> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
I am pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I think clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful.
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
An interesting fact is that China has passed "peak coal" in 2024 while still growing with about 5% in a year.
Denmark had peak coal early (2003) due to early investments in wind power. Coal is now practically gone.
We might see China get the same shift in electricity source as Denmark had over the past 20 years, just much faster.
Wow almost a tripling of solar output in less than 4 years. That’s incredible!
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
The answer is batteries (why it hasn’t seen the adoption and also what is about to enable it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y94yV7WUwGY is a short lecture by someone from BloombergNEF that speaks to some of your questions.
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
We're getting to a point where we can stop boiling water for electricity.
What a time to be alive.
That's why I hope Helion Fusion does well. The system they are developing sends power to a device that captures power directly no boiling water.
“How did humanity solve climate change? We taught sand to move electrons with photons.”
I wonder if we will run out of battery materials in a hundred years, then what?
green gas or flow batteries
Now that PV panels are less expensive than cabinet grade plywood, it makes a lot of sense to get some independence through local generation.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Whenever there is a discussion about nuclear I always remember this XKCD https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
> fanatical implementation
Not supported by the stats in TFA:
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
Most of it has been installed in the last 4-5 years, and we are still accelerating.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
I am pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
Good luck getting fission to work on any of the other materials.
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Two different tools for different things.
It really is sad how ugly solar is. Miles and miles of beautiful, peaceful open desert are ruined. It's a bit of an environmental travesty.
You're aren't looking at all factors here. I look at solar and things its beautiful for what its displacing.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I think clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful.
The Great Solar Wall: China doubles down on its ambitious effort to tame deserts - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3363108/grea...
Triple win: solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00516-8
Swathes of Earth are turning into desert — but the degradation can be stopped - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03621-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
Publication says that specialty of the publication is booming. Noted.
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
These are easily verified hard numbers that could be looked up anywhere. It's not an "opinion" or a subjective piece.
What is your note, precisely?
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
> China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying.
Would be interesting to know how much nuclear vs solar they are building per year domestically.
"We still haven't solved cheap battery storage."
we literally already have salt battery
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
Are you trying to claim solar has nastier end-of-life cleanup than nuclear? That is certainly one way to get people to discount everything you say.