IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first (opens in new tab)

Yes, from the source report, for total generation capacity, solar is in a distant sixth:

Coal: 10858 TWh

Natural Gas: 6822 TWh

Hydro: 4470 TWh

Nuclear: 2859 TWh

Wind: 2723 TWh

Solar: 2653 TWh

Decent growth, but still a long way to go.

> solar becoming the world's primary source of energy

Solar has always been the primary source of energy, Something like 99.95%, with geothermal taking 90% of the rest and tidal being basically zero

Should it be ‘solar leading energy subsidy growth’.

Just Stop Oil announced the cessation of all activities in my country.

Officially it's because reportedly they've achieved their goals locally, but I can't help but think that it was really because the POTUS Just Stopped way more Oil than they ever imagined they could.

The man is an overachiever.

He is in the process of killing the rise of neonazism, exposing those religious extremists that want constant wars on the Middle East, creating a multipolar world commerce chamber, turning the EU into a federation, popularizing socialism (and even outright communism) in the US, dismantling the US's foreign government overthrowing apparatus, creating actual diplomatic relations between the Eastern Asia governments...

The world's most effective ecoterrorist.

Greenpeace should name their next ship after him.

In a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.

You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.

Comparing primary energy is VERY misleading. From Marc Jacobson:

The use of primary energy on the vertical axis is an old trick by the fossil fuel industry to mislead people into thinking that one unit of fossils = one unit of renewables. In fact, one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity is the equivalent of three units of fossil fuel electricity.

Another trick is to pretend we need all those fossils if we switched to renewables. In fact, if we switch to renewables, 12% of the fossil fuel energy disappears because that is how much energy is used to mine-transport-refine fossil fuels+uranium for energy, and we wouldn't need to do that anymore

A third trick is to pretend we need so much energy if we go to all electricity powered by renewables. In that case, because EVs use 75% less energy than gasoline/diesel vehicles, heat pumps use 75% less energy than combustion heating, etc., energy demand goes down another 42%.

In sum, this plot illustrates the real story of where we are and where we need to go. The proper metric is end-use energy, not primary energy.

https://lnkd.in/gYw9mB3x

and here's the paper

https://lnkd.in/gTcqkyG5

While your statement is true your graph is misleading for two reasons.

1) comparison of spent energy for fossil fuels vs electricity is not a good way to do it because electric motors use less for the same output. Compare kWh per 100km for an ICE car and EV. Electrification will lead to a drop simply because of this

2) the graph is global, we have seen energy consumption go down in the developed world. E.g. the EU now uses less electricity than 20 years ago.

It's quite impressive how badly we've done in cutting fossil fuel use in that. Gas+Oil+Coal has gone up 71% since the first IPCC report in 1990 to the amount for 2024.

Yea, the article struck me immediately as a lot of spin in that it’s hyping the growth rate of solar versus the growth rate of other tech. Solar is newer and is still a relatively small slice of the overall pie compared to oil and gas. It’s relatively easy to rapidly grow a small pie wedge than a large one given the overall growth rate of the pie. And growth rates inevitably slow down as pie wedges get larger, because they have to. So, as you say, good news, but still over-hyped, IMO.

Read it carefully. The growth in renewables exceeded the growth in electricity demand. The 60% figure is all forms of energy.

Stated another way, we could (hypothetically) stop building coal and gas fired electrial generation and we'd still have enough renewable growth to cover electrical needs.

There's certainly room to start offsetting non-electrical power usage, but that's a different ball game entirely. I'd be pretty happy if we got to a point where only transportation ran on oil. To do that, we need enough renewables to both offset growth (done) and to start shutting down non-renewable generation. Even if we did nothing, those plants have a usable service life of < 100 years so we're within a human lifetime of not needing them anymore.

In deed. We are really late in ramping down fossils usage and emissions, and the death toll is higher than the other bad things in the news headlines.

Cost is the barrier

> they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back

Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%.

> solar would have made far fewer emissions

Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar.

> they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about

True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it.

> They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.

I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019689040...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.

Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter right now. I am literally paying that at the pump. I will actually happily pay more then that if the diesel were actually renewable, but instead it doesn't exist.

No, you are comparing watthours to watts. At 90% used factor 12GW would be ~95 TWh.

No you're wrong, the nuclear "started construction" and so solar added infinitely more generation than the zero they will generate this year/decade.

The world did add 3GW of nuclear generation in 2025 but it also closed 3GW.

I made the same gut assumption, and it points to either poor writing, or deliberately misreading writing that they mix units like that in the same paragraph, where presumably the idea is that we get a feel for growth in both?

Its probably nitpick correct, because the 12GW is planned capacity, while the solar might be measured use? but simple assumptins or conversions, as another comment points out, get you comparable numbers. taking the title into account, the whole article is a little bit smoke and mirrors on clear communication, despite having plenty of numbers. Thats a shame because it sounds like even unvarnished its good results!

Just to add to your point; The final energy demand is much less than the primary energy we produce due to the energy costs of extraction, refining, transportation, and inefficient end use.

According to Kingsmill Bond (great name btw) on Dave Roberts' Volts podcast if we magically could replace all fossil energy with renewables today the final energy use would only be ~30% of today's final energy use.

"We’re pouring, from our calculations, two thirds of the primary energy into the air and wasting it." - Kingsmill Bond

https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable

A pretty big one is the hollowing out of the international power oil producers have over the life of fossil importers; the middle east becomes pretty irrelevant for Latin America if you don't need their oil, and maybe Lebanon will avoid an US invasion if the newly discovered gas cannot find buyers anyway.

I'd argue that the decreased usage of oil has -to some degree- already started, e.g. Chinas crude imports have dropped the last two years in a row and yet they're still adding ever more EVs at a spectacular rate. There's practically no way but down for those numbers. It's mostly similar for the EU, though they're not as aggressive re EVs.

1279 units vs total 20'000'000 units or 0,006% doesn't make a difference

What is interesting is that tesla had 1'636'129 deliveries in 2025 which accounts for 8,1% of that number. That means other vendors are healthy and it is a good thing for EV market.