

(Which happens to be about 37 W per person, or less than the average output of a 1 m² solar panel)

ChrisArchitect•4 days ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831272

takihito•4 days ago

It's all thanks to President Trump's efforts, unfortunately.

tristanj•4 days ago

No, this is a result of a concerted effort by the Chinese decades in the making.

tim333•4 days ago

I have it down as a normal exponential tech growth thing. Silicon solar was invented in the US and would have got big without the Chinese although they have sped it along rather.

It's been fairly close to Kurzweil's doubling every couple of years prediction https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/futurist-ray-k... and exponential growth could keep on for ages before we hit Kardashev 2.

tristanj•2 days ago

That "prediction" is from 2016 and is ex-post-facto. China began investing tens of billions into solar in 2009, and quadrupled down in 2013 when it began pouring hundreds of billions in.

It's easy to "predict" the future years after gigantic sums of money are invested into making something happen.

vrganj•4 days ago

Trump doesn't get credit for the rest of the world doing the obvious thing and moving towards basically free energy that is good for the environment and frees us from dependence on despots.