Superfact 117: The share of electricity generated from Solar Power in the world has grown from essentially 0% in the year 2000, 0.15% in 2010, to 3.19% in 2020, and to 8.75% in 2025. Both wind and solar energy are expanding fast around the world, but solar energy is a strong latecomer to the energy scene.
In the year 2000 less than 0.01% of the world’s electricity was generated by solar. In 2005 it was 0.02%, in 2010 it was 0.15%, in 2015 it was 1.07%, 2020 it was 3.19%, in 2025 it was 8.75%. Can you guess what will it will be in 2030? The United States may be behind the rest of the world with respect to wind power and EVs, but it closely follows the rest of world when it is about solar. You can play around with the graph below and select different countries by clicking here.
New solar panel technology such as Perovskite Solar cells is being developed. The price of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 99% since 1991 and by 82% in the last ten years. New battery technology such as sodium-ion batteries is being developed. One advantage of sodium-ion batteries is that they function exactly like a lithium-ion battery but replace lithium with abundant sodium ions to carry the electric charge. The evolving battery technology makes it easier to store power from solar during the night. SolarPower Europe project that the global solar fleet will more than double by 2030. In other words, the future looks bright for solar power, and that pun was intended.
Solar Power as a Share of Electricity Generation Around the World
For solar, the United States follows the rest of the world closely. Some countries have a higher percentage, such as the Cook Islands – 50%, Luxembourg – 30.52%, Chile – 25.06%. If you wish you can take a closer look here, or here, and you can play around with the different graphs. You can pick millions of combinations of countries and regions. For illustrative purposes I am showing some combinations below.
How Clean and Safe is Solar Energy ?
You sometimes come across claims that renewable energy isn’t really clean energy. The truth is that renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc., is much cleaner than gas, oil, and coal. These energy sources are also much safer and using them saves a lot of lives. As you can see, among the eight energy sources depicted solar is the safest, and among the cleanest. Coal has 1,230 times higher death rate than solar. According to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago Chinese citizens can expect to live on average 2.2 years longer than they would have a decade ago, due to the sharp drop in pollution. This is thanks to the increased use of EVs and renewables such as solar.
Below are two pictures corresponding to zoom-in of the graph above.
Important Climate and Energy Facts
As I said, the misinformation about climate science has bamboozled a lot of people. We know that climate change / global warming is happening. We have also known for several decades that the current climate change / global warming is not natural. It is caused by us, chiefly due to the burning of fossil fuels. Yet many non-scientists dispute it. The scientific evidence is conclusive, but a lot of people know very little about the evidence. It includes satellites directly measuring our greenhouse gases trapping heat, the upper troposphere is cooling whilst the lower atmosphere is warming, showing that the heating is from greenhouse gases, the unnatural speed of the warming is another piece of evidence, isotope studies, climate models, etc. Below are fourteen super facts related to climate science and clean energy.
- (16) Wind power is providing more than a quarter of Texas Power
- (17) Wind power is not a major cause of bird death
- (25) Global Warming is Happening and is Caused by us
- (26) The Hockey Stick Graph is not Wrong
- (34) Scientists Agree that Global Warming is happening and that we are the Cause
- (52) Climate change worsens wildfires in the US
- (77) Landman Lies
- (87) Wind Energy is Indeed Clean Energy
- (91) Without carbon dioxide the Earth would freeze
- (96) Nuclear Energy is Relatively Clean and Safe
- (99) Carbon Capture and Storage an Unfulfilled Promise
- (100) The Unfolding Clean Energy Revolution
- (106) IPCC Did Not Backtrack on Global Warming Being Human Caused
- (107) EVs are Replacing the Internal Combustion Engine
To see the other Super Facts click here
Super Facts 
Interesting article, Thomas!
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Thank you so much Alex
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I find the misinformation about climate science quite shocking, and probably wouldn’t have even realized if I hadn’t read your blog, Thomas! It’s great that solar is the safest energy source and seems to be expanding fast around the world.
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Thank you so much Ada. Yes solar has been expanding very quickly lately worldwide. I agree, the misinformation about climate science is quite shocking. It is very bold and blatantly false. Make the lie big as they say. The disinformation is mostly on social media and it is currently also coming from our own administration (US administration). Those are not good sources for scientific information but it is unfortunately what a lot people read/listen to and believe. I call it disinformation because it is typically intentional.
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I love that Elon Musk is putting his data centers in space so they can access this unlimited supply of energy.
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I did not know that. But that sounds like a very interesting development.
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All these stats are so interesting. Thank you for another informative piece, Thomas.
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Thank you so much for your kind words Esther.
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Solar is great. My brother put it on his roof in New Hampshire a few years ago. I think now it has paid for itself. I think he said the electric company pays him to buy his over supply. Not sure I got that right.
On climate change it is happening but the crazies fall on this “even the scientists don’t believe it now” what they fail to see is they all agree it is happening, what they fail to say is that the scientists don’t all agree on the exact time of how it continues, the largest impact or areas, what can be the fallout. They all have different ideas but never did they say the data is wrong.
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That is good for him. I don’t have solar myself but I know people that get paid from their electric company buying their over supply. I don’t think it applies to all roof solar. I think you have to install some special thing for it, but I know you can do it. You are right the scientific consensus is that climate change / global warming is happening and that we are the cause of the current and unnaturally fast global warming, chiefly because of our burning of fossil fuels. Very few scientists question those facts because the evidence for both points are overwhelming. The details about exactly how fast it is going and what the consequences will be in the future are more complicated. First of all, it depends on our future emissions. The people who make that claim you refer to “even the scientists don’t believe it now” are not only wrong, they are probably dishonest too, because it is so easy to look up using google.
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