Solar Has Overtaken Nuclear in the Global Power Mix

Last year, solar power quietly overtook nuclear power in the global energy mix. This is a stunning feat when you consider that just a decade ago, in 2015, global solar generation amounted to just 256 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2015, while global nuclear power generated ten-fold that amount at 2,576 TWh. And solar didn’t just overtake nuclear power in 2025; it surpassed it by a wide margin, producing 13 percent more energy worldwide. "[Solar] generating more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants is a pretty insane stat, for sure," Dave Jones, co-founder of Ember, recently told the BBC. Solar power’s rise has been meteoric, surpassing expectations year after year as the cost of solar panels has plummeted. Global solar power production capacity has been doubling approximately every three years, reaching a staggering 2,778 TWh in 2025. The majority of this buildout has come from China, which has built up an unstoppable solar manufacturing empire over the last decade. And the flood of cheap solar panels out of China has, in turn, fomented a renewable revolution around the world, as solar panels have become the cheapest and most secure option, even in impoverished nations. Solar power has become the fastest-growing source of new electricity in human history precisely because it is the cheapest form of new energy capacity on Earth. Solar photovoltaic panel prices have plummeted an astonishing 90 percent since 2010. As a result, some of the biggest growth has been seen in the poorest countries. While richer nations initially led the charge for solar development, developing and emerging economies represent an increasingly large share of demand growth. According to Yale Environment 360, approximately 63 percent of emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are now sourcing more of their energy generation from solar power than the United States. Countries including Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya, and Namibia have already overtaken the world’s largest economy in their respective clean energy transitions, and Pakistan has become an unexpected poster child of solar adoption in recent years as residents install rooftop solar and batteries faster than any other market in the world.The growth of rooftop solar panels in countries like Pakistan has also been enabled in part by a similar downtrend in pricing for batteries, enabling the low-cost adoption of solar-plus-battery systems. Advances in battery technologies help to redress solar power’s most critical trade-off – its intermittency. "Solar plus storage is now routinely cheaper than new fossil plants in sunny regions," Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford in the UK, was quoted by the BBC. "Batteries have largely solved the daily problem of shifting midday sun into the evening."Low costs, supportive energy storage, and the energy independence that solar offers have proven to be a winning combination for energy security in all kinds of economies. On a global scale, renewable energy now represents more stable and affordable energy access than oil and gas, especially against the backdrop of the war in Iran and subsequent volatility in global energy markets. “Wind and solar cannot be embargoed, blockaded, or shut off by a foreign power,” David Frykman, General Partner at Stockholm-based venture capital group Norrsken, wrote in an op-ed for Fortune earlier this year. “Every terawatt-hour of domestic renewable generation is a terawatt-hour that no adversary can weaponize.”These factors have proven to be more powerful than policy in the marketplace. Even as politics around renewable energies have shifted, with a whiplash removal of policy supports in the United States under the Trump administration, solar power has simply become too cheap to fail. “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," Alicia Zhao, an expert in US mitigation pathways at the University of Maryland, recently told the BBC.By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.comMore Top Reads From Oilprice.comInvestors From 119 Countries Pile Into Dangote’s Record Refinery IPOU.S. Lawmakers Warn Banks Against Trump's Russian Diesel DealUS Oil Inventories Fall Again As Prices Rise