Solar grew 50% in just 19 months

From Gavin Mooney

One third of the world’s total solar capacity was installed in the last 19 months.

Global installed solar has now passed 3 TW. The first terawatt took decades to build – the latest one took just over a year and a half.

Having said that, SolarPower Europe is expecting a slowdown this year before growth picks up again from next year. It forecasts annual installations to fall to 612 GW in 2026 from a record 664 GW last year.

This would be the first annual decline in solar installations in more than two decades.

A few things stand out:

✅ The slowdown is a China story. China accounted for 57% of global additions in 2025, but installations there are forecast to fall 24% this year following domestic policy changes.

✅ Outside China, however, deployment continues to broaden. India has become the world's second largest market, installing 45.7 GW in 2025. The number of countries with at least 1 GW of solar has risen from 42 in 2020 to 74 now.

✅ Growth is expected to resume from 2027. By 2030 annual installations could reach 864 GW with the global fleet approaching 7 TW.

So while the next terawatt might take slightly longer than 19 months, the underlying direction remains clear: annual solar additions are moving towards 1 TW, while deployment continues to spread across more markets.

The other interesting part of this story is how solar growth is starting to spread into markets that barely registered a few years ago.

BloombergNEF highlights rapid rooftop growth in countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria and the Philippines, while smaller markets like Lebanon and Cuba have also accelerated sharply.

The main constraint for these countries increasingly looks less like panel cost, and more like access to affordable finance.

 

We can run our grid on renewables, except (perhaps) in very high latitudes.  According to Engaging Data, 179.4 million people in the world live north of Manchester (latitude 53 degrees N).  This is a lot of people, but it makes up just 3.4% of the world's population.  The rest of us will be able to run our grids off wind and solar, with battery storage.  Those brave enough to live in high latitudes should still be able to run their grids mostly on renewables, with back up from gas and (maybe) nuclear, even if they don't import electricity from sunnier places.

Source: Engaging Data