Skip to Content

Solar Is a Booming Business, but It’s Still Not Generating Much of Our Power

Solar capacity is on the rise, but it still accounts for only about 1 percent of the world’s electricity.
March 23, 2016

The solar industry is growing fast. Led by China, the United States, and Japan, the world will install nearly 65 gigawatts of new solar generating capacity this year—up from 54 gigawatts in 2015 and four times the amount installed in 2010.

Solar now represents somewhere between 3 and 4 percent of the world’s total generating capacity. But capacity, which is the maximum amount of electricity that a power plant can supply and varies according to the amount of sunlight available, is a lot different from the amount of electricity a plant actually generates. In 2014, only about 0.8 percent of the world’s electricity came from the sun. Last year, solar power may have finally covered more than 1 percent of global energy demand.

In 2014, 19 countries, most in Europe, produced at least 1 percent of their electricity using photovoltaic panels. Germany gets more than 7 percent of its electricity from solar. Japan gets 2.5 percent from solar. Meanwhile, China and the U.S.—the two biggest builders of solar capacity in 2016—have yet to officially cross the 1 percent line.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.