Record-breaking solar generation in 2025 points to ‘structural changes’ in global energy mix

“What we’re seeing is that the generation increases—these record increases—are the results of structural changes in the power system,” he explains. “They’re the result of capacity build-out.”

The figures from the report are encouraging reading for the solar industry. The world added a record 636TWh of new solar PV generation in 2025, up from 331TWh in 2023 and 479TWh in 2024. And total solar generation in 2025, of 2,778TWh, exceeded that of wind for the first time.

The strong performance of solar power helped drive a record contribution of renewables to the global power mix, with clean power accounting 33.8% of generation in 2025, surpassing one-third for the first time, and demonstrating that renewable power can be an essential part of the push towards greater energy security.

Strong growth and a sustained growth rate

Fulghum says that the scale of growth in the solar sector last year is the largest Ember has “ever” reported for any energy technology, save for the growth of coal in the anomalous post-Covid-19 year.

“The increase in 2025 was structurally the largest increase in generation of any individual source of electricity ever,” he explains. “There’s one tiny exception, which is the rebound in coal generation after the Covid-19 pandemic, and that rebound was largely driven not by new coal plants but by demand declines in 2020 and then a rebound in demand in 2021.

“But from a structural perspective, new capacity resulting in new generation, solar power’s increased in 2025 was the highest increase we’ve ever seen from any electricity source.”

A key driving force behind this change is, unsurprisingly, the low cost of solar technology. This analysis is nothing new—a separate report from Wood Mackenzie found that solar PV had the most competitive levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) in 2025—and Ember’s figures show that, in 2024, 90% of globally installed renewable energy projects were already cheaper than the “lowest-cost fossil fuel alternative”.

Crucially, Fulghum argues that these low costs are helping to make a strong business case for solar even in markets and regions where there is less political or legislative will to make it work. This is reflected in the graph below where, in almost all regions of the world, renewable energy has overtaken coal in the power mix.

To put it another way, solar PV is not popular because of a general commitment to the ideals of the energy transition, but because it makes the most economic sense.

“Those cost declines mean that even in heavily liberalised markets, like Texas, for example, the choice for how to meet new load, and new electricity demand, oftentimes falls towards solar,” explains Fulghum.

This is perhaps best exemplified in the US, where members of the Republican party this week introduced legislation to strengthen renewable energy incentives, citing the strong market economics underpinning clean power at present.

Fulghum also notes that solar has become something of a statistical oddity: an increasingly mature technology that is retaining the kind of growth rates that would typically be seen for a technology much earlier in its development phase.

“On the pure growth rates for solar generation, in 2025, solar grew by 30%,” he explains. “Usually, 30% growth for one of the ‘smaller’ sources in the electricity system isn’t that much, but solar is now a mature technology. Usually with mature technologies, you expect the growth rate to come down over the years.

“Instead, what we’ve seen with solar, is that the growth rates have stayed high very consistently,” he continues. “30% is actually the highest growth rate that we’ve seen in eight years. That means that this exponential curve is still intact; solar is still doubling, roughly, every three years and has grown tenfold in the last ten years.”

Record-breaking storage growth facilitates distributed solar

Another key takeaway from the Ember report is that battery energy storage systems (BESS) are becoming increasingly popular, with record capacity additions and record-low costs.

The report shows that the world added 250GWh of new batteries in 2025, a 46% increase over the previous year, and Fulghum notes that “the cost of battery packs fell by 45% in 2025”, to a record low of US$70/kWh for stationary storage facilities, demonstrating similarly compelling market dynamics as the solar industry.

Industry leaders like Chile and Australia added enough grid-scale BESS to “shift”, as Ember puts it, over 50% of new solar generation in 2025. This “shifted” capacity refers to electricity from solar projects that is produced during the middle of the day, when solar supply is high and can outpace demand, which can be stored and used during the evenings or early mornings, when solar supply is low and electricity demand is high. Fulghum says that the ability to shift new solar deployments is a critical component of the energy transition.

“The reason that storage is so important is because it unlocks the next stage of solar growth,” he says. “On a global level, of the new solar generation that came online in 2025, with the storage deployed, we can shift 14% of that to other parts of the day.”

“In the front-runner markets—Chile and Australia, with more than 50%—if you get to that level, and you can shift that amount electricity, you’re not growing your midday peak at all, so you can deploy more solar, you gain more from regular generation in the shoulder hours, and all the excess in the middle of the day can [be shifted] towards the evening hours.”

The graph above shows how the percentage of new solar generation added each year can be shifted by the new battery capacity additions of that year, with 2025 seeing a record figure of 14%.

The addition of significant new storage capacity has also been an integral part of new distributed solar additions. The Ember report notes that the world added 22TWh of new distributed solar in 2025, and Fulghum described the growth of distributed solar, in particular, as “quite astonishing” in 2025.

“We have provinces in China where distributed solar is more than half of the solar capacity that’s been deployed,” he says. “The same is true in the EU as well, where it’s a pretty even split between distributed capacity deployed and utility-scale capacity deployed.”

Increased battery deployment can support energy expansion in regions without traditional utility-scale grid systems. “It plays such a huge role now, and especially for countries where grid assets are harder to implement, those distributed assets are becoming a much more important part of the equation as well,” explains Fulghum.

The Ember report points to a number of examples of this trend, including Pakistan, which added a record 17TWh of solar generation in 2025, roughly the same as Brazil and an 85% increase over the previous year.

Solar’s share in the country’s energy mix has almost tripled in three years—from 6.6% in 2022 to 18.8% in 2025—and solar-plus-storage has allowed energy demand to grow by an average of 4.5% a year between 2022 and 2025, while fossils fuel electricity generation has fallen over this period. This trend led Ember to call Pakistan “one of the world’s fastest-growing solar markets”.

Solar and energy security

Fulghum also notes that solar is now an integral part of delivering energy security in a number of countries around the world; he tells PV Tech Premium that, at present, three-quarters of the global population lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels, meaning they are vulnerable to disruptions of the global energy supply chain.

“This is a vast majority of the world [that] is directly affected by [power price] fluctuations and, in this case, price spikes in the global fossil fuel markets,” he explains, adding that the 2022 energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated to many countries the weaknesses of reliance on fossil fuel imports from a single country, which has encouraged greater solar investment.

“Solar generation accelerated pretty significantly in the following years from 2022 onwards, in the EU,” Fulghum continues. “The EU was hit hardest back then, but now it is very much a global crisis.”

The graph below shows how the contribution of various energy sources to the global generation mix has changed since the year 2000; since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the contribution of solar has almost doubled, from 4.61% in 2022 to 8.74% in 2025.

When asked about the role of renewables and fossil fuels in delivering energy security, Fulghum notes that the latter are exposed to “changes from year to year”.

“On the fossil fuel side, you see changes from year to year that are heavily affected by electricity demand or by temperatures [whereas] the solar story is the story of structural change in the power system.”

This shift towards the perception of solar as a key component of energy security is perhaps best exemplified by the US; in addition to the launch of the American Energy Dominance Act this week, both state governments and independent thinktanks have highlighted the role that clean energy plays in improving energy security in the last few months, and drawn attention to the need for better policy support and greater financing to deliver on this potential.

Looking ahead, Fulghum is optimistic that solar will continue to grow at an impressive rate, and continue to be a part of the global discussion about energy security; as he concludes: “this trajectory, in absolute terms but also in relative terms, is the fastest shift we’ve ever seen in the power sector.”