Solar power has been growing with astonishing speed over the last decade, both in the U.S. and around the world.
U.S. solar capacity has grown more than 180 percent over the past five years, and it has accounted for most of the new generating capacity added to the country’s grid in the past year as companies found solar—frequently paired with battery storage—the cheapest and fastest way to meet energy demand.
Even with efforts by the Trump administration to slow clean energy, the federal Energy Information Administration reported last week that solar will likely account for more than half of the new power that developers plan to bring online this year.
Globally, solar’s growth is even brighter. The International Energy Agency projects that solar power’s remarkable growth will push renewable energy to overtake coal-fired generation as the world’s top source of power for the first time either this year or “by 2026 at the latest.”
But author and organizer Bill McKibben pointed out that you would hardly know these facts about solar from most popular media discussion and political rhetoric on energy, where solar is still frequently dismissed as too expensive or unreliable.
“I think it’s the real untold story of the moment,” McKibben told Newsweek in a recent interview from his home in Vermont. “It also offers the first—one hesitates to say solution—but the first scalable opportunity for doing anything about climate change that we’ve had in the 40 years that I’ve been at work on this.”
McKibben is known for his urgent warnings about the threat of climate change, going back to his first book, The End of Nature, and for organizing climate activists in groups such as 350.org.
His latest work takes a, well, sunnier view. In Here Comes the Sun, McKibben highlights the underappreciated potential of solar power to finally end the global grip of fossil fuels and to decarbonize our energy supplies before the accumulation of greenhouse gases pushes warming to catastrophic levels.
The title borrows from The Beatles to reflect what McKibben called the “deep human connection” to the sun that is evident in George Harrison’s song and hundreds of other musical mentions of the sun.
“There’s something about the beauty of this moment that really captures people, without getting all hippy-dippy about it,” he said. “There are not 100 wonderful odes to fracked natural gas out there.”
In this conversation, lightly edited for length, McKibben explained why he thinks U.S. energy policy under Trump is on a collision course with surging electricity demand, and described his latest organizing effort, which he calls Sun Day.
Newsweek: Why do you think the rise of solar is not more widely known?
Bill McKibben: Well, partly, I think it’s because we’ve spent so long calling this stuff alternative energy that it got stuck in a corner of our brain and became difficult for people to imagine. You read endless stories about all the different kinds of possible alternatives, small nuclear reactors and tidal power and geothermal, all of which are interesting, but none of which are scaling in any significant way.
Meanwhile, this is so obviously the economic way forward that it’s, almost without people paying attention, has just snuck up on everyone. It happened very fast—that’s the other thing. You know, it’s only maybe five years ago that we crossed some invisible line where this stuff became cheaper than burning coal and gas and oil. So, this is a different world than the one we’ve lived in.
All through the rest of the climate and energy conversation, fossil fuel was cheap, and renewables were expensive, and the job of people trying to do something about climate change was basically to figure out how to raise the cost of fossil fuel—carbon taxes, divestment to stop their infrastructure expansion, whatever it was. That’s sort of how we’re tuned to think about it.
But that’s no longer the reality. Now we’re in this upside-down world where renewable energy is cheap and fossil energy is comparatively expensive. And I think the first people to really figure out the true dynamics of this world were in the oil industry, who understood it for the threat that it was.
Maybe the most hopeful statistic in the book is from California. California has obviously reached some kind of tipping point with renewable energy. Most days they get 100 percent of their electricity for long stretches of the day from renewable power, and at night batteries are the biggest source of supply to the grid.
But the bottom line stunned even me: California is using 40 percent less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago. That’s the 4th largest economy in the world.
You’ve got to figure that for the oil industry, that’s a scary number. That really indicates the kind of pressure that they’re starting to feel. And I think that that explains more than anything else their unprecedented involvement in our political life. And so, to me, that’s sort of the ultimate back-handed compliment to the renewable energy boom, the fact that big oil is clearly freaked out and doing everything they can to slow it down.
You have this great line in the book that solar is no longer the Whole Foods of energy, it’s the Costco of energy.
That’s right. It’s no longer nice, but pricey. Now it’s cheap, available in bulk, on the shelf, ready to go.
So, a couple of things arise from that, though, that present their own unanticipated challenges. One is that when it’s super cheap, it’s actually not that good for the people who are trying to sell that power, and therefore price alone doesn’t necessarily incentivize more deployment.
You’re right. The economic problem with solar energy and wind energy is that in some sense it’s too cheap. And this was the problem that the CEO of Exxon forthrightly identified last year when he told people they were never going to invest in renewables because it wouldn’t return above average profits to investors, which is true. You can’t hoard it. You can’t hold it in reserve. Once you’ve built the solar panel, then the energy rains down from heaven for free. And from Exxon’s point of view, that’s the stupidest business model of all time.
For almost everybody else, this is a great advance. But getting over that hump of who’s going to help pay for the investment up front to build the infrastructure, that’s the big question.
That’s obviously what the IRA [the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act] was designed to do in this country, help get us over that particular hump. That’s not going to happen now in this country, though it’s happening everywhere else around the world.
So, we’re going to have to figure out a bunch of ways, even without federal help, to make it possible to exploit this cheapness in ways that really pay off.
For instance, putting solar panels on your roof in America costs three times what it does in Australia or the E.U.—not because of tariffs on the panels; that’s a tiny part of it—because we have this Byzantine and Baroque permitting structure. Every jurisdiction, every municipality has its own rules. They all send up inspector after inspector. You have to get these permits and that utility has to tie it in and on and on and on, all of which is unnecessary. So, one of the things we’re campaigning hard for at Sun Day is widespread reform of that.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright was in Iowa recently and made some remarks about the end of the subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act for renewable energy. He made the argument that this is a mature market that doesn’t need subsidies anymore, and, in a way, the fact that solar is now so cheap might support his argument.
Yes, except that as he well understands, the costs are all front-loaded with renewable energy and so it would make great sense to provide some modest assistance to get this stuff built so that then we have a cheap energy economy on the other side.
His talk about subsidies would be a lot more believable were we not continuing to subsidize, in massive amounts, the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, the big, beautiful bill [the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act] added a new subsidy for coal. We’ve been doing it for 250 years! And Chris Wright, yes, is energy secretary. But what was he before that? He was a fracking executive in the middle of the hydrocarbon industry.
But I thought that the remarks Wright was making in Iowa were quite interesting. He was saying, ‘we’re going to get blamed for high electric prices.’ And rightly so, I mean, they’ve cut off the cheapest form of electricity. But, like his boss, he’s somehow trying to pin the blame for high electric prices on Joe Biden, an argument that I think will not work very well.
These guys are creating their own mess. It would be a mess in any event, but the fact that it coincides with this boom in data centers is making the mess doubly hard to contain. If you wanted to build data centers—and I’m very unclear that we’re going to build as many of them as people keep saying—but if you wanted to, the only way to supply big, new amounts of electricity fast is to put up solar farms and windmills, because that’s the only thing you can do fast. It takes years to build a gas-fired power plant; it takes weeks to build a solar farm. That’s one of the great advantages of this technology.
Tell me about Sun Day. What’s the idea with this and does the name intentionally play off of Earth Day?
Yes, it sure does. And, in many ways, the first Earth Day was the most important political protest in American history, or the biggest—20 million Americans out in the street. That’s obviously not going to happen now, but this first iteration of this is on September 21st, the fall equinox, and the goal is to have hundreds and hundreds of events, all scattered around the country, all just beginning to drive home this point, that we could make a different set of choices than we’re making. That this technology really is available for everyone, that we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
That’s the most interesting new fact of this decade, maybe of this century so far, but it hasn’t sunk in yet, and we need to start making it sink in that we have a different set of choices than we had just a few years ago.
We need to start really adjusting how we see the world. I’m a writer and an organizer, and in both cases what you’re trying to do, I think above all else, is shift the zeitgeist some on the theory that if you shift the zeitgeist, people’s sense of what’s normal and natural and obvious, then it gets much easier to shift policies and politics.
It doesn’t happen automatically. You have to fight for it all. But if you can shift the zeitgeist, then it’s all easier. So that’s what we’ll try to do.
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