Chart: Solar power keeps beating expectations

Solar is becoming predictable in its unpredictability — time and time again, experts have underestimated how much the clean energy source will grow globally. This year is no different.

The price of panels has continued to plummet and their efficiency keeps rising, while deadlines for meeting climate laws creep closer. The result? The world is installing more solar than ever before — at a pace that even many top energy analysts didn’t see coming, according to a new analysis by think tank Ember.

So far this year, 29 percent more solar has been installed than was in the same period last year, per Ember. By the end of 2024, Ember says the world will be on track to reach 593 gigawatts of solar installations — 200 GW more than the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted at the start of the year. That’s a significant underestimate: Those extra gigawatts alone represent more solar than the entire world built in 2021.

This year’s record-breaking solar installations follow another peak year in 2023, when installations grew by 86 percent over 2022.

Five countries account for the majority of solar additions: China takes the top spot, followed by the United States, India, Germany, and Brazil. In the U.S., utility-scale solar is driving the industry’s growth. Policy changes in India have helped encourage solar; this year, the country has already installed more solar panels than it did in all of 2023. In Germany, small-scale solar has grown thanks to lower panel costs and incentives for rooftop solar. Solar is also taking off in new markets, particularly distributed solar in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Cost is the main factor driving solar’s always-faster-than-expected ascension, says Kingsmill Bond, senior principal on the strategy team at RMI. As solar has become cheaper, it’s ​“not entirely surprising” that solar installations have spiked, Bond said.

“When technologies get cheap enough, they are like water flowing down a mountain. You don’t know exactly how the water will find a way down the mountain, but you know that it will find a way,” he said.

The solar industry’s success is putting the world’s climate pledges within reach. Annual solar installations will now have to show only ​“relatively modest levels of growth” to meet global goals, the Ember report notes. Recent BloombergNEF (BNEF) data sees a slight shortfall on the current trajectory but says 2030 goals are still entirely feasible.

Getting there, of course, won’t be simple. ​“Every single solar panel needs someone to put it up and needs planning permission in many countries,” Bond said. ​“Change is not easy, but it is nevertheless inexorable and driven by the internal logic of what happens when you get really cheap technologies available to 8,000 million people.”