This was the year that solar — finally, inarguably — achieved main character energy. Between January and May, China’s solar capacity surpassed 1,000 gigawatts, the first country in the world to do so, and in April, solar and wind were generating a full quarter of the country’s electricity. This past summer, also for the first time, solar became the main source of electricity in the European Union. All told, the sun provided 10 times more electricity globally than it did a decade ago, when the Paris Agreement was struck.
Marking this bright turn of events, in October, Bill McKibben, the renowned American journalist and environmental activist, published ”Here Comes the Sun,” a chronicle of the revolutionary rise of solar. For McKibben and other energy experts, solar now has the potential to transform everything, from geopolitics to the economy, and is our last, best hope for staving off climate catastrophe. “This is the first thing with potential to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet ultimately gets,” McKibben said in an interview earlier this fall. “Every tenth of a degree is another 100 million people who move from a relatively safe climate zone to a dangerous one.”
What changed? Solar energy has been around for more than 6,000 years, used in Bronze Age China to light fires and in ancient Rome to heat bathhouses. In 1883, American inventor Charles Fritts created the first photovoltaic cell by coating selenium, a superconductor material, with a thin layer of gold. Over the next several decades, the technology evolved and improved, but by the time Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House in 1979, it was still relatively expensive (those panels cost $28,000 U.S.) and inefficient (the energy was used only for heating water).
Then, in some ways, solar went dark — when Reagan took office, he killed tax incentives (and tore the panels off), oil prices stabilized, and much of the world went in a different energy direction.
Solar didn’t go away, however. On the contrary, over the next 40 years, as scientists refined the technology and governments pushed pro-renewables policy, it became exponentially cheaper, far more efficient and much easier to install. Solar is now on track to be the dominant form of electricity generation by 2050.
Here, a brief history of the solar surge.
Innovation begets innovation
As technologies go, solar panels are pretty straightforward. Each panel is made up of photovoltaic (PV) cells, which in turn are made up primarily of semiconductor material, such as silicon. When sunlight hits the cell, electrons are released and converted to DC power (an inverter changes this to AC, which households use). The silicon solar cell, as we know it today, was created in 1954 by researchers at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
But starting in 1970, according to an MIT report published this past August, there have been 81 separate innovations in solar panel technology that cumulatively cut the cost of the tech by more than 99 per cent. In 1976, it cost about $100 (U.S.) to produce one watt of solar energy; today that same watt costs about 10 cents. The cheapest fossil fuels, meanwhile, now cost 41 per cent more, the UN says.
These innovations have been in both hardware, such as improvements to antireflective coated glass, and in broad, systemic changes, like faster permitting processes for solar projects. The solar industry has also benefitted from, and incorporated, innovation in other fields: semiconductors, metallurgy, even, ironically, oil and gas drilling. AI and robotics are expected to produce further cost reductions and boost performance.
One challenge solar has faced since its inception is intermittency. The sun obviously doesn’t shine all the time, which creates gaps on the grid that must be filled by other sources (historically, fossil fuel-based). But solar energy can be stored, and battery capacity has dramatically improved in recent years, too. New solar batteries use non-toxic and abundant sodium rather than lithium, and while these batteries are larger and heavier, they’re also safer, last longer and much cheaper.
According to a report by energy think tank Ember, “batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar’s full potential, getting as close as 97 per cent of the way to delivering constant supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively, in the sunniest places.”
Finally, as we’ve seen with the personal computer, technologies get predictably cheaper as their cumulative production increases. “Companies have gotten better at building things,” says Sara Smith-Hastings, a professor at the University of Calgary who studies energy transitions. “So, you have economies of scale, you have learning-by-doing.”
Plus, solar holds a competitive edge over oil and gas: the sun always comes up. Whereas with a non-renewable resource, as Smith-Hastings says, “once you extract that oil or that natural gas, you have to find oil and gas that’s much, much harder to extract.”
The German lesson
In his book, ”How Solar Energy Became Cheap,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Gregory Nemet argues that, while the U.S. may have created solar technology, Germany built the market for it. In 2000, Germany’s “red-green” coalition government passed the Renewable Energy Act (EEG in German), which mandated that public utilities purchase electricity generated by wind and solar (markedly more expensive at the time than coal or nuclear) under fixed contracts for 20 years. This “feed-in” tariff was designed so anyone could build a renewable power plant or install rooftop solar panels and receive guaranteed profits by selling energy to the grid at premium prices.
While electricity prices remain high in Germany, this induced energy transition had the desired effect: The cost of renewables fell, a new solar industry was born and energy-related carbon emissions dropped — by 32 per cent since the passing of EEG. In 2000, renewables represented a six per cent share of Germany’s electricity mix; by 2024, it was 60 per cent.
Most crucially, it also reoriented global energy policy, with more than 100 other countries adopting similar models. “The EEG transformed the world PV market,” Nemet writes. Between 2004 and 2010, it accounted for half of global PV installations while the size of the world market grew 30 times.
A green industrial giant
Someone needed to supply this rapidly growing market, and, by both accident and design, China became the country to do so. Around the time that Germany passed EEG, it was barely giving renewables a second glance — in 2000, Chinese innovators had filed just 18 clean energy patents. But by 2022, they had filed more than 5,000.
This green revolution happened gradually, and then all at once. First, several ambitious scientists educated in PV research labs abroad founded startups that could meet the growing solar demand in Europe. Production scaled at a historic pace, and, by 2007, China was producing more PV than any country in the world. A year later, the 2008 financial crisis made the European market less viable, and Beijing began to invest in its now substantial domestic industry, hoping it could revive a flagging economy, reduce pollution and ensure energy security. Cheap credit, generous promises of land and direct subsidies followed. Cutthroat competition among domestic solar companies meant no one company had a significant share of the global market and prices went down even more.
Today, China is the undisputed global leader in solar, both in terms of its own market and in powering the energy transition in the rest of the world. It is now supplying enormous emerging markets, such as Brazil, India and Pakistan. As of this past July, the country was building 74 per cent of all solar and wind projects. In September, President Xi Jinping told the UN that his country, still the world’s biggest polluter, would cut its carbon emissions by seven to 10 per cent by 2035. And it would do so by expanding wind and solar capacity six times its 2020 levels, a massive 3,600 gigawatts in total.
Waiting for the sun
For a brief moment in 2010, Canada had the world’s largest solar farm, a facility in Sarnia, Ont., that supplied enough electricity to power 40 per cent of the town’s homes. Since then, thanks to shifting political winds and priorities — as well the continued dominance of an energy sector synonymous with oil and gas and our abundant supply of hydroelectricity — solar has remained just a small part of our electricity mix.
While our total wind, solar and energy storage capacity almost doubled between 2019 and 2024, it’s still just 24 GW, with solar accounting for just 1.1 per cent of electricity generation. By contrast, in the much smaller and cloudier Netherlands, it accounts for 16.6 per cent. “We’re not even in the conversation,” says Mike Andrade, the CEO of Morgan Solar, a Toronto company that specializes in solar energy solutions. “Canada has tremendous inertia on hydroelectricity, nuclear power, oil and gas. There’s massive incumbency and massive inertia and historical success.” But with solar now so cheap and its growth so relentless, that will inevitably change. The rest of the world, experts argue, will compel it to.
“While we may be falling behind in Canada,” says Smith-Hastings, “at least the rest of the world is continuing to install solar and continuing to bring its cost down. When we’re ready to jump on this opportunity, we will benefit from that.”
Can’t get enough sun? On the latest episode of the MaRS podcast, Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World, Mike Andrade and other solar experts discuss the potential impact this shift in power could have.
Jason McBride writes about technology for MaRS. Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.
