The coming solar era in numbers

An attempt to visualize the unprecedented growth of solar and wind

The picture above is an attempt to show how unprecedentedly fast the growth of solar and wind has become. And there is no sign of slowing down.

The picture shows from the advent of electricity around 1882, fossil and hydro-electric energy where the only games in town. Their market share did not change because together it was close to 100%. I think this 75 period of steady hegemony is one of the reasons many people still can’t imagine a world without fossil fuels.

From 1950 to 1995 this dominance was challenged by nuclear. The challenge of nuclear to fossil in terms of market share ended around 2000, and by then nuclear had it’s highest electricity market share ever of almost 17%.

Only recently have wind and (now predominantly) solar emerged as challengers. What always strikes me is how constant and predictable their exponential growth has been until now. You see it again in on this graph with its novel way to frame the data. Worldwide market share is now 15%. But the trend is exponential growth with the highest correlation (99.98%) at 12% growth in market share per year. At this rate global market share would increase to 100% in 2040 (with solar and wind gobbling up 10% market share every year in 2040). That is of course impossible: market share can never go higher than 100%, and as market share increases, it becomes harder and harder to push competitors out of niches that suit them.

But still: never in the history of mankind have we seen such a rapid rise of any form of energy!

I’m just putting it out there since you don’t see the revolutionary change if you look at cummulative primary energy (picture from OurWorldInData below).

Electricity is an increasing part of total energy and it’s where most of our energy use is heading. You should of course look at final energy (ignoring the waste inherent in burning fuel) but even if you look at total final electricity (see below) it is sometimes hard to see how revolutionary what is happening with solar and wind actually is. It almost seems like coal is still growing fast. And it is, in absolute terms.

If you look at market share, the picture becomes a little bit clearer. You can see that oil+gas rose to almost 40% market share in 1970, but that (after the oil crises, OPEC and increasing awareness of oil’s problems, and the lower price of coal) it lost some market share. You can also see the bump in market share from nuclear and how that market share is slowly declining after 2000. But it I think it still doesn’t tell you very clearly how the change we are in the middle off is playing out.

So that’s why I like the presentation I’ve shown in the beginning and that is also represented below. I had to use some pretty drastic averaging to make it clear, because the changes from year to year are enormous (except for solar and wind). I also combined all fossil fuel and hydro (that is declining in market share since 1919) because the fluctuations partially cancel each other out, making the point clearer.

Once you’ve done all that you can see that the rise of solar and wind is unprecedented in speed and size. Nuclear is keeping its market share but the era of fossil fuels is over.

And let me remind people again that this is not only because of the spectacular drop in solar costs (that have reduced in price hundreds of times over the past decades) but also the even more regular rise in battery production and their even more steeply dropping price. See picture below from my new (open access) article on learning curves.

In countries close to the equator and in countries with the space to massively overbuild solar, a day’s worth of battery storage is enough to supplement solar for all electricity use. It can also be used to give the grid more robust and precise stability compared to the old fashioned mechnical inertia of fossil and nuclear. I recently explained this on bluesky and on twitter and compared it to going from vinyl to digital.

If you like or dislike this visualization, please let me know on bluesky or twitter. In found it useful for myself so I thought I would share.