Despairing about climate change? The unstoppable growth of solar may change your mind

from The Conversation, May 11, 2023

Last year, the world built more new solar capacity than every other power source combined.

Solar is now growing much faster than any other energy technology in history. How fast? Fast enough to completely displace fossil fuels from the entire global economy before 2050.

The rise and rise of cheap solar is our best hope for rapidly mitigating climate change.

Total solar capacity tipped over 1 terawatt (1,000 gigawatts) for the first time last year. The sector is growing at around 20% a year. If this continues, we’ll hit 6 terawatts around 2031. In capacity terms, that would be larger than the combined total of coal, gas, nuclear and hydro.

By 2050, Earth will have a population of about 10 billion people. To supply everyone with enough electricity to live a good life, we’ll need about 200 billion megawatt-hours per year (equal to 200,000 terawatt-hours per year).

Let’s assume that solar does the heavy lifting for decarbonisation, completing two-thirds of the task with the remaining one-third left to wind, hydro and everything else put together. Is it possible?

Yes. If sustained, solar’s growth rate of 20% per year is easily fast enough to reach 80 terawatts of installed capacity in 2050 – enough to provide 130,000 terawatt-hours per year and (with help from wind) to entirely decarbonise an affluent world.

As well as eliminating most greenhouse emissions, we will also get rid of car exhausts, smokestacks, urban smog, coal mines, ash dumps, oil spills, oil-related warfare and gas fracking.

In Australia, 99% of new generation capacity is now solar and wind because it is cheap. To read the full article, follow this link: https://theconversation.com/despairing-about-climate-change-these-4-charts-on-the-unstoppable-growth-of-solar-may-change-your-mind-204901