'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear

After defying projections, solar's dramatic growth means it is now overtaking nuclear as a global power source. Here are seven reasons for solar's success, and where it might go from here.

The world's solar power is crossing a threshold. A decade ago, it barely registered on a global scale, providing just 1% of the world's power. In 2026, it will almost certainly increase to 10% of power, and overtake nuclear, a mainstay of electricity since the late 1970s.

Globally, solar electricity generation quietly overtook nuclear power (just) in 2025, according to statistics from UK-based energy think tank Ember. And BBC analysis of its data over the past 12 months up to September 2026 shows it clearly outstripping nuclear, producing 13% more power.

"[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. 

From China's vast arrays to a recent solar upsurge driven by escalating oil prices, the incredible rise of solar power has defied all projections. Here are seven ways it has become an apparently "unstoppable force" – and what the future looks like from here.

1. An underestimated force 

"Solar is now the engine of the power transition," says Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford in the UK.

Solar has become the fastest-growing source of new electricity in history, and by far the largest source of new electricity globally. In 2025, it met three-quarters of the growth in the world's demand for electricity, overtaking wind power generation (wind power is also growing, just a little more slowly).

"It wasn't expected," says Rosenow. Mainstream projections, he says, have underestimated solar year after year. Outlooks such as those from the International Energy Agency (IEA), an influential intergovernmental organisation based in Paris, "assumed linear growth and slowly falling costs, and got both wrong".

Over 2026, multiple sources indicate solar electricity generation will almost certainly far exceed nuclear globally. Nuclear's electricity generation has remained more or less constant since 2000, while solar's has increased some 2,700-fold.

2. 'Offensively cheap'

Solar, a mature technology for some 15 years now, became the cheapest electricity in history in 2020. Since then, solar has scaled, efficiency has risen, and the amount of silicon and silver used in panels has gone down, leading prices to fall yet further, says Jones. 

"Massive Chinese manufacturing scale and current overcapacity have pushed module prices to record lows," says Rosenow. 

In particular, a large fall in the price of panels in 2023-24 pushed us into the current era of what Jones calls "offensively cheap" solar. "A panel in itself is just so unbelievably cheap," he says. "It's well under $100 (£75)… and that's going to keep you generating electricity for 30, 40 years without any input at all."

Of course, it's not just in purely economic terms that solar is bringing down costs. Researchers have calculated the US's rising wind and solar generation brought it $249bn (£186bn) in climate and health benefits between 2019 and 2022.

China is still the world's biggest solar power by far but is by no means the only player.

Despite the US imposing a variety of tariffs on solar, it remains the second country when it comes to installations, which are still skyrocketing – especially in states won by President Trump in 2024. In fact, the US now has enough solar to power more than one-third of its households.

"Tariffs and other federal policies that constrain renewable energy growth are........

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