A decade ago solar power barely registered globally, providing about 1 per cent of the world’s electricity. In 2026 it will almost certainly reach 10 per cent — and pass nuclear, a mainstay of the grid since the late 1970s.
According to the UK energy think tank Ember, solar generation narrowly overtook nuclear in 2025. Over the twelve months to September 2026 it is no longer narrow: solar is producing 13 per cent more power than every nuclear plant on earth combined.
“Generating more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants is a pretty insane stat, for sure,” says Dave Jones, co-founder of Ember.
Everyone underestimated it
“Solar is now the engine of the power transition,” says Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford. “It wasn’t expected.”
Mainstream forecasts missed it year after year. Outlooks such as those from the International Energy Agency, Rosenow says, “assumed linear growth and slowly falling costs, and got both wrong”.
The scale of the miss is in two numbers. Nuclear generation has been roughly constant since 2000. Solar has increased about 2,700-fold. In 2025 alone, solar met three-quarters of the growth in world electricity demand, overtaking wind.
“Offensively cheap”
Solar became the cheapest electricity in history in 2020, and has kept falling since as efficiency rose and the silicon and silver in each panel went down. “Massive Chinese manufacturing scale and current overcapacity have pushed module prices to record lows,” says Rosenow.
A sharp fall in 2023–24 produced what Jones calls “offensively cheap” solar. “A panel in itself is just so unbelievably cheap,” he says. “It’s well under $100 (£75)… and that’s going to keep you generating electricity for 30, 40 years without any input at all.”
The savings are not only on the bill. Researchers calculated that rising wind and solar generation brought the United States $249bn (£186bn) in climate and health benefits between 2019 and 2022.
Where it is growing
China remains by far the largest, but is no longer the only story. The United States is second for installations despite tariffs, and now has enough solar to power more than a third of its households — with the fastest growth in states that voted for President Trump in 2024.
“Economics are a key part of why solar has been able to grow so quickly,” says Alicia Zhao of the University of Maryland. “Even with rising costs, solar is still one of the cheapest sources of new power in the US. And it is getting built regardless of political lines.”
India is moving off fossil fuels faster than China did: new solar has met 60 per cent of the rise in power demand over the past two years. In Australia, more than four million homes have rooftop solar — well over a third of all households. Across Africa, roughly 100,000 panels a day are being installed.
The example that is actually ours
Pakistan is the one to read closely, because the conditions are the ones we know: an expensive, unreliable grid, and cheap imported Chinese panels.
In 2019 solar provided less than 2 per cent of Pakistan’s electricity. It is now 24 per cent.
And the mechanism is the striking part. “What’s really incredible in Pakistan is… generally most of the solar boom has been out of people’s pockets,” says Jones. “People can afford it, without needing to take out loans.”
No national programme drove that. No subsidy scheme, no utility rollout, no waiting. Households bought panels because the arithmetic worked for them that month.
“Solar lets households act without waiting for governments or utilities,” Rosenow says. “In uncertain times, that speed and independence is extremely valuable.”
The same pattern is visible from Lebanon to Nigeria, driven partly by diesel prices pushed up by the Russia–Ukraine conflict and the US–Israel war with Iran. Where home diesel generators were the answer to a weak grid, rooftop panels now are. Ethiopia has gone further and banned the import of petrol and diesel cars.
What this means here
Bangladesh imports from the same Chinese factories, pays for the same diesel, and runs a grid under the same strain. The Pakistani figures are not a forecast for us, but they do settle one argument: the barrier to household solar is no longer the price of the panel.
What remains is everything around it — metering rules, roof access for tenants, the cost of batteries and inverters, and whether an ordinary household can connect without a long official process. Those are policy and paperwork problems, not technology problems. The technology got cheap while we were arguing about it.
