Solar energy capacity in the world doubled to 2 TW only from 2022: what is known

It's only been two years since the global solar industry reached its first terawatts.

At COP29, in Baku, the Global Solar Council announced that the 2 TW threshold for total photovoltaic capacity had been reached. Balkan Green Energy News writes about it.

The Global Solar Energy Council said that the capacity of the photovoltaic industry has reached 2 TW, against the backdrop of the second presidency of Donald Trump in the United States and the important UN conference on climate change (COP29), which began today in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku.

Industry association noted that in recent years, the adoption of this technology has accelerated significantly, leading to a sharp decrease in costs and making solar energy the cheapest form of energy available to consumers in many countries of the world.

According to calculations by the Global Solar Council and SolarPower Europe, it took the photovoltaic industry 68 years to reach 1 TW of installed capacity, and only two years to double it.

The announcement said the milestone underscores how solar power is becoming the backbone of the global energy system. 2 TW of solar power is equivalent to the total installed electricity capacity of India, the United States and the United Kingdom combined. It is also double the total capacity in the European Union.

At a capacity utilization factor of 20%, 2 TW could provide electricity to a billion homes, which consume a world average of 3.5 MWh per year.

It is noteworthy that this is only an equivalent, since photovoltaic panels cannot generate electricity without daylight. This means that it is necessary to combine them with energy storage and other power sources for a 24/7 supply every day.

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The Global Solar Council emphasized the need to achieve 1.5 TW of global storage capacity and develop 25 million kilometers of grid infrastructure by the end of the decade. The 2030 target for solar energy is 8 TW. It is important to note that the global production capacity is already 1.1 TW per year, the organization emphasized.

“The unprecedented deployment of solar power around the world, and now that we have reached this 2 TWh mark, or nearly seven billion solar panels installed, is the culmination of decades of hard work. Forward-looking policies, industrial ingenuity, seven million hard-working solar installers and versatile and scalable technology — all of which have brought us to this point,” said Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council.

Seven billion solar panels are generating electricity and seven million people are installing solar panels. She said that annual solar installation capacity must now double to 1 TWh per year to meet the global target of tripling renewable energy agreed at COP28 in Dubai.

— Dunlop declared.

By 2030, solar energy will be the world's leading renewable energy source, said Global Solar Council Chairman Mate Hayes, who is also responsible for global affairs at SolarPower Europe. “We urgently need the support of national governments and investors to achieve our goal of tripling renewable energy,” — he warned.

The Global Solar Council said it would launch an International Solar Energy Financing Group at COP29. The world's first global dialogue between the PV industry and the financial sector aims to bridge the financial gap between ambition and deployment, he explained. The goal is to reduce the cost of capital for solar power in developing economies from 15% to 5%.

While the lag behind poor countries in deploying PV is a major factor in the decline, the most important the phenomenon is China's dominance in both capacity addition and production. A similar situation is observed in the wind energy segment.

As world leaders and leading climate diplomats began arriving in Baku for COP29, the Global Solar Council announced that the 2 TW threshold for total PV capacity had been reached. Only two years have passed since the first terawatt.