With PV being the absolutely cheapest form to get energy in most regions of the world already or soon-ish (and even highly useful electric energy at that), I fully expect our capital machines to pour ever more resources into its deployment. This will go on until we have plastered some percentage of the earths surface with PV, there's fundamentally no real constraint to doing so.<p>Along the way, over the next 10-30 years we will have replaced most major fossil burning things - the only way you will be able to compete with PV power is if you're sitting right on top of a gas field in a location with little sunlight and no grid connection.<p>Incidentally, with ever-falling battery storage costs, I'd assume the need for large interconnect buildout to be diminishing, but there's lots of inertia in that system so societies might end up with some underused assets. Still better than all the stranded assets I suppose, but still.
Very misleading title: it should be "Solar leads global energy <i>growth</i> for the first time".<p>Still good news, but a long, long way from solar becoming the world's primary source of energy.
> solar becoming the world's primary source of energy<p>Solar has always been the primary source of energy, Something like 99.95%, with geothermal taking 90% of the rest and tidal being basically zero
You can look at coal, oil, gas as form of compressed solar energy, because all of them have biological source, stored millions of year ago. It's just burning coal, oil, gas has nasty side effects.<p>"
Volcanic coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 252 million years ago.<p>Extensive burning in Siberia was a cause of the Permo-Triassic extinction
"
<a href="https://www.nsf.gov/news/volcanic-coal-burning-siberia-led-climate-change" rel="nofollow">https://www.nsf.gov/news/volcanic-coal-burning-siberia-led-c...</a>
Should it be ‘solar leading energy subsidy growth’.
No chance, fossil fuels are subsidized more. A large share of solar growth is from countries like Pakistan who have had <i>some</i> subsidies but total dollar amount of them is trivial.
Solar subsidies still pale in comparison to oil and gas subsidies worldwide
"Overall, renewables and nuclear together met nearly 60% of the growth in energy demand".<p>That's not enough. It's obvious this is going in the right direction but adoption is still too slow, considering how cheap renewables are now (and will be).
Read it carefully. The growth in renewables exceeded the growth in electricity demand. The 60% figure is all forms of energy.<p>Stated another way, we could (hypothetically) stop building coal and gas fired electrial generation and we'd still have enough renewable growth to cover electrical needs.<p>There's certainly room to start offsetting non-electrical power usage, but that's a different ball game entirely. I'd be pretty happy if we got to a point where only transportation ran on oil. To do that, we need enough renewables to both offset growth (done) and to start shutting down non-renewable generation. Even if we did nothing, those plants have a usable service life of < 100 years so we're within a human lifetime of not needing them anymore.
In deed. We are really late in ramping down fossils usage and emissions, and the death toll is higher than the other bad things in the news headlines.
The problem is also, that solar infrastructure is vulnerable to some of the attack vectors of climate change. The torrent downpours we see now in the us and in Europe - especially in mountainous regions are endangering the traditional valley cities in the hinterlands- the biggest consumer of solar.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(2...</a>
Cost is the barrier
Maybe "accidentally killing fossil fuels" will be DT's singular good deed
The man is an overachiever.<p>He is in the process of killing the rise of neonazism, exposing those religious extremists that want constant wars on the Middle East, creating a multipolar world commerce chamber, turning the EU into a federation, popularizing socialism (and even outright communism) in the US, dismantling the US's foreign government overthrowing apparatus, creating actual diplomatic relations between the Eastern Asia governments...
Just Stop Oil announced the cessation of all activities in my country.<p>Officially it's because reportedly they've achieved their goals locally, but I can't help but think that it was really because the POTUS Just Stopped way more Oil than they ever imagined they could.
In a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.
A substitution of coal for oil, or more likely natural gas, isn't that big a shift of emissions in the short run if it's a stopgap for massive solar and wind investments. Solar and wind install quick.
The world's most effective ecoterrorist.<p>Greenpeace should name their next ship after him.
You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.
i think that's why they used the word "accidentally"
I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on.<p>If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?
If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake.<p>Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?
Mao's campaign to kill sparrows was a result of a belief that they were a net loss for harvests.<p>Stalin's support of Lysenko was a result of thinking Lysenko was actually able to drive agricultural growth.<p>Both mistakes led to mass deaths.<p>We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.<p>Both of them <i>also</i> killed a lot of people maliciously and intentionally, but a large proportion of their death toll as a side-effect of their oppression, not the goal of it.
> We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.<p>What is the analogue here for attributing the rise of alternative energy sources to Trump? Being too incompetent to avoid harm isn't the same as being too incompetent to avoid benefit, because your job is to create benefit.<p>It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes. If he creates positive outcomes by accident while trying to create negative ones, he should get panned for trying to create negative outcomes.
> Electric car sales jumped by more than 20% in 2025 to over 20 million vehicles, accounting for roughly 1 in 4 new car sales worldwide.<p>I wonder if included these numbers in that calculation <a href="https://electrek.co/2026/04/16/tesla-cybertruck-spacex-1279-q4-sales-inflated/" rel="nofollow">https://electrek.co/2026/04/16/tesla-cybertruck-spacex-1279-...</a><p>;-)
1279 units vs total 20'000'000 units or 0,006% doesn't make a difference<p>What is interesting is that tesla had 1'636'129 deliveries in 2025 which accounts for 8,1% of that number. That means other vendors are healthy and it is a good thing for EV market.
More importantly, for the first time ever we generate more electricity from renewables than coal!
> Solar added about 600 terawatt-hours of generation globally<p>> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025<p>Am I reading it right that growth in solar was 50000x that of growth in nuclear? (And those reactors of course won't be finished / online until some years into the future.)
No, you are comparing watthours to watts. At 90% used factor 12GW would be ~95 TWh.
I made the same gut assumption, and it points to either poor writing, or deliberately misreading writing that they mix units like that in the same paragraph, where presumably the idea is that we get a feel for growth in both?<p>Its probably nitpick correct, because the 12GW is planned capacity, while the solar might be measured use? but simple assumptins or conversions, as another comment points out, get you comparable numbers. taking the title into account, the whole article is a little bit smoke and mirrors on clear communication, despite having plenty of numbers. Thats a shame because it sounds like even unvarnished its good results!
No you're wrong, the nuclear "started construction" and so solar added infinitely more generation than the zero they will generate this year/decade.<p>The world did add 3GW of nuclear generation in 2025 but it also closed 3GW.
Sooooo....you're telling me there's a chance! Solar FTW!
I wonder what political and trade consequences can be expected when oil actually does start seeing real decreased usage.<p>I mean one obvious thing has already started: governments taxing the sun (well, solar panels) pretty heavily (meaning above VAT), which I imagine will increase, and what the result will be. It's weird to say this, but solar panel smuggling is actually already a thing now. I used to have a Louis XIV painting somewhere ...<p>Oil appears to be 33% of total energy usage, and if you count all fossil fuels (oil, coal, nat. gas) it's 81%. What happens when that starts dropping.
Just to add to your point; The final energy demand is much less than the primary energy we produce due to the energy costs of extraction, refining, transportation, and inefficient end use.<p>According to Kingsmill Bond (great name btw) on Dave Roberts' Volts podcast if we magically could replace all fossil energy with renewables today the final energy use would only be ~30% of today's final energy use.<p>"We’re pouring, from our calculations, two thirds of the primary energy into the air and wasting it." - Kingsmill Bond<p><a href="https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable" rel="nofollow">https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable</a>
A pretty big one is the hollowing out of the international power oil producers have over the life of fossil importers; the middle east becomes pretty irrelevant for Latin America if you don't need their oil, and maybe Lebanon will avoid an US invasion if the newly discovered gas cannot find buyers anyway.
> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025<p>By the time they are ready they will have contributed so many carbon emissions, that they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back. But by the time they are commissioned (~2036), solar + battery + solar-made hydrocarbons will have made them uneconomic, and solar would have made far fewer emissions.<p>Furthermore, they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about. Investing in nuclear is like willingly tying a brick to your foot, severely limiting your investment options.<p>They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.
Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.<p>Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter <i>right now</i>. I am literally paying that at the pump. I will actually happily pay more then that if the diesel were actually renewable, but instead it doesn't exist.