Solar becomes the world's fastest-growing source of power

Solar power has become the world's fastest-growing source of electricity, with record installations making it the single largest driver of new generation capacity and reshaping the global energy mix at a pace that has repeatedly outstripped forecasts.

The scale of the solar boom is remarkable. Driven by costs that have plummeted over the past decade, supportive policies and surging demand, solar panels are being installed around the world at a record-shattering rate, on rooftops, in vast utility-scale farms and increasingly in developing countries hungry for affordable power.

Solar's rise has been so rapid that analysts and agencies have been forced to revise their projections upward again and again. What was once a marginal, expensive technology has become, in much of the world, the cheapest source of new electricity, and a central pillar of the energy transition.

The growth has been accompanied by a parallel boom in battery storage, which helps address solar's intermittency by storing energy generated during the day for use after dark, making a grid powered increasingly by the sun more feasible.

Challenges remain, including the need to expand and modernise electricity grids, manage the variability of supply, and ensure that supply chains for panels and minerals are secure and sustainable. But the trajectory is unmistakable. Solar's extraordinary ascent stands as one of the most hopeful developments in the effort to decarbonise the world's energy, a technology whose falling costs and soaring deployment have made clean power not just viable but, increasingly, the obvious economic choice.