Sunshine is humanity’s lifeline for warmth and light, Vitamin D, and even unraveling depression.
Despite its ubiquity, though, harnessing the sun’s power for modern energy needs has been expensive.
Coal, oil and gas reigned as the kings of energy for nearly 300 years, aided substantially by direct and indirect subsidies. In just the last few years, though, renewable energy has become cheaper than subsidized fossil fuels.
Our own star has also proven to be more efficient, more equitable, and far less polluting than the alternatives. Bill McKibben argues this succinctly in “Here Comes the Sun.”
“The world has exactly one path available to make the rapid changes that the climate crisis requires, and that path is sun, wind, and batteries,” he says. “They are available right now, in scale, at affordable price.”
Deployment of renewable power is happening in myriad ways. This year, solar energy will generate more electricity than nuclear plants around the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
If we stay on the IEA’s net-zero-by-2050 curve, solar will be the largest source of all energy, not just electricity, by the 2040s.
“We’re still at the very beginning of this boom,” McKibben asserts.
Though cheap renewables were not supported soon enough to thwart the climate disruption already upon us, progress is escalating.
In 2024 Californians used a quarter less natural gas to generate electricity than the year before. By the spring of 2025 that reduction in fossil fuel use grew to 43%.
The conversion is not only necessary in the face of climate change, but a phenomenal bargain in terms of cost.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s solar-covered canal is one such bargain. Roger Bales, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC-Merced, called this “first of its kind” canal a triple win for California’s water, energy and land needs.
Project Nexus, the pilot endeavor completed late last year, consisted of solar panels constructed over both narrow and wide sections of canal in the Central Valley.
When the entire project is complete, the panels could conserve enough water for 2 million homes per year. Importantly, no new land would be needed for the solar arrays.
Other states are taking advantage of the renewable energy revolution. In Texas, Google Nest has planned the largest virtual power plant to date. Virtual power plants (VPP) are networks of small-scale, decentralized energy resources.
Rocky Mountain Institute estimates these plants could reduce peak demand in the U.S. by enough to power every home in California, Texas and Florida by 2030.
It’s not just greenies talking “solar liberation.” The Economist recently gushed: “In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.”
They marveled at the far-reaching possibilities. With cheap energy, The Economist argued, ventilation systems in buildings can clean and recirculate faster, “drastically reducing the spread of airborne disease.”
Fully half of the swing to renewables is happening in China, which is why many of us hadn’t been aware of the shift. Many other countries are advancing “full steam ahead,” as it were.
Some of the switch is driven by outside demand, such as Western apparel brands stipulating sustainable practices from Pakistani textile manufacturers.
Non-oil-producing countries are converting more rapidly: they are free of pushback from domestic vested interests trying to protect fossil fuel markets.
Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson and his team have produced plans to guide 149 countries to 100 percent wind, water and solar power by 2035. The latest additions are Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda and Eswatini.
In addition to the lower cost and flexible installations, the health effects of clean cook-stoves and efficient air conditioners is extraordinary.
“Our job is to flood the world as fast as possible with electrons from the sun and wind, confident that the very availability of clean, cheap power in bulk will drive the rest of the process,” Jacobson stresses.
In the 1700s we began burning decomposed plants and animals to power the Industrial Revolution. Now we are entering another civilization inflection, harnessing the sun’s virtually endless rays.
We are making clean energy from our star.