Solar Is Powering Our Lives In More Ways Than You Might Know

Last Updated on: 12th July 2025, 02:28 pm

I remember attending the World’s Fair in Knoxville, TN, in 1982. Amidst the carnival rides, food booths, and international pavilions, the theme “Energy Turns Our World” was really compelling to me. I remember seeing an exhibit of a planned neighborhood of half a dozen or more homes, all of which were powered by common solar. It seemed to make a lot of sense then, and it still does now. In fact, solar is powering many more homes and businesses than you might expect.

Solar is now growing faster than any power source in history — people are constructing a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every 15 hours. That’s more or less what one coal-fired plant generates.

The story of solar’s rise in the US is fascinating. Bill McKibben — climate activist, professor at Middlebury College, and founder of 350.org — wrote an informative piece for the New Yorker this week. In case you don’t get that publication or might not have the attention span to digest his 5,000 word essay, here are some highlights, especially as relates to the state of solar energy in the US.

“Forecasters are still a little in the dark,” McKibben states, “as to how fast solar is growing.”

Let’s put the topic of solar in a little perspective to get started. Averaged over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar energy fall upon every square meter of Earth — 44 quadrillion (4.4 x 1016) watts of power, NASA explains.

At last, the world has begun to shift to this amazing solar source. “Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often,” McKibben reminds us, with the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution as big-time but infrequent examples of comparable systemic change.

• Last year, 96% of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables.
• In the US, during that time, 93% of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.
• In March 2025, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the US.
• Texas is now installing renewable energy and batteries faster than California. The state has also set records for solar and wind production as well as for battery discharge.

“All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word ‘power,’” says McKibben, “offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.”

McKibben reminds us that the sun and the wind are ubiquitous and complementary, so that “when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up.” Concerned about renewables intermittency? As the director of reliability analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation described to CleanTechnica, “Batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.”

Importantly, because renewables can’t be stockpiled, the energy they produce makes it “difficult to fight wars over.”

Looking Beyond the Big Brutal Bill

McKibben asks, “What might slow this revolution down, and how might we speed it up?”

An analysis from the Rhodium Group think tank found that, by 2035, the Big Brutal Bill may have eliminated as much as 72% of all the clean electricity that would have been produced in the US under the previous Biden administration Inflation Reduction Act.

In case you’ve heard otherwise, price isn’t the barrier to a solar transition, as the cost of solar panels and other equipment will continue to fall.

“Instead, the blockages come from policy and infrastructure: there are nearly enough renewable projects on the books to power the United States entirely from renewables,” McKibben continues, “but they wait in an ‘interconnection queue’ for utility companies to approve them.” The Biden Administration had been working to reduce these blockages, but “the Trump Administration is actively trying to impede such progress.”

McKibben also offers a kernel of hope that this Trump administration “backlash is a backhanded recognition of the moment; the Administration, and its supporters in the fossil-fuel industry, clearly consider this the last possible moment to stifle the sun.”

Why is that? It may be the difference between work and heat — and the efficiencies built into each.

All energy demand comes down to either heating things up or making things move, which, in physics, is known as doing “work,” explains RMI. We require more work than heat to power our motors, electrical appliances, and data processing to generate warmth. But even though needs have changed, fundamental energy supply methods have not changed much. Work energy has proven to be more proficient than heat energy in providing heat — an electric heat pump is three to five times as efficient as the typical gas boiler. Last year, for the third year straight, heat pumps outsold furnaces in the US.

McKibben deepens the discussion by outlining how burning oil to power a car or burning coal to produce electricity yields only 30% efficiency. It’s important to discuss efficiency because “even an EV charged with power from a coal-fired plant is still far more efficient than a vehicle run on an internal-combustion engine.” And an e-bike is “almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a five-hundred-watt e-bike costs, on average, about eight cents.”

Current predictions from the IEA offer a positive upward trajectory for solar.

• By 2026, solar will generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear plants combined.
• By 2029, it will generate more than all the hydro dams. By 2031, it will have outstripped gas, and, by 2032, coal.
• Solar is likely to become the world’s primary source of all energy, not just electricity, by 2035.

But the IEA also estimates that, if we are to head for a net-zero carbon world by 2050, the pace at which the world installs renewables needs to increase by about 20%.

What about the prevalent fears that we might run out of the minerals necessary to build the panels and turbines and batteries? McKibben suggests that vast new sources of lithium, an essential ingredient of most of the world’s batteries, have been located. Mineral prices have fallen even as the demand for them has soared. The degradation of the earth to retrieve those minerals is also less than that of excavating fossil fuels.

Solar panels, with their potential for recycling materials, will “be like small mines,” McKibben says. Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and a senior researcher at Oxford University, calculated recently that at “the silver used in one solar panel built in 2010 would be enough for around five panels today.”

By 2035 or so, when McKibben’s own oldest panels may have started to go out of service, “the minerals that each contains will almost certainly be enough for ten new panels.”

If you’d like to learn more, check out Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.