The Solar Decade 2025-2035

Posted 16 January 2025

Friends,

Delighted to be posting my first ebirchy blog today, as I wish you all a happy 2025 – and an even happier 2035, as we enter this, the solar decade!

Launching “The S-Curve”:  Proof we’re game on for 50% Solar by 2035!

It’s just another day on the road to a world powered by sunshine, but a big day for me personally as we launch the ebirchy.com site and as I release the S-Curve model to the world.  This is the model that proves how – despite the world feeling addicted to fossil fuels – we are actually on track to getting over 50% of our energy from solar, in under a decade!

I’ve been working on this subject really hard for over half my life, and have been waiting to say that one-liner for 25 years, so selfishly, maybe allow me to say it one more time!

On current growth trends, solar is on track to deliver over half of all the world’s energy within the next 10 years, in what we must surely now call The Solar Decade (2025 to 2035)!

An infographic showing the increasing percentage of energy from solar

The modeling we’ve done corrects the 3 main mistakes energy analysts make, where actually:

  1. Solar costs continue to fall
    They’ve fallen on average 15% per annum since 2000 and actually even faster in the last 10 years so they’re most likely not going to suddenly flatline like most analysts assume.
  2. Solar continues to grow at 25%+
    Sales have grown at 34% per annum since 2000 and never slowed down…that’s because the cost reductions drive even more growth in a very beautiful cycle of what will turn out to be planetary importance.
  3. We need 60% less energy
    The “primary energy” measure of energy that analysts use is only appropriate for fossil fuels (and so will soon become an accounting relic).  When we electrify our economy and power it with solar, we avoid all the waste from burning stuff to create the useful energy we actually need, so we need less than half as much!

There have been lots of great reports out recently calling out the robustness of global solar growth and others have highlighted the maths on electrification vs combustion….but I don’t think anyone has pulled the overall arithmetic together to show that when you combine 25% per annum growth off the now huge base of 594GW (2024 solar installs) with the lower energy need arithmetic you get your climate solution really quick!

Forget new nuclear (15-20 years away and 5x as expensive) or R&D stage sequestration tech (maybe 10-20 years, maybe never!).  Solar’s S-Curve is the answer, this is where we all need to focus: consumers, professionals, governments, keep growing solar! The sheer speed with which humankind will shift to 50% solar feels like bad news for trillion dollars of coal, oil and gas bank loans, and it shines a light on the idiocy of our governments using our tax dollars to subsidise a dying industry – but it’s GREAT news for all energy consumers (i.e. everyone else!) and for the millions of professionals I have the honor to work with in this global community.

And with wildfires raging around the world and scientists this week predicting a >50% probability of a breakdown of the Gulf Stream, well hell, we need some good news to start 2025!

Check out the short video here and please share it with anyone who needs cheering up this new year!

Andrew Birch (“Birchy”)
Chief Executive Officer, OpenSolar Executive Team