Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: September 25, 2024
Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: September 25, 2024
Updates from the solar revolution!
The solar revolution is advancing rapidly, with new milestones arriving thick and fast.
Tell your state leaders the latest stats from the epic global solar surge!
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Reasons For Hope
The global energy picture has been completely transformed in just a few years with the exponential growth of solar power, and it’s critical for decision-makers at every level to realize how much has changed.
BloombergNEF reports that a massive 428 gigawatts (428 thousand megawatts!) of solar power were installed worldwide in 2023, up by 76% from 2022. Notably, this is per year, not cumulative, making it even more impressive! And we’re still zooming ahead: BloombergNEF forecasts that nearly 600 GW of solar will be installed in 2024. WOW!
Thanks to this unprecedented solar surge, 85% of new electricity capacity built worldwide in 2023 was clean energy. That’s a massive turnaround that happened very fast: in 2014, just ten years ago, the majority of new electricity projects being built worldwide ran on fossil fuels.
And in the United States, 2024 is bringing an even bigger historic surge in clean energy, with an incredible 97% of new electricity-generating capacity projects built this year using zero-carbon sources (mostly solar).
These are numbers that would have seemed impossibly optimistic just a few years ago, but the global solar boom is exceeding everyone’s expectations. To recap:
428 gigawatts of solar were installed globally in 2023, up 76% from 2024
85% of the new electricity capacity built worldwide in 2023 was clean energy.
97% of new electricity capacity built in the USA in 2024 is clean energy.
U.S. policymakers need to know about how much the landscape has changed. Solar has reached maturity as an energy source now, and we need to accelerate adoption of this clean electron-generating technology as much as we can.