Solar power has moved with startling speed from the margins of the energy system to its center. After decades labeled as “alternative energy,” solar crossed a decisive economic threshold a few years ago, becoming cheaper than electricity generated from fossil fuels. That shift followed seventy years of steady engineering progress since the first photovoltaic cell was unveiled at Bell Labs in 1954. Once solar reached cost parity and then undercut coal, oil, and gas, deployment accelerated rapidly, says The Engineer.
The scale of growth is unprecedented. By mid-2025, China was installing roughly three gigawatts of solar capacity every day. By early 2026, global electricity generation from solar was up by one-third year over year. When wind power is included, itself driven by uneven solar heating of the planet, renewables accounted for about 90% of new generating capacity worldwide. This is not an incremental change but a full-scale energy transition.
The implications go beyond replacing one power source with another. Solar offers a scalable path to cut greenhouse gas emissions at a moment of acute climate risk. China’s carbon emissions appear to have peaked in 2025, a development with global significance. Reduced fossil fuel combustion also brings immediate public health benefits, as millions die each year from air pollution tied to burning coal, oil, and gas.
More profoundly, solar challenges the historical link between energy and scarcity. Human civilization has relied on fire for hundreds of thousands of years, first through biomass and later through fossil fuels that concentrated power but imposed economic, environmental, and geopolitical costs. Solar upends that model. In Australia, surplus midday solar generation is so abundant that several states will soon guarantee residents free electricity for hours each afternoon.
If electricity becomes effectively “too cheap to meter,” energy shifts from a resource we extract and fight over to a flow we simply capture. Sunlight cannot be stockpiled or monopolized in the same way as fossil fuels. That change carries echoes of past technological revolutions, marking a transition toward energy abundance that could reshape economies, politics, and daily life.