In the midst of a world grappling with the ever-present threat of climate change, the solar energy revolution of 2025 is rewriting the rules of the global energy game. Once dismissed as little more than a green dream, solar power has now become the cheapest and fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet, catapulting China to the forefront of a technological and economic transformation that is reshaping everything from international trade to domestic politics.
Back in 1978, President Jimmy Carter extolled the virtues of solar energy, installing 32 panels on the White House roof and declaring, "No cartel controls the sun." Yet, history had other plans. The panels came down under President Ronald Reagan, and the annual "Sun Day" celebration vanished from the calendar. It would take decades—and a seismic shift in global economics and technology—for solar to return to the center of the energy conversation. According to Current Affairs, it was Germany that gave the global solar market its first big push in the late 1990s, but it is China that has seized the opportunity and run with it.
Today, China stands as the undisputed king of solar, having installed a staggering 887 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2024—almost half of the world's total. As Current Affairs reports, the country is not just the largest producer of solar cells but also the engine behind plummeting costs: the global average price of solar-generated electricity now hovers around $0.04 per kilowatt hour, making it the cheapest energy source in history. To put that in perspective, a conventional kilowatt hour from the grid costs $0.06 in Russia and a whopping $0.45 in Ireland, as per Statista data cited in the article.
This tidal wave of cheap solar panels, largely manufactured in China, has not been universally welcomed. In 2024, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stood at a shuttered solar plant in Georgia—closed after an influx of low-cost imports—and denounced China's "unfair competition" that, in her words, "distorts global prices" and "hurts American firms and workers, as well as firms and workers around the world." The European Union, for its part, launched investigations into whether Chinese subsidies had rigged bids for photovoltaic parks, notably in Romania. Yet, as Current Affairs points out, these complaints may miss the bigger picture: in a world on the brink of climate catastrophe, is free-market purity really the hill to die on?
The numbers tell a story of unstoppable momentum. The world is now adding over 244 gigawatts of solar capacity every six months, a pace that would have seemed fantastical even a decade ago. According to clean energy analysts at Ember, "No other electricity source has scaled this quickly," with the surge driven by "plummeting costs, modular design and fast and easy deployment." In 2025 alone, China's solar capacity doubled from the previous year, and the country installed more solar in the first half of the year than the rest of the world combined, as reported by Prospect.
But China isn't just powering its own grid. In August 2025, the country exported 46 gigawatts of solar panels in a single month—equivalent to the output of 46 large coal or nuclear plants. This export juggernaut is fueling solar booms across the globe, especially in the Global South. The Rocky Mountain Institute found that renewable energy is growing twice as fast in the Global South as in the Global North. In Africa, solar adoption rates in 2025 were described as "off the charts" by Ember's chief analyst Dave Jones. Twenty African countries set new records for solar panel imports, and in Sierra Leone, panels imported over the previous year could meet 61 percent of the nation's electricity needs.
Pakistan, too, has emerged as a solar success story. China exported 16.6 gigawatts of solar capacity to Pakistan in the financial year ending March 2024—a fivefold increase from 2022—with average costs falling by 54 percent. Notably, most of this demand came from rooftop and shopfront installations, not government projects. As Waqas Moosa, chairman of the Pakistan Solar Association, told NPR, "Individuals have made this decision. It's like a democratisation of solar."
The European Union, meanwhile, continues to expand its solar footprint. Sixteen EU countries now generate more than 10 percent of their electricity from solar, with Hungary reaching over 25 percent in 2024 and an astonishing 40 percent in the summer of 2025. Germany installed 16.2 gigawatts of solar power in 2024, bringing its total to 89 gigawatts—95 percent of which were made in China. The UK saw solar generation rise by a third in the first half of 2025. Yet, the EU's efforts to curb carbon emissions through its Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) face challenges: the current carbon price sits at about $80 per tonne CO2, well below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's estimate of $190 per tonne for the social cost of carbon.
In the United States, the solar story is a tale of political whiplash. President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 was hailed as the most ambitious clean energy bill in U.S. history, aiming to make hydrogen available for $2 per kilo by 2026 and spur massive investments in renewables. But the act was scrapped by President Trump in his first week back in office, and subsidies for "unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources"—a thinly veiled swipe at Chinese solar—were ended by executive order in 2025. Despite these headwinds, solar is booming: generation is up nearly 40 percent year-on-year, and solar is set to account for the majority of new generating capacity installed in 2025. By March 2025, fossil fuels produced less than half of American electricity for the first time.
This surge is not just technical—it's cultural. Sun Day, the solar celebration first established by Carter, was resurrected by climate activist Bill McKibben in 2025, with 500 events nationwide. McKibben recalls, "It went great—the biggest day of clean energy action in decades, with about 500 events spread out around the country." His latest book, Here Comes the Sun, chronicles the astonishing rise of solar from novelty to necessity. As he notes, it took until 2022 for the world to install its first terawatt (1,000 gigawatts) of solar power; just two years later, the second terawatt was added, and the third could be reached by the end of 2025.
Critics argue that the solar boom is merely adding to overall energy use, not displacing fossil fuels. Yet, the evidence suggests otherwise. In May 2025, China reduced coal power use by 4.7 percent compared to the previous year, even as its economy surged. California, now the world's fourth-largest economy, used 40 percent less natural gas in early summer 2024 than in the same period in 2023. Globally, wind and solar nearly surpassed gas generation in April 2025 and are expected to overtake coal by 2026.
Perhaps most transformative is the democratic potential of solar. As McKibben and others point out, solar's decentralized nature breaks the grip of centralized fossil fuel industries, which have often been linked to authoritarian outcomes and entrenched interests—such as the $445 million in fossil fuel funding that supported Trump's 2024 campaign. With 80 percent of humanity living in countries dependent on fossil fuel imports, the shift to local, renewable power could reshape not just energy, but politics and society itself.
As the world races toward a solar future, one thing is certain: the sun, inexhaustible and unowned, is finally living up to its promise as the engine of a cleaner, more democratic energy era.
