“In 2004, it took the world a whole year to install a gigawatt of solar-power capacity (1GW is a billion watts, or a thousandth of a terawatt); in 2010, it took a month; in 2016, a week. In 2023 there were single days which saw a gigawatt of installation worldwide. Over the course of 2024 analysts at BloombergNEF, a data outfit, expect to see 520-655GW of capacity installed: that’s up to two 2004s a day…

Buying and installing solar panels is currently the largest single category of investment in electricity generation, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental think-tank: it expects $500bn this year, not far short of the sum being put into upstream oil and gas. Installed capacity is doubling every three years. According to the International Solar Energy Society, solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032. In an IEA scenario which provides net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by the middle of the century, solar energy becomes humankind’s largest source of primary energy—not just electricity—by the 2040s.”

From The Economist.