As the world struggles to access oil as a consequence of the US war on Iran, the scramble for alternative forms of energy has become a mad dash. And contrary to the energy future some have imagined, the hunt for new power sources has supercharged the solar trade — leaving even nuclear power way back in the rearview mirror.
According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.
As professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford Jan Rosenow told the British broadcaster, “solar is now the engine of the power transition.”
Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.
Much of the solar energy boom can be traced back to China, where massive supply is driving down the cost of photovoltaics to unprecedented lows. Though plenty of US-based startups have emerged with the goal of reviving the nuclear energy sector, their efforts to commercialize fission seem to be going nowhere fast.
In fact, the cost of nuclear construction projects in the US have skyrocketed over recent decades, defying conventional norms around infrastructure, which hold that complex energy builds should get cheaper as scale increases.
For the rest of the world, cheap solar power is increasingly becoming a lifeline, both in the literal day-to-day sense, and as a way to decouple from the long-standing oil economy.
As Rosenow told the BBC, the issue going forward is no longer one of access to alternative energy, but in balanced development of infrastructure for underdeveloped and overexploited nations.
“The bigger question,” Rosenow says, “is no longer whether solar grows, but whether our power systems and institutions can keep up.”
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