IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first
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Still good news, but a long, long way from solar becoming the world's primary source of energy.
Coal: 10858 TWh
Natural Gas: 6822 TWh
Hydro: 4470 TWh
Nuclear: 2859 TWh
Wind: 2723 TWh
Solar: 2653 TWh
Decent growth, but still a long way to go.
Looking at TWh of renewables added each year we will have grids entirely dominated by them in 10-15 years. That is lightning speed for the energy system, and we’re still speeding up.
But in our current position, nuclear is too slow, and luckily we have alternatives in wind and especially solar. Where the main advantage of solar is how quickly it’s scaling. Notably, the slowness in building nuclear also limits how fast you can improve the process of building nuclear. Whereas solar is so quick to build you can learn lessons and try innovation much faster.
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
" Volcanic coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 252 million years ago.
Extensive burning in Siberia was a cause of the Permo-Triassic extinction " https://www.nsf.gov/news/volcanic-coal-burning-siberia-led-c...
Oil consumption is about 4,000 TWh per year, or about 10^19 Joules.
The Earth receives about 170,000 TWh per year of Solar energy.
When people say "solar energy", they are usually referring to first order solar energy, directly from photons, not second or third order solar energy after it has been trapped into other sources of potential energy.
China only ended solar panel export subsidy this month.
Oil is directly subsidized in most oil producing countries. Go look at what fuel costs in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, vs what they could sell it for on international markets. That's a subsidy.
Jet fuel is universally exempt from tax. Try finding any other energy source that is.
Yes some places choose to lower fuel taxes. But that's not really a subsidy is it.
(And tbf nor is my mentioned Chinese solar panel export subsidy as it was actually a GST/VAT rebate).
But in many cases there is an alternative to air travel, at least for short distances. I don't really understand why railways (at least in the UK) such ridiculously expensive. Return flights from London to Edinburgh start at £30, train tickets between the same cities start at £100. A return ticket from a station in 50 miles from London is more than £65 (peak times).
There isn't an alternative for water, electricity and food. Easy to find places where the former two are taxed, the latter is taxed effectively everywhere.
> Synfuel still has pollution problem and represents like 0.1% of total jet fuel used.
is a fairly lightweight critique of a product development path scarcely five years in:
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is an alternative fuel made from non-petroleum feedstocks that reduces air pollution from air transportation. SAF can be blended at different levels with limits between 10% and 50%, depending on the feedstock and how the fuel is produced. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), over 360,000 commercial flights have used SAF at 46 different airports largely concentrated in the United States and Europe.
Worldwide, aviation accounts for 2% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) and 12% of all CO2 from transportation. ICAO's Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) caps net CO2 from aviation at 2020 levels through 2035. The international aviation industry sets goals for SAF usage globally. SAF presents the best near-term opportunity to meet these goals.
The Sustainable Aviation Fuel Grand Challenge, announced in 2021, brings together multiple federal agencies for the purpose of expanding domestic consumption to 3 billion gallons in 2030 and 35 billion gallons in 2050 while achieving at least a 50% reduction in lifecycle emissions.
So, have some patience and remember the goal here is to reduce the use of fossil fuel as much as possible .. if Synfuel evolves into something that reduces fossil fuel usage by 50% in the aviation sector, that's a win on the path to ideally eventual elimination altogether.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...
So $400b. Still a lot.
But I really should locate a more recent version of this report...
https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2025/12/20/und...
In 2024 they found $725bn in explicit subsides, plus $6.7tn in implicit subsidies.
Plus, add the entire defense budget of US + western countries, which only exists to protect oil interests.
This graph shows all energy usage over time: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy
New energy sources have always been additive. We have never gotten rid of an energy source unless we exhausted the resource or it got prohibitively expensive (whale blubber having a population collapse). Coal is far more polluting then any other fuel source and globally we aren't reducing its usage. This graph is not updated for 2026, but I doubt the message will change much.
As we now undergo a worldwide population decline things might change. But at the same time we are also introducing energy intensive technologies: AI and robots, so there is no clear end in sight to increased energy consumption yet.
The use of primary energy on the vertical axis is an old trick by the fossil fuel industry to mislead people into thinking that one unit of fossils = one unit of renewables. In fact, one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity is the equivalent of three units of fossil fuel electricity.
Another trick is to pretend we need all those fossils if we switched to renewables. In fact, if we switch to renewables, 12% of the fossil fuel energy disappears because that is how much energy is used to mine-transport-refine fossil fuels+uranium for energy, and we wouldn't need to do that anymore
A third trick is to pretend we need so much energy if we go to all electricity powered by renewables. In that case, because EVs use 75% less energy than gasoline/diesel vehicles, heat pumps use 75% less energy than combustion heating, etc., energy demand goes down another 42%.
In sum, this plot illustrates the real story of where we are and where we need to go. The proper metric is end-use energy, not primary energy.
and here's the paper
They base this on the efficiency of older gasoline engines, which is about 25%. They ignore future improvement in fuel efficiency and disregard all current combustion engines with higher efficiency.
High-tech gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of more than 50%.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/how-f1-technology...
Very fuel efficient diesel engines have been developed for large ships because fuel costs are large part of operating costs of big ships. Low speed diesel engines like the MAN S80ME-C7 have achieved an overall energy conversion efficiency of 54.4%, which is the highest conversion of fuel into power by any single-cycle internal or external combustion engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Diesel_engin...
Renewable energy advocates also like to disregard efficiency of gas turbines. Latest generation gas turbine engines have achieved an efficiency of 46% in simple cycle and 61% when used in combined cycle. And still some of the waste heat can also be used for cogeneration.
Another trick is to pretend that renewables need almost no mining-transportation-refining. According to International Energy Agency.
"The special report, part of the IEA’s flagship World Energy Outlook series, underscores that the mineral requirements of an energy system powered by clean energy technologies differ profoundly from one that runs on fossil fuels. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a similarly sized gas-fired power plant."
https://www.iea.org/news/clean-energy-demand-for-critical-mi...
Carnot also puts pretty harsh limits on future improvements in fuel efficiency in scenarios like ocean shipping where the engines can get close to their theoretical efficiency.
"The energy devoted to heating and cooling buildings accounts for around 35% of all energy consumption, the largest share attributable to any end use. "
https://www.energy.gov/cmei/buildings/heating-ventilation-ai...
There are electric replacements of fossil fuels for many applications where heat pumps can't by used, but usually they don't use 75% less energy than combustion heating. Usually they use more energy...
1) comparison of spent energy for fossil fuels vs electricity is not a good way to do it because electric motors use less for the same output. Compare kWh per 100km for an ICE car and EV. Electrification will lead to a drop simply because of this
2) the graph is global, we have seen energy consumption go down in the developed world. E.g. the EU now uses less electricity than 20 years ago.
Yes but there are losses in generating electricity, and in transmitting it as well. If you only measure from energy in your car's battery to motion you're right, but I don't think that's a useful measure.
Solar panels or windmills are like oil drills. They aren't oil.
Take a look Graph of energy consumption of China which is about double the US: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
The energy consumption of the United States has flat lined: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption by de-indusrializing and having China produce all the energy (largely with coal!) to manufacture their goods instead of manufacturing it themselves.
1) Is a lot more complicated as well. A simple ICE vs EV comparison ignores electric grid generation efficiency and transmission losses as well as the massive energy cost of manufacturing the battery.
The US has not "maintained a low energy consumption". US total energy consumption is the second highest in the world, at 2x third (India), 3x fourth (Russia), 5x fifth (Japan), and 6x sixth (India). It was first until China overtook it in 2008. Here's a line graph from 1965-2024 of those 6 countries [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-cons?tab=l...
Does it take into account the "massive energy cost" of manufacturing the ICE vehicle then?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine#...
Because of ecology, refining of U.S. mined rare earths was outsourced for a very long time to China. Outsourcing of ecological damage...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/mp-materials-sto...
I don't think I ever said otherwise. FWIW I think cars are bad. Full stop. If they have to exist, electric cars appear to have fewer externalities.
There's obviously no ecological impact of mining and refining fossil fuel. The Deepwater Horizon actually reduced the amount of oil in the ocean.
And unlike batteries, which are non-recyclable and always have been. It's common to throw the lead-acid battery from ICE vehicles into the nearest body of water, for example. It's definitely not the case that 99% of them are recycled today. Whereas recycling coal and oil is trivial and done all the time. /s
Most in US don't know that recycling of lead-acid batteries from ICE vehicles is outsourced to Africa.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...
https://www.sustainable-recycling.org/reports/urgent-strateg...
"Although efforts to enforce regulations in the United States have ramped up and cleanup is underway at some sites, many lead-acid batteries from the United States are exported to the Global South, where companies continue to cause harmful public health disasters, and US automotive companies subsequently purchase the recycled lead."
https://blog.ucs.org/jessica-dunn/how-recycling-is-done-matt...
Great, all better in that case. And that's the only time oil and gas extraction and shipping ever caused environmental issues. It's totally clean the rest of the time.
> Most in US don't know that recycling of lead-acid batteries from ICE vehicles is outsourced to Africa... and US automotive companies subsequently purchase the recycled lead
So the batteries can be recycled.
They can be recycled, but much more discussion in public should be done about who pays the ecological price of recycling, mining, refining. For example US automotive companies should be fined for outsourcing recycling of lead-acid batteries to Africa.
Overall there is no 100% clean source, there is something dirty in the chain everywhere. The main question for me is, is one thing an improvement over the other, is the improvement massive or modest? I think the improvement is massive and am hopeful for the future. This doesn't mean you can never improve, but I think this is already happening. For instance I saw an estimate from the Rocky Mountain Institute that they expect no further mining of lithium for batteries because it will be recycled. I obviously don't know if this is true, but even if lithium mining is environmentally unfriendly, if it's an improvement over what we have now, and if we can down the road get rid of that too, it's a positive development.
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).
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.
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.
It's even better than this appears, because normally a Joule of electrified work replaces 2 to 4 Joules of fossil fuel. And electrification tends to happen on the less efficient processes first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(2...
That's good progress but it does raise some new cost barriers to get over for each new thing we electrify.
EVs are over this hump, heat pumps replacing boilers are just about there. Some industrial uses are getting there.
Notably, in electricity renewables went through being cheaper than new build and reduced further in cost to being cheaper than running existing plants.
We're not quite at that stage for many electrification use cases, though for growing nations without lots of existing assets that's not as relevant.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
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.
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.
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.
Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%.
> solar would have made far fewer emissions
Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar.
> 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
True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it.
> 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.
I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019689040...
Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter right now. 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.
You won't burn them in your truck, though. That's an almost certainty. But whatever use they still get when we end transitioning to solar will be met by synthetic hydrocarbons, there's no point on keeping the entire oil production and distribution industries when you can just make a bit of it near the point of use.
> Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again.
> —CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Strategy Session
"Predictions are hard, especially about the future".
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.
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...
Greenpeace should name their next ship after him.
If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?
Fascism is fundamentally driven by a realized nihilism where pure destruction is the actual goal, rather than an accident. From the very beginning, the Nazi party explicitly promised the German people wedding bells and death, including their own deaths and the death of the Germans. The population reportedly cheered for this not because they misunderstood the message, but because they actively desired to wager their own destruction against the death of others.
According to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler operated in a world "in which even success makes no sense,"[0] meaning the movement prioritized an "intense line of pure destruction and abolition"[1] over any constructive political goals.
This intentional drive toward self-destruction culminated at the end of World War II. In his 1945 Telegram 71, Hitler declared, "if the war is lost, may the nation perish". Instead of trying to protect his country in defeat, Hitler actively joined forces with his enemies to complete the destruction of his own people by ordering the obliteration of Germany's remaining civil reserves, water, and fuel. The devastation of Germany was therefore not an accidental failure to achieve greatness, but the logical, intended conclusion of the "suicidal state" fulfilling its death drive.
0. Joachim Fest, Hitler and The Face of the Third Reich
1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
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?
Stalin's support of Lysenko was a result of thinking Lysenko was actually able to drive agricultural growth.
Both mistakes led to mass deaths.
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.
Both of them also 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.
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.
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.
The number of Americans still believing this is baffling and saya everything about their history education.
"The previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative for the people in those countries, but surely this time it would've been different!".
Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea. Potentially Venezuela, mostly because we constrained our objectives.
I also don’t think it’s fair to constrain OP’s statement to “the people in those countries.” Regional impacts matter, too. An Iran that isn’t funding terrorist proxies everywhere could still be a net positive even if the average Iranian is no better off afterwards. (To be clear, I’m in no way supporting this stupid war.)
To even hint at those being in the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Congo is really desperate. Come on now. Not comparable and irrelevant.
…why are Japan and Germany not comparable to Iraq? We’re talking methods and outcomes, not motivations. All involved a wholesale invasion, occupation and supervised restructuring followed by disarmament.
For whom?
His belief that the jews were the problem was the issue. But Germany has still not recovered scientifically or technologically. He was just as wrong about jews as Mao was about sparrows, or Stalin about wheat.
I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Millions died in all three cases.
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.
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.
I wonder if included these numbers in that calculation https://electrek.co/2026/04/16/tesla-cybertruck-spacex-1279-...
;-)
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.
Literal no brainer
It is basically at the bottom, above only "biofuels" as a source of energy.
But the derivative with respect to time of solar was higher over a one year period.
> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025
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.)
The world did add 3GW of nuclear generation in 2025 but it also closed 3GW.
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!
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 ...
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.
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.
"We’re pouring, from our calculations, two thirds of the primary energy into the air and wasting it." - Kingsmill Bond