Solar Power Quietly Overtakes Nuclear

October 27, 2026

A decade ago, solar provided just 1% of the world's electricity. In 2026, it will reach almost 10%, overtaking nuclear power as a global energy source. Solar electricity generation narrowly surpassed nuclear in 2025, according to statistics from Ember, a UK-based energy think tank. BBC analysis of Ember data over the 12 months to September 2026 shows solar now producing 13% more power than all the world's nuclear plants combined [1].

"Solar generating more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants is a pretty insane stat, for sure," says Dave Jones, co-founder of Ember [1].

Nuclear electricity generation has remained roughly constant since 2000. Solar's has increased approximately 2'700-fold in the same period. The crossover happened quietly, without the fanfare that accompanied nuclear's rise in the 1970s [1].

Seven Reasons Solar Won

The BBC piece identifies several drivers behind solar's explosive growth [1]:

• Consistent underestimation. Mainstream projections, including those from the IEA, assumed linear growth and slowly falling costs. They got both wrong. Solar has grown exponentially while costs dropped faster than any forecast predicted.
• Scale. Solar met three-quarters of the growth in global electricity demand in 2025, making it the largest source of new electricity by far.
• China. Vast arrays in China drove much of the capacity addition, with the country installing more solar in 2025 than the rest of the world combined.
• Cost. Solar is now, in Dave Jones's words, "offensively cheap." Levelized costs fell below those of coal and gas in most markets years ago, and continue to decline.
• Oil price pressure. Escalating oil prices pushed more countries toward solar as a hedge against fossil fuel volatility.
• Speed. Solar farms can be built in months, not the decade-plus typical for nuclear plants. This speed matters when demand is rising.
• Distributed growth. Unlike nuclear, which requires massive centralized plants, solar scales from rooftop panels to gigawatt arrays. This distributed nature means growth happens everywhere simultaneously.

What Comes Next

Solar is on track to become not just the king of new electricity but the king of energy overall. The challenge shifts from generation to storage and grid flexibility, since solar only produces when the sun shines. Nuclear advocates argue their technology provides the baseload that solar cannot, but battery storage costs are falling on a similar trajectory to what solar panels experienced [1].

The IEA and other forecasters are now revising their solar projections upward again, though history suggests they may still be underestimating it. As Jan Rosenow of the University of Oxford puts it: "Solar is now the engine of the power transition" [1].

Sources

[1] "'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear," BBC Future, October 23, 2026. bbc.com