New model predicts half of world’s energy will come from solar by 2035
In the first weeks of 2025 – with Los Angeles burning, Trump in the White House, and Australia approaching an election that could be awful for climate – solar PV is a ray of hope.
This remarkable technology, which owes a good deal of its success to Australian researchers, dominates the new energy landscape, growing at a rate that continues to defy expectations.
And all the while, solar is becoming cheaper, more efficient and faster to deploy.
The world reached a cumulative total of 2 terawatts (TW) of installed solar capacity in November last year – a milestone that came just two years after the first terawatt mark.
In Australia, rooftop solar alone regularly supplies the majority of daytime power in South Australia’s grid and in other state networks is gearing up to do the same.
In NSW, utility-scale solar generated more than 40% of the state’s power for the first time in January – a remarkable milestone for one of Australia’s biggest coal holdouts.
But can solar growth ramp up to the levels needed to triple renewables and meet climate targets?
According to a newly launched climate modeling tool, the answer to these questions is a resounding ‘yes’.
The S-Curve model, developed by Australian solar industry pioneer Andrew Birch, predicts that by 2035, half of the world’s energy needs will be supplied by solar in a classic S-curve technology shift.
The S-Curve projects forward solar’s historical trends, predicting that it will continue to fall in cost by 10% a year and grow at 25% a year.
This will see solar energy eclipse nuclear power this year and eclipse oil by 2031.
Birch’s theory is that “three huge mistakes” – including a flawed equation at the heart of solar projections – have resulted in decades of inaccurate energy market forecasting on solar.
The first mistake is the belief that solar cost reductions are “suddenly going to stop from nowhere”.
The second mistaken assumption is that the market’s consistent growth of well over 25% a year will also suddenly end.
The final mistake Birch describes as more of an accounting problem - we’re told we need a certain amount of energy to run our economy, but over half of that fossil fuel energy is wasted when we burn it, Birch says.
The S-Curve seeks to correct this by using delivered energy as the metric underpinning projections, rather than primary energy.
In this way, the projections show a solar electric economy would require 60% less energy than previously assumed.