Global solar energy has reached a new historic milestone: the cumulative installed capacity of solar power plants has exceeded 3 terawatts.
This is not just a nice round number. It shows how rapidly solar energy has transformed from a promising technology into one of the key sources of new electricity worldwide.
Not long ago, the scale was entirely different. Humanity took about a decade to reach the first global terawatt of solar capacity. The second appeared in less than three years, and the third in less than two. Growth rates are accelerating noticeably.
Why 3 terawatts is an important milestone
Three terawatts is 3 000 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. Behind this figure are millions of solar panels on rooftops, industrial facilities, and massive solar power plants across different continents.
It is especially important that solar energy is ceasing to be a technology only for a few wealthy countries. It is increasingly spreading in nations across Asia, Africa, and other rapidly growing regions, where cheap and relatively quickly installed generation can significantly change access to electricity.
Another indicator of the scale of change: in 2020, 42 countries had solar capacities of more than 1 GW, and by 2025, that number of countries had already reached 74.
The next goal is 9 terawatts
According to the BloombergNEF forecast, by 2036 global solar capacity could exceed 9 terawatts.
If the forecast holds true, over the next ten years humanity will install approximately twice as much solar capacity as was created in the entire previous history of the industry.
This clearly illustrates one of the main features of modern energy: solar panels are spreading not linearly, but at an accelerating rate. Production is scaling up, technologies are improving, equipment costs are decreasing, and experience in building solar power plants is accumulating worldwide.
But panels are only part of the energy revolution.
The more solar generation appears in power grids, the more important other technologies become: batteries, power grid modernization, flexible demand management, and energy transmission between regions.
The sun does not shine around the clock, so the next major stage of development is learning how to most effectively store and distribute vast amounts of clean electricity.
That is precisely why the record of 3 terawatts can be seen not as a finish line, but as the beginning of a new stage.
Good news that is easy to overlook.
Such changes rarely look dramatic in the daily news feed. There is no single day when the world suddenly "switched to solar energy."
Instead, every month new stations are connected, new panels are installed on rooftops, battery storage facilities appear, and power grids are expanded.
But if you step back from the daily headlines and look at the decade as a whole, the change becomes obvious.
The world has already built 3 terawatts of solar energy. And the next 6 terawatts may appear faster than the first three.
And this is, perhaps, one of those positive global trends whose significance we will fully realize only after a few years.
