Solar is booming, and batteries are catching up fast.
In 2025, Ember found, solar alone met 75 percent of all new electricity demand, which is both an eye-popping figure and not surprising. Total global output of solar power has doubled since 2022; it has grown more than tenfold since 2015, when the Paris agreement was negotiated. Last year’s was the largest increase on record, and more electricity was generated by new solar than could be produced by all the gas that passed through the Strait of Hormuz last year.
Batteries are growing fast, too — with 46 percent more storage capacity added in 2025 than in 2024. And globally, utility-scale battery capacity has grown 12-fold since just 2019, which makes sense, given both the way that batteries flatten out the problem of intermittency for cheap solar and the fact that battery costs fell 20 percent in 2024 and then 45 percent in 2025. Even in Trump’s America, batteries are being added everywhere.
You can see the Trump effect, but you have to squint.
The world’s four largest carbon emitters are, in order, China, the United States, India and the E.U. (if counted as a single country). Last year, energy emissions and coal use fell in three of those four places. Only in the U.S. did they go up.
Even so, the story that the return of Trump heralded a major pivot back to fossil fuels seems a bit overstated — as does the increasingly common shorthand that the U.S. is now operating like a “petrostate” while China looks more like an “electrostate.” In 2025, the U.S. installed more than nine times as much clean power capacity as it did fossil fuel kit. This year, the Energy Information Administration reports, 93 percent of all new planned American energy capacity will be green. And last month, for the first time, the U.S. got more electricity from renewables than from gas, typically the biggest American source. The share of electricity generation from renewables was more than twice as large as that of coal. In California, batteries are eating more and more of peak demand, with battery storage capacity growing more than 2,000 percent since 2019 and completely transforming the state’s energy mix in the process.
But energy and climate remain two different stories.
As the green transition has picked up speed, it’s displaced an awful lot of talk about climate change, such that you tend to see more talk about numbers like these than about carbon concentrations, temperature targets or global emissions. You also tend to hear more of the relatively good news from the fast-moving electricity sector than news about the limited progress in industry and infrastructure, agriculture and land use. Public opinion hasn’t shifted much: 44 percent of Americans say they worry a great deal about climate change, which is just a point or two below the moments of peak alarm in 2017 and 2020. But the leadership class has moved on: five years ago, world leaders talked about warming in self-consciously apocalyptic terms; now they talk about the green transition as though climate weren’t part of the story at all.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
