These reports are inferring a lot from 1 year trends that are often changing only around 1%. Certainly it is great if new energy is coming mostly from cleaner sources, but the idea that we are actually getting rid of the non clean sources is something we should be skeptical of.
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.
Comparing primary energy is VERY misleading. From Marc Jacobson:
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.
Yea, the article struck me immediately as a lot of spin in that it’s hyping the growth rate of solar versus the growth rate of other tech. Solar is newer and is still a relatively small slice of the overall pie compared to oil and gas. It’s relatively easy to rapidly grow a small pie wedge than a large one given the overall growth rate of the pie. And growth rates inevitably slow down as pie wedges get larger, because they have to. So, as you say, good news, but still over-hyped, IMO.
While your statement is true your graph is misleading for two reasons.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
"
Volcanic coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 252 million years ago.
No chance, fossil fuels are subsidized more. A large share of solar growth is from countries like Pakistan who have had some subsidies but total dollar amount of them is trivial.
"Overall, renewables and nuclear together met nearly 60% of the growth in energy demand".
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.
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.
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.
Cost is no longer the barrier as today even the upfront cost of solar is competitive against upfront cost for building coal or gas power plant. While there is no cost of fuel for solar. In China and India even solar + battery is cheaper than new coal power plants.
Just Stop Oil announced the cessation of all activities in my country.
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...
He's also making the case for radical downsizing of the US military, since he's shown the military's take that it won't obey illegal orders was a sham.
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.
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.
If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?
This is a very misleading title. What they mean is that solar capacity contributes more to energy growth than any other factor. In terms of actual energy generation, solar remains far below coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear and wind.
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.
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.
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.
1279 units vs total 20'000'000 units or 0,006% doesn't make a difference
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.
> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025
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.
Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.
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.
Of course they are. We aren't going to be able to take hydrocarbons out of the ground forever.
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.
I expect in a post-fossil age we'll get organic chemical feedstocks from biomass, and non-biomass solar will help with that by providing hydrogen for hydrodeoxygenation. That will roughly double the hydrocarbons one can get from a given quantity of carbohydrate. Biomass here will also include waste stream organic matter.
> Solar added about 600 terawatt-hours of generation globally
> 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.)
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?
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 wonder what political and trade consequences can be expected when oil actually does start seeing real decreased usage.
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.
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.
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
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.
These reports are inferring a lot from 1 year trends that are often changing only around 1%. Certainly it is great if new energy is coming mostly from cleaner sources, but the idea that we are actually getting rid of the non clean sources is something we should be skeptical of.
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.
Comparing primary energy is VERY misleading. From Marc Jacobson:
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.
https://lnkd.in/gYw9mB3x
and here's the paper
https://lnkd.in/gTcqkyG5
Yea, the article struck me immediately as a lot of spin in that it’s hyping the growth rate of solar versus the growth rate of other tech. Solar is newer and is still a relatively small slice of the overall pie compared to oil and gas. It’s relatively easy to rapidly grow a small pie wedge than a large one given the overall growth rate of the pie. And growth rates inevitably slow down as pie wedges get larger, because they have to. So, as you say, good news, but still over-hyped, IMO.
While your statement is true your graph is misleading for two reasons.
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.
I think 2) is a lot more complicated to the point statements like that are misleading.
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.
2 replies →
> 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
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.
3 replies →
Very misleading title: it should be "Solar leads global energy growth for the first time".
Still good news, but a long, long way from solar becoming the world's primary source of energy.
Yes, from the source report, for total generation capacity, solar is in a distant sixth:
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.
> solar becoming the world's primary source of energy
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.
" 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...
What about nuclear?
7 replies →
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 some subsidies but total dollar amount of them is trivial.
5 replies →
Solar subsidies still pale in comparison to oil and gas subsidies worldwide
Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
Plus, add the entire defense budget of US + western countries, which only exists to protect oil interests.
"Overall, renewables and nuclear together met nearly 60% of the growth in energy demand".
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.
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.
> The 60% figure is all forms of energy.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(2...
Cost is the barrier
Cost is no longer the barrier as today even the upfront cost of solar is competitive against upfront cost for building coal or gas power plant. While there is no cost of fuel for solar. In China and India even solar + battery is cheaper than new coal power plants.
3 replies →
Maybe "accidentally killing fossil fuels" will be DT's singular good deed
Just Stop Oil announced the cessation of all activities in my country.
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.
The man is an overachiever.
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...
He's also making the case for radical downsizing of the US military, since he's shown the military's take that it won't obey illegal orders was a sham.
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.
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"
2 replies →
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.
If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?
12 replies →
This is a very misleading title. What they mean is that solar capacity contributes more to energy growth than any other factor. In terms of actual energy generation, solar remains far below coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear and wind.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I wonder if included these numbers in that calculation https://electrek.co/2026/04/16/tesla-cybertruck-spacex-1279-...
;-)
1279 units vs total 20'000'000 units or 0,006% doesn't make a difference
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.
> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025
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.
Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.
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.
Of course they are. We aren't going to be able to take hydrocarbons out of the ground forever.
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.
I expect in a post-fossil age we'll get organic chemical feedstocks from biomass, and non-biomass solar will help with that by providing hydrogen for hydrodeoxygenation. That will roughly double the hydrocarbons one can get from a given quantity of carbohydrate. Biomass here will also include waste stream organic matter.
> Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.
"Predictions are hard, especially about the future".
More importantly, for the first time ever we generate more electricity from renewables than coal!
> Solar added about 600 terawatt-hours of generation globally
> 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.)
No, you are comparing watthours to watts. At 90% used factor 12GW would be ~95 TWh.
More over that 12GW is start of construction. New commissioned nuclear is 2.7GW in 2025 and 7.4GW in 2024. 2024 is probably an anomaly.
ooh, of course, thank you
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable
See also Kingsmill Bond's slidedeck at https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...
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.