--- title: Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear | daily.dev description: Solar power overtook nuclear generation globally in 2025, according to energy think tank Ember. Over the 12 months to September 2026, solar produced 13% more... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/solar-power-is-becoming-bigger-than-nuclear-b8l40jtry twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear | daily.dev og:description: Solar power overtook nuclear generation globally in 2025, according to energy think tank Ember. Over the 12 months to September 2026, solar produced 13% more... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/solar-power-is-becoming-bigger-than-nuclear-b8l40jtry og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/B8L40JTRY.png og:image:alt: Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 9 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Solar power overtook nuclear generation globally in 2025, according to energy think tank Ember. Over the 12 months to September 2026, solar produced 13% more electricity than nuclear worldwide. Falling panel prices, now 'well under $100' per panel, cheap Chinese manufacturing, and battery storage drove the surge. Pakistan's solar share jumped from under 2% in 2019 to 24% now, while the US has enough solar to power over a third of its households. The IEA expects solar generation to double by 2030, overtaking hydro as the world's third-largest electricity source. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Has solar power generation actually overtaken nuclear power globally? Yes, solar electricity generation overtook nuclear power globally in 2025, according to UK-based energy think tank Ember. Over the 12 months to September 2026, solar produced 13% more electricity than nuclear worldwide. A decade earlier solar provided just 1% of the world's power; nuclear generation has stayed roughly constant since 2000 while solar output rose about 2,700-fold. _Anyone tracking the energy transition can follow solar-versus-nuclear data trends on daily.dev._ ### Why has solar power gotten so cheap in recent years? Massive Chinese manufacturing scale and overcapacity pushed solar module prices to record lows, especially after a large price drop in 2023-24. A single solar panel now costs well under $100 and generates electricity for 30 to 40 years with no further input. Falling silicon and silver use in panels and rising efficiency have also pushed prices down, making solar what one analyst calls 'offensively cheap.' _Developers weighing energy costs for infrastructure can keep up with solar pricing shifts via daily.dev._ ### How much of its electricity does Pakistan now get from solar power? Pakistan now gets about 24% of its electricity from solar, up from less than 2% in 2019. The rapid rise was driven by costly, unreliable grid electricity combined with cheap solar imports from China, and most of the boom came from households paying out of pocket rather than taking out loans. _Those researching emerging-market energy shifts can track country-level solar adoption stories on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 285 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-27). **TL;DR:** The discussion largely celebrates solar's growth but quickly pivots into deep technical debate about whether storage (batteries, thermal, pumped hydro, e-fuels) can realistically fill the gaps, alongside frustration over why US residential installation costs so much more than elsewhere. **Sentiment:** 40% positive · 45% mixed · 15% skeptical **The case for** - Battery storage costs are falling on a similar exponential curve to solar, just years behind. - Diurnal storage is already essentially solved by cheap lithium batteries, and interconnected grids reduce the need for massive storage. - Utility-scale solar is already far cheaper than residential installs, showing the underlying hardware cost has dropped dramatically. - Distributed rooftop solar is seen as more resilient/harder to disrupt than centralized plants like nuclear. **The pushback** - Residential solar installation in the US is seen as wildly overpriced due to labor, permitting, and financing practices compared to countries like Australia. - Long-duration (multi-day to seasonal) storage remains unsolved and all proposed solutions (flow batteries, thermal storage, e-fuels) have real practical limitations. - Cloudy days and winter still drastically cut solar output, raising doubts about solar ever being a complete standalone solution. - Concerns that the US blocking cheap Chinese battery/solar tech mainly protects incumbent fossil fuel and domestic industries rather than helping consumers. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Enthusiasm about solar's trajectory is matched by lengthy technical skepticism and debate over storage solutions and why US installs cost so much more than elsewhere. **Hottest debate:** Whether long-duration/seasonal energy storage can realistically be solved with thermal storage, flow batteries, or e-fuels, versus just accepting some ongoing fossil fuel backup. **Open questions** - What is the most cost-effective technology for multi-day to seasonal energy storage at grid scale? - Why do residential solar installation costs in the US remain several times higher than in countries like Australia despite similar or higher labor costs there? - Can thermal storage systems achieve high enough round-trip efficiency and extraction rates to be useful beyond niche heating applications? **Highlights** > Usually solar and storage are a package deal these days for grid scale solutions. Mostly, storage is not really about providing long term storage but short term. It used to be that the sweet spot that makes the most economic sense was something like 2 or 4 hours of power (relative to the maximum output of the solar panels) but these days batteries are a lot cheaper and 8 hours or more is becoming fairly common. The point of storage is not really to cover for all the downtime when the sun doesn't shine but to give grid operators enough lead time to bring online extra generation or buy capacity on the open market and adjust their planning. Mostly a few hours is all they need to ensure the grid stays up and running through daily peak usage windows. In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it. Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere. The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way. > — [jillesvangurp on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50246410) > Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt. The cheapest residential solar options are community solar if your state and utility supports it, or a ground mount system. The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/ (have installed 100kw+ of residential solar, ama) > — [toomuchtodo on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245594) > Typical non-informed incorrect opinion. The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use. Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency. The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution. In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for. The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions. > — [johnea on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253558) > There's also, like... winter. I'm fairly sure there's a calculation somewhere you could determine the number of deaths this will cause with pretty good accuracy. Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to. We shouldn't hinge our future on half of a technology. > — [kulahan on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253289) > All fine and dandy until your grid goes mysteriously offline the day after China moves on taiwan. > — [WarmWash on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50254243) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245385) · 168 points · 285 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time – pv magazine Global](https://daily.dev/posts/solar-surpasses-nuclear-power-globally-for-first-time-pv-magazine-global-bytdfiqbj) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [In Europe, Wind and Solar Overtake Fossil Fuels](https://daily.dev/posts/in-europe-wind-and-solar-overtake-fossil-fuels-if9qtbuh6) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Final 2025 data is in: US energy use is up as solar passes hydro](https://daily.dev/posts/final-2025-data-is-in-us-energy-use-is-up-as-solar-passes-hydro-bd7wfmvmu) · Ars Technica · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Solar to dominate energy by 2035, but AI data centers will keep fossil fuels in business](https://daily.dev/posts/solar-to-dominate-energy-by-2035-but-ai-data-centers-will-keep-fossil-fuels-in-business-7ufyrkl2h) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first](https://daily.dev/posts/iea-solar-overtakes-all-energy-sources-in-a-major-global-first-ssm00wdrv) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/solar-power-is-becoming-bigger-than-nuclear-b8l40jtry) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/solar-power-is-becoming-bigger-than-nuclear-b8l40jtry","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/solar-power-is-becoming-bigger-than-nuclear-b8l40jtry"},"datePublished":"2026-10-27T01:02:28.986Z","dateModified":"2026-10-27T03:20:14.313Z","description":"Solar power overtook nuclear generation globally in 2025, according to energy think tank Ember. 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