Solar power overtakes nuclear as global energy milestone nears

China remains by far the world's biggest solar power, but it is no longer alone. The US is second despite a range of tariffs on solar, with installations still skyrocketing — especially in states won by President Trump in 2024. The country now has enough solar to power more than one-third of its households.

India is moving away from fossil fuels faster than China did, with new solar meeting 60% of its rise in power demand over the past two years. In Australia, more than four million homes have rooftop solar, well over a third of all households. Pakistan and Lebanon are installing solar at breakneck speeds, and across Africa countries are adding some 100,000 panels per day.

Escalating diesel prices, driven by the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the US-Israel war with Iran, have pushed the cost equation even further in solar's favor — particularly in African countries where home diesel generators are common due to unreliable grids.

The timing is significant. The world's electricity demand is climbing fast, driven in part by AI data centers that are being built at a pace the sector has never seen. Solar already met three-quarters of the growth in global demand in 2025, making it the default answer to the question of where new power comes from.

Jones framed the bigger picture plainly: solar is heading "to not just be king of electricity, but king of energy." Researchers have also calculated that rising US wind and solar generation brought the country $249bn in climate and health benefits between 2019 and 2022, adding a second argument beyond pure cost.

Tariffs and policies that constrain renewables are expected to raise costs and slow expansion, said Alicia Zhao, an expert in US mitigation pathways at the University of Maryland — but economics keep winning. "Even with rising costs, solar is still one of the cheapest sources of new power in the US," she said. "And it is getting built regardless of political lines."

For readers in Tunisia, the story is less about a distant statistic and more about a price curve that keeps bending. Solar panels are now cheap enough that home and business installations can pay off over time, and falling module prices are a global trend that tends to reach North African markets too. No specific Tunisian solar prices or incentives are included in the sources used here.

The AI boom is also a local signal: data centers and power-hungry technology push electricity demand up everywhere, and solar is now the fastest-growing source of new supply. If you are a household weighing a rooftop system or a business watching energy bills, the main takeaway is that the technology's cost story has changed dramatically — while the availability of specific products and subsidies in Tunisia has not been announced in these reports.

It is worth remembering that the solar-over-nuclear milestone comes from Ember's data and independent analysis, not from an official global agency announcement. Some projections still lag behind reality, and the exact pace of solar's rise in 2026 may differ from early estimates.