Solar Energy is the Future

AI picture of a city powered by renewable energy

I was reading the book, Here Comes the Sun by veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben and I was shocked that solar power has come so far.

In the beginning of the book, McKibben says the following:

"We live on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun; the second-cheapest is to let the breeze created by the sun’s heating turn the blade of a wind turbine."

He goes on to say that we are still in the beginning of the transformation to renewable energy. Only 15% of the planet's electricity comes from sun and wind, and only a quarter of energy comes from electricity. However, he goes on to say that in 2024, 92.5% of all new electricity bought online around the world came from renewables. By April 2025, fossil fuel was producing less than half of American electricity.

These are staggering numbers right? What's amazing is that our planet is actually setup for us to use solar and wind in combination. He says, "the farther north you go, the stronger the wind gets—which is useful, since Norway has rather less sunlight than, say, Greece. And wind speeds tend to be higher in the winter than the summer, because of sharper temperature gradients. Sun and wind are therefore complementary. And they have a triplet, hydropower, which is just one more form of solar energy."

McKibben says that he doesn't think we need to build out hydropower any further. On the other hand, we have a lot to do in our transition to wind and solar. "Stanford’s Mark Jacobson calculates that if, by 2050, we’d convert the world to running on solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro power, we’d actually be using about 56 percent less total energy. A third of that savings would come from the switch to EVs (electric vehicles), a quarter from heat pumps; hell, just mining, refining, and transporting fossil fuels requires 11 percent of all the energy humans currently use."

In regards to the AI data center problem, I like technology and the future of AI but I think we should halt large data center projects that are requesting massive amounts of water from drought-ridden communities. In addition, I'm totally against new fossil fuel plants being built for these large data centers. Who wants to live next to a natural gas plant? These plants contribute to asthma and respiratory illnesses. Below is a quote by McKibben about the use of solar power for AI data centers:

"But even if we do need vast new server farms, solar offers the most likely method for powering them. A team of researchers from Silicon Valley stalwarts such as Stripe, Tesla, Terraform, and Anthropic produced a paper in December 2024 showing that the fastest, cheapest way for the Googles of the world (all of whom have pledged to slash their emissions) to power those new data centers was with co-located solar microgrids. 'The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives,' the report concluded. Someone was paying attention; in December 2024 Google announced plans for $20 billion worth of solar farms located next to their new data centers."

There is of course always resistance to change. McKibben explains that in 2025 he was standing on the roof with Lyndon Rive, who at the time was the CEO of SolarCity, the fastest-growing solar installer in the country. They were looking out at the roofs of Phoenix discussing the promise of solar power in a city that averages over 300 sunny days per year. The issue is that local utilities companies campaigned for candidates that would support them. What happened is that after the election, the state's second-largest utility announced that it was going to charge a monthly fee to anyone who wanted to put a solar panel on the roof. McKibben goes on to say that 12 percent of homes in Arizona have solar panels on the roof compared with about 16 percent in cold and northern Vermont.

It's also a known fact that President Trump is an advocate for fossil fuels. McKibben says that "He'd been in office four hours when he signed an order ending all federal support for wind power". He goes on to say, "By April, just three months into his second term, Trump was announcing plans to revive the coal industry, and his bizarre tariffs were making life harder for renewable energy developers; he cut off funding to Princeton’s climate modelers on the grounds that their findings were causing 'climate anxiety'.”

Interestingly, China is doing well at transitioning to renewable energy. McKibben says that, "China is well on its way to being the earth’s first 'electro-state'; something like half of all clean energy has been installed within its borders." He goes on to say, "In May 2025 came the news that China had used 5 percent less coal in the first quarter of the year to produce electricity than it had in 2024—despite a surging economy, Chinese emissions were actually dropping."

In addition, the batteries that store energy when the sun goes down or the wind drops have also improved immensely over the years. McKibben says, "We—well, the Chinese—got skilled at building batteries for smartphones, and then used much the same technology for EVs; the price for lithium-ion storage has dropped 97 percent in the last 30 years. And now that expertise is producing big grid-scale batteries, so large that they can carry whole cities with their power. In 2025 the world will add 80 gigawatts of grid-scale storage, an eight-fold increase from 2021."

The good thing is that even though President Trump and the fossil fuels industry have tried to thwart the movement toward renewable energy, we've already come far enough along that people are starting to see the benefits, both to our environment and to the cost. "Solar generation grew more in 2024 than coal-fired power has grown—total—since 2010. By 2026, according to the International Energy Agency, solar will generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear plants combined. By 2028 it will generate more than all the hydro dams. By 2030 it will have outstripped gas, and by 2032 coal. If we manage to stay on the IEA’s net-zero-by-2050 curve, then solar energy will become the earth’s largest source of all energy, not just electricity, by the 2040s."

However, we need to talk more about renewable energy and climate change, and we need to put pressure on our elected leaders to address these issues. We need to elect people who are willing to have these conversations and take meaningful action. Humanity is already dealing with serious consequences of climate change, including flooding in the Midwest and devastating wildfires and heat waves across Canada, Washington, California, and Europe. I don’t like to get political, but I struggle to understand the continued focus on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are archaic, outdated, and are destroying our planet and our health. Continuing to invest heavily in them feels like digging ourselves into a deeper hole when we already have many of the tools we need to move in a different direction.

There is still a tremendous amount of work to do. But when I look at how far solar and wind power have come in such a short period of time, I find reason for optimism. The transition is already underway, and I believe we have an opportunity to accelerate it and create a cleaner, more sustainable future.