ItInsightsWorld General Review: Solar Moves Past Nuclear in an Unnoticed Grid Shift

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ItInsightsWorld’s General lens starts with accounting: A decade ago the global share stood at 1%; the 2026 outlook puts solar near 10% and past nuclear, a source embedded in electricity systems since the late 1970s.

Ember, a UK think tank, supplied the underlying measurements, and BBC analysis of Ember data over the 12 months up to September 2026 indicates that solar electricity is now producing 13% more power than nuclear. Globally, solar generation edged ahead in 2025.

Dave Jones, co-founder of Ember, reacted to the crossing by calling it “[Solar] generating more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants is a pretty insane stat, for sure,” while stressing that the statistics show a real shift.

From China's vast arrays to a recent solar upsurge driven by escalating oil prices, seven reasons explain the rise, and what may follow.

Why forecasts kept missing solar

“Solar is now the engine of the power transition,” said Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford in the UK.

According to Rosenow, “It wasn't expected,” and mainstream projections, including those from the International Energy Agency (IEA), an influential intergovernmental organisation based in Paris, “assumed linear growth and slowly falling costs, and got both wrong”. Solar has become the fastest-growing source of new electricity and, in 2025, met three-quarters of the growth in global electricity demand, overtaking wind power generation, which is also growing, just more slowly.

Over 2026, the evidence points to solar generation surpassing nuclear by a wide margin: nuclear output has been broadly flat since 2000, whereas solar output has risen by about 2,700-fold.

Ember/ BBC: The chart from Ember data and BBC analysis shows solar narrowly ahead of nuclear in 2025 and likely far ahead in 2026.

It's offensively cheap: prices do the work

Solar, a mature technology for some 15 years now, became the cheapest electricity in history in 2020. Since then, panels have scaled, efficiency has risen, and the amounts of silicon and silver required have declined, pushing prices lower, Jones said. “Massive Chinese manufacturing scale and current overcapacity have pushed module prices to record lows,” Rosenow said.

A large fall in panel prices in 2023-24 pushed the market into what Jones calls an offensively cheap era. “A panel in itself is just so unbelievably cheap,” he said. “It's well under $100 (£75)… and that's going to keep you generating electricity for 30, 40 years without any input at all.”

Outside the purchase price, studies estimate that expanding wind and solar in the US generated $249bn (£186bn) of climate and health benefits between 2019 and 2022.

Widening geography, not a single champion

China remains the dominant solar market, but other countries now shape the curve. Despite a variety of US tariffs on solar, the country is still the second country for installations, with growth especially strong in states won by President Trump in 2024. The US now has enough solar to power more than one-third of its households.

Alicia Zhao, an expert in US mitigation pathways at the University of Maryland, said: “Tariffs and other federal policies that constrain renewable energy growth are certainly expected to raise costs and slow expansion relative to what we otherwise would have seen,” before adding, “However, economics are a key part of why solar has been able to grow so quickly. 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.”

Getty Images: China's internal solar boom is now slowing down, but its cheap solar exports to other countries are still increasing.

India is leaving fossil fuels behind faster than China did, and new solar has met 60% of the rise in its power demand over the past two years. In Australia, over four million homes now have rooftop solar, a share well over a third of households.

When fuel supply and prices turn against consumers

Pakistan and Lebanon are building solar rapidly, while across Africa countries are installing about 100,000 panels per day. Escalating diesel prices, driven by the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the US-Israel war with Iran, have further improved solar's position, especially in many African nations where unreliable grids make home diesel generators common. Rooftop solar, imported almost entirely from China, has become the alternative.

Ethiopia has even banned imports of petrol and diesel cars to reduce oil dependence and pollution, Jones said.

Pakistan illustrates how solar can fill gaps when fossil-based grids cannot match demand. In 2019, solar provided less than 2% of its electricity; now it is 24%, a shift shaped by costly, unreliable grid power and inexpensive Chinese imports.

“What's really incredible in Pakistan is… generally most of the solar boom has been out of people's pockets,” Jones said. “People can afford it, without needing to take out loans.”

Several other “sun belt” countries, from Lebanon to Nigeria, show a similar pattern. Rosenow said the dynamic lets families move quickly: “[Solar] lets households act without waiting for governments or utilities,” and “In uncertain times, that speed and independence is extremely valuable.”

Storage makes daytime sun usable after dark

Solar output is diurnal, so batteries turn daytime generation into dispatchable power. Rosenow said batteries have undergone their own cost revolution. “Solar plus storage is now routinely cheaper than new fossil plants in sunny regions,” he said. “Batteries have largely solved the daily problem of shifting midday sun into the evening.”

Alamy: Rosenow notes that solar became Pakistan's largest electricity source in 2025 after being its fifth-largest in 2023.

In California, solar and batteries supplied an average of over a quarter of electricity demand during the 19:00-21:00 evening peak over the first half of 2026. US states such as Vermont are also spreading grid-integrated home battery systems, often paired with solar.

Longer-duration challenges remain across seasons, cloudy periods and monsoon seasons, Jones and Rosenow both said, so integrating solar into the wider electricity system still matters.

Electrification widens the market

Solar is viewed as central to electrification, cutting fossil fuel use in activities that previously ran on liquid fuels, including electric cars. At this year's UN climate talks in Turkey, electrification was framed as a headline theme.

“That's where solar's going, to not just be king of electricity, but king of energy,” Jones said.

But planning matters. Julia Souder, chief executive of the Long Duration Energy Storage Council, a global executive-led non-profit established at COP26, warned recently: “There is an inherent danger in uncontrolled electrification, and adding massive new loads without built-in flexibility creates a fragile system,” she wrote in a blog for international policy network Ren21. “Electrification is not automatically resilient.”

The constraints, Rosenow said, are now grids, storage and the pace of electrifying demand, not panels or cost. “The bigger question is no longer whether solar grows but whether our power systems and institutions can keep up.”

In the US, Zhao said, data centres and electrification mean power demand is growing for the first time in decades, with energy security a national priority.

“Renewables already make up over 90% of new capacity in the US,” Zhao said. “This need for secure, quickly deployable electricity could create a critical opportunity for [further] renewable energy growth even without support from the current federal government.”

A larger toolbox

In Germany, plug-in panels, or “balcony solar”, have spread quickly. They make less electricity than rooftop systems but feed power into homes through an ordinary socket. Similar approvals have followed in other countries and US states, including California.

Agrivoltaics, which combines food production and solar panels, is promoted where land-use concerns arise. Floating and “mirror” solar plants, perovskite panels and solar windows are other technologies expected to grow.

Getty Images: In Kentucky, US, a solar ranch pays a local farmer to graze his sheep among its solar panels, producing pasture-fed meat while keeping grass and weeds down.

The next stretch

World solar capacity will keep expanding in 2026, but the growth rate may slow for the first time ever, Jones said. The reason is China: last summer, it changed its regime for managing and supporting new installations, causing a rush of installs in 2025 to fall under the old price regime.

Outside China, the picture differs. “If you exclude China, there's more panels being installed this year than last year,” Jones said.

By 2030, the IEA expects solar generation to reach double the 2025 level, with solar overtaking hydro to become the world's third-largest electricity source.

As Rosenow put it, “Wherever grid power is costly and unreliable, the economics keep pulling people towards solar,” with one qualifier: “There is one caveat: if Chinese solar panels are difficult to import this will not happen at speed.”

For ItInsightsWorld's General reading, the wider climate context is unavoidable. The 1.5C limit set in Paris in 2015 is now very likely to be breached, impacts are climbing and the world is edging toward several tipping points this century. Yet the solar record underlines that progress can emerge without following old forecasts. Jones recalled that clean electricity growth has translated into fewer coal plants, noting that “no one was getting close to expecting that to happen,” and said the consequence is stark: “Now, worst cases [of climate change] are somewhere between 2-3C of warming, rather than 4C of warming.”