I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons. The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder). In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off. My up time is better than the grid. The simple fact is that solar plus batteries is a complete solution for 90% + of the worlds population. One of my side projects was to remove the alternator from the "truckasaurus" and mount solar pv as the only electrical power for starting, lights, etc. It was marginal, but I ran it that way as my only vehicle ,year round, for years. Relevant?, yes! as my experience has shown me where the margin realy is, and there has been a great deal of technological improvements and cost reductions since I built my system.

I think the key is to combine it with a strong, digitalized grid and a lot of BESS—a technology which is now getting progressively cheaper, just like PV.

https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...

I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.

From the article:

  Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.

Connect enough grids and the sun is always shining.

There must be some kind of calculation generally based on latitude?

A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?

One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.

-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.

> Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants

No, Germany has 97 coal BLOCKS in its power plants (down from 150 in 5 years), but those are NOT all active.

Also Germany's coal consumption is at an all time low, down a third in only 5 years.

That’s a lot of text, none of which even attempts to refute the factual claim that solar’s generation share has increased from 1% in 2015 to 10% in 2025.

Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.

They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.

The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment. I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied. Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector.

The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources. You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.

hydro is mostly tapped, solar on the other hand can grow a lot. And we are talking about electricity, not energy in general. Tackling energy is more about electrification.

Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.

Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.

The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices

It is working perfectly fine: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-

The energy transition in Germany sucks because they are replacing nuclear with solar when they should have been replacing coal with solar.

That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.

If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.

Your comment is typical of the tortured efforts of skeptics to discredit renewables, also usually applied to electric cars and other climate friendly measures.

You ignore the points made to argue a bunch on non-sequiturs that you think serve your purposes. Plus you throw in various ad-hominem attacks.

The article points out the experiential growth of renewables and logarithmic reductions in price. You don't take issue with that, maybe because you don't understand the consequences of exponential growth?

You mention that largest renewable share is hydro, but the number of locations suitable for hydro is very limited, and the attendant cost is very high.

What you focus on in existing installed capacity. But so what? Yes sources of power that have been installed over hundreds of years are indeed outnumbering renewables. Somehow you don't get that the rapid increase of renewables will wipe out existing forms of power generation in a fraction of the time it took for those to appear.

Renewables are much, much cheaper than other forms, and more scalable (up and down). That is undeniable buy you or anyone else. That will drive installations even in the face of issues such as intermittency because the force of money, along with convenience and flexibility, beats everything.

Hydro has its own problems, it traps fish and it significantly changes ecosystems. It might be renewable but not necessary ecological

it's winning regardless - every kwh of solar is a kwh less of fossils. You can achieve even deeper decarbonization with nuclear but the perfect shouldnt be the enemy of good. There are countries where nuclear is politically hard and changing ppl's opinions is hard too. So it's either ren+ some fossil firming or just fossils

That's what batteries and wind and hydro are for.

We've already got pumped-hydro storage infrastructure and battery tech, while certainly not as far along as the boosters circa the middle of the last decade promised us, is at a point where it's viable as one part of the puzzle.

Speaking of the larger picture, this is to say nothing of all the other renewable options out there that continue to work when the sun goes down.

EDIT: And it doesn't speak at all to the other "alternative" energy storage options like thermal storage

> Every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs.

Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.

And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.

Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane. At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle. That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.

Recent Bloomberg opinion pice about factories there and in nearby countries shifting to renewables:

Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/asia-s...

> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915

It is absolutely sane and perfectly reasonable. The climate highly support it, you are already used to a grid that in some cases are not available 24/7, and the major energy consumptions are AC and fans which correlate with production.

The US can have this too if it stops demonizing China.

It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.

The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.

Not to mention, all the red tape.

But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.

sOcIaLiSM!!!

There was a production car planned called the Lightyear One [0], originating from a Dutch student team, but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_0

You absolutely can .. but in order to be self sustaining vehicles need to look somewhat like the builds that appear in Australian multi day solar races - ultra lightweight, extreme streamlining, zero driver comfort, no extras like cargo space and automatic rear doors, etc.

Maybe in time efficiencies will get there.

* https://worldsolarchallenge.org/

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lVdrHnbYo

Addendum: addressing the [dead] comment below

> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.

is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.

It’s a good question, but the reality is the energy required to power a car is far larger than what you can collect.

The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.

A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?

Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW.

To convert that to a more familiar car power measurement that’s about 5 horsepower.

Hopefully it’s clear why a realtime solar car is hard.

This is not to say it’s impossible, they have been built. They’re just not super practical for everyday use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_car

The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce.

Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.

you get too little energy vs the cost of integrating it. It gets worse considering as a driver you want to park your car in shade/garage/multistory parkings

> Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly

This is 100% a very common noob question. The answers are therefor easy to find if you try.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...

https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...

A much better idea is to 20x the surface area of solar panels, get ones that aren't as weight sensitive (and therefor expensive), mount them on your house or garage roof instead, and charge the EV off that when it's parked adjacent. Maybe add a battery as buffer for when the car's not there.

And it in fact has been an option on some cars, but not a popular one. It has been described as "worthless"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hyundai/comments/tayavo/what_happen...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456963

Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built.

But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.

The USofA is a broligarchy not a capitalist society, so there's that.

Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc.

There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped back to near zero.

Where at the point in the transition where the level of subsidies, if any, determines the speed of the build out.

The question is: how early do you retire existing thermal power plant?