Quote: Solar Charge Up

Bill McKibben in The New Yorker on 2025-07-09:

In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world. Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:

• It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.
• That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.

This was a nice reminder that we are making headway against non-renewable energy, even though it seems like so many powerful people are against renewable energy. Solar and wind power are such winners, and fossil fuels such losers, that they stay winning, despite all the pushback.