In all, India has roughly 100 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. The United States, with an economy 7.5 times as big and vastly more resources, only has 179 gigawatts of solar.

India saw 18.5 gigawatts of new utility-scale solar projects implemented, nearly 3 times as much as in the previous year.

Indians installed 4.59 gigawatts of rooftop solar, impelled by a government program called the Prime Minister’s” Free Electricity Program [Muft Bijli Yojana],” or solar for residences, which was put into effect by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It successfully promoted 700,000 rooftop solar installations within 10 months of its start. It aims to put rooftop solar on 10 million homes and to spend $8.7 billion.

The big increase in solar installations is thought to be in part because of government incentives and in part because of a steep drop in the price of Chinese solar panels this past year.

India is emerging as one of the more important countries in the world by nominal over-all gross domestic product (GDP). The IMF is projecting its 2025 GDP to be $4,271,922, only a bit less than Japan, which in turn has a somewhat smaller economy than Germany. India is therefore the world’s fifth largest economy, ahead of Britain, France, Italy and Canada. Of course, India’s enormous population is such that its per capital GDP is small. But if we are talking about the place of the country as a whole, it is becoming one of the leading world economies.

“Rashtrapati Bhavan,” Digtial, Dream / Dream v3, Clip2Comic, 2024

India’s transition to green energy is therefore consequential. It is currently the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States. Again, its per capita emissions are small.

Renewables make up 43.6% of the Indian electricity grid, a more impressive number than can be offered by China or the United States. It amounts to 209 gigawatts in total. India hopes to put in 500 gigawatts of renewables by 2030.

Total installed renewable capacity surged nearly 14% in 2024.

India imports half of the natural gas it uses, and spent some $15 billion a year on these imports in 2024. The Financial Express reports that India’s natural gas import costs rose by 18.5% last year, reaching $7.7 billion in the first half of the current fiscal year. That was up from $6.5 billion in the same period last year. This increase is attributed to a higher demand, particularly from city gas distribution companies and the power sector.

India is still poor on a per capita basis and would benefit from not having to spend $14 billion a year on fossil gas imports, especially since it could have the same energy for free from the sun.

Further, being beholden to Trump, the UAE, and Nigeria for imports of Liquefied Natural Gas is a security issue for India, which has such abundant solar that it does not need to put itself in that situation. US sanctions have already forced India to back off imports of Russian fossil gas.

Here’s another irony. Solar panels are the solution to Iran’s woes, even if it has all those oil and gas fields under the ground. It is better for everyone, and especially for Iran if the carbon locked up in those fields is never pumped into the atmosphere, where it will act like a planetary Bunsen burner.

The energy crisis has several roots. The country has been under US and international sanctions for nearly two decades. They have made it impossible for Iran to attract investment in its gas fields, which it shares with the small Gulf nation of Qatar. In contrast, Shell and other multinationals are heavily invested in Qatar’s side of the underground gas field and are vastly expanding production. Iran has fair relations with Qatar but there is some tension over all this, since Iran’s access to the same fields is blocked by sanctions.

The sanctions also interfere with the importation of equipment and materiel essential to the gas industry, which has therefore become backward and ramshackle.

Farnaz Fasihi wrote at The New York Times in mid-December that in February Israel destroyed two gas pipelines in Iran as part of its clandestine conflict with the ayatollahs. Consequently, she said, the government discreetly accessed emergency gas reserves to prevent service interruptions for millions. The government of the late prime minister, Ebrahim Raisi, secretly drew down reserves to avoid outages in the aftermath of this strike, but the reserves went only so far.

Israel’s strike on civilian infrastructure was a war crime.

The Iranian state is also just not very good at its job, and mismanagement is part of the problem.

Finally, the sanctions on Iran include kicking it off the major currency exchanges and making trade in riyals difficult. The riyal has been cratering against the dollar.

What would you do if your life savings were dwindling in value daily, and you couldn’t even use them to buy imported goods?

You might mine some bitcoin. Cryptocurrency, though, is a huge energy hog, and some analysts suspect it has added to Iran’s energy crunch. Individuals and businesses are suspected of illegal cryptocurrency mining and of spreading out the load to avoid detection, reducing access to power on the part everyone else.

Finally, in the summer the temperatures have risen because of human-caused climate change, i.e. from burning Iran’s and other countries’ oil and gas, and there are enormous air-conditioning demands in the summer months, way up from previous years.

“Azadi Tower Solarized,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024.

Solar panels would solve Iran’s electricity problems, including air conditioning and winter heating. Iran has vast deserts like the Dasht-i Kavir, where you could place the panels without interfering with humans, farming, or other land use. So it has room for PV. Not every country has this advantage.

Iran can import inexpensive Chinese panels. It has excellent relations with China, which has found ways around US sanctions on Iranian trade. Private Pakistani citizens and small businesses added 17 gigawatts of solar power to Pakistan in 2024, just importing photovoltaic panels made in China despite the lack of government support. Pakistan’s energy crisis makes Iran’s look like a walk in the park.

Iran also has a fair industrial base and an excellent scientific establishment, and Iranians could make their own panels if they wanted to. It would be far more remunerative than investing in nuclear power.

Iran could deploy community and neighborhood solar, which would make it harder for an enemy to knock out the whole grid.

According to Azerbaijan’s Trend News Agency, Iran has an electricity generation capacity of about 93 gigawatts. Its power plants put out 76 gigs, mostly from fossil gas, and it gets another 2.4 gigs from retail power plants. Iran has 12 gigs of hydro. The Bushehr nuclear plant produces about a gigawatt. and it has 0.4 gigawatts of diesel electricity production. Its renewable installations at the moment produce only 1.1 gigs.

Just last week, President Masoud Pezeshkian announced plans to substantially increase solar and wind power generation. He has ordered all government office buildings to have solar panels on their roofs by this coming summer.

The renewable energy and Energy Efficiency Organization (SATBA) of Iran is inviting bids for new renewable electricity plants. The agency plans to add 500 megawatts of new renewable production by March.

The question is whether Pezeshkian can move toward renewables quickly enough to avert a budding economic, social and environmental meltdown.

But the potential is vast. In mid-December, Egypt just inaugurated another big solar facility, with a nameplate capacity of 500 megawatts (0.5 gigawatts). The new installation was built in just 18 months, and is intended to deal with increasing electricity outages, what Americans call “brown-outs,” which are driven in part by increased use of air conditioning in the ever more torrid summers.

This problem is widespread — burning gas to produce energy causes rising temperatures, which people deal with by using more air conditioning, which burns more gas, and so on. Turkey faces the same problem, but has dealt with it much more aggressively, achieving nearly 19 gigawatts of solar to power the extra air conditioning.

In addition, Egypt Today reports that someone has finally figured out that the relatively educated and relatively inexpensive Egyptian labor force is well placed to manufacture solar panels in-country, which would much reduce their price — not only for Egypt but for other markets like Africa.

Sweden’s Sunshine Pro is partnering with Egyptian institutions to establish a solar panel manufacturing facility. Egypt has something like 33 million workers. About 28% work in industry, and 74% of adults are literate.

“Amon-Ra,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024

Egypt Today writes that the project entails establishing the Arab-Swedish Energy Factory (ASEF), an automated facility for producing solar panels with an annual capacity of 1 GW. The project aims to strengthen domestic manufacturing potential, minimize reliance on imports, draw international investments, and enhance the private sector’s contribution to sustainable progress.

I have explained in the past why Egypt is so suited for solar power. The brown stretches in the map below are pure desert where there just is nothing at all except occasionally lizards and scorpions. No one will be inconvenienced by solar farms in those tens of thousands of square miles. Egypt is 387,050 sq mi., or about 1 million sq. km., and only 3 percent of it is suitable to farming.

h/t Wikimedia

Most people live along the Nile on a north-south axis, so the electrical wiring is pretty straightforward, though they need new grid connections and some high density wires. This is what the population density looks like:

h/t Wikimedia.

The country’s grid currently produces on the order of 60 gigawatts and most of it is fossil gas. Egypt is the world’s 20th largest producer of natural gas, but it also imports about 8% of what it uses — from Israel, to the tune of almost $1 billion a year. Replacing the imported fossil gas with solar should be a high priority, since it would save money and contribute to national security.

Egypt has adopted new green energy goals, saying that it wants 42% of its grid to be renewable energy by 2030, and 60% by 2040. These targets are woefully inadequate — all countries need to be at 100% green energy by 2050 if we are to avoid a chaotic and challenging climate.

It is bizarre that Egypt has so little solar power as yet. It is currently in the same ballpark for installed solar capacity as Morocco, which has an economy only about a third as large as Egypt’s. Subsidized and imported natural gas are way more expensive to the government than solar, even accounting for the latter’s start-up coasts. But, it seems that this dismal record is likely to improve over the next decade, despite governmental foot-dragging.

Türkiye is suffering from increasing summer heat waves, especially in the western part of the country, creating dramatic increases in electricity use from ACs.

But the country has also showed that there is an alternative to this constant ratcheting up of the temperature. According to the energy think tank Ember, 2/3s of the increased demand for electricity, mostly caused by the sweltering temperatures of the summer of 2024, was met by new solar installations. Turkish energy production from solar was up 40% in the first half of 2024, year over year.

By putting in new solar installations, Türkiye in 2024 avoided 16 gigawatts of dirty electricity produced by fossil fuels. All of those fossil fuels would have been imported, since Türkiye is poor in these resources, resulting in a big import bill. That expenditure was also avoided.

“Solar Golden Horne,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 /Clip2Comic, 2024 >

Türkiye reached 16 gigawatts of installed solar capacity this summer, which is 14% of the country’s installed power capacity. It has already risen to 18.7 gigawatts in December. The government wants to increase solar capacity to 22.6 gigawatts in the next twelve months.

A little over half of the country’s electricity is produced by coal-fired and fossil gas-fired plants on a year-round basis, but the government has plans to invest heavily in renewables toward a zero-carbon electric grid over the next little over a decade. It plans 89 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity by 2035, with plans to invest $108 billion in the transformation.

Greening the Turkish grid is made difficult not only by the extra air conditioning use in increasingly hot summers, but also by the economy’s continued expansion. It is one of the fastest-growing countries in the world economically, which creates vast additional electricity demand.

Türkiye is also going for 14.8 gigawatts of wind generation by the end of next year.

Turkish electric vehicle sales are also surging by 39% this year. The country produces the Togg, for which it is seeking increased Chinese partnerships, and plans to export it to Europe starting next year. The Togg is helping drive EV sales domestically and creating local jobs, showing how green technology can help power clean industrialization.

Türkiye, a member of NATO, is the world’s 17th largest economy, making it a member of the G20, with a projected 2024 nominal GDP of $1.3 trillion. It has a population of 87 million, just a little bit more than that of Germany.

Spain is Europe’s champion at producing solar power, because some of its regions are especially sunny — think Seville. The Global Energy Monitor puts it this way: “The country has more utility-scale solar capacity in operation (29.5 GW) than any other European nation, and more capacity under construction (7.8 GW), and in early stages of development (106.1 GW) than the next three European countries combined.” They have 100 gigawatts of solar in development! That is all the solar capacity the US has now, and it is a much bigger and wealthier country.

Germany comes in second in Europe with 24.6 gigawatts of industrial-scale solar.

So far this year, renewables account for 57.5 percent of electricity in Spain, which is remarkable for an industrial democracy. Renewables only make 26% of American electricity, so Spain is doing twice as well as we are. Spain wants to get 74% of its electricity from renewables by 2030.

Wind power provides 22.4 percent of Spain’s electricity, while solar is at 18.3 percent. Solar, however, is rapidly building out.

Spain has already produced more renewable energy by November this year than it did in the full 12 months of 2023, and production is up 13%. And, this is the second year in a row that renewables produced more electricity for Spain than did fossil fuels.

All this is not an accident. The Socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has an industrial policy when it comes to green energy. He credits outgoing Minister for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO), Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, as having spearheaded the expansion of renewables since 2018, leading to some of Europe’s lowest electricity prices for consumers. Sunlight and wind are free, so once you have built the means to capture them, electricity generation is low-cost. This is especially true at a time when the Ukraine War has caused fossil gas prices to increase substantially, hurting countries dependent on it. Ribera is on her way to Brussels to serve on the European Commission, with portfolios in competitive practices and the environment.

In contrast, when they were in power Spain’s conservatives actually put a punitive tax on rooftop solar to benefit the fossil fuel corporations to which they are close.

All the research demonstrates that Socialist democracies make people happier than other systems, and now it turns out they are better for the health of the earth, as well.

Elections matter. But so do civil society initiatives. People are forming cooperatives to share the output of solar installations. Even football (soccer) teams have done this with solar panels at their stadiums.

Spanish utilities are increasingly creating hybrid solar parks that incorporate wind turbines and batteries, as well, to ensure steady power once the sun goes down. Spain has about 1 gigawatt worth of battery storage projects under review, and has a goal of 22.4 gigawatts of battery capacity by 2030 — a deadline that some experts believe the country will easily beat.

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “60% of electricity in Spain comes from renewable energy”

Pakistan has abruptly become the world’s sixth-largest consumer of solar panels.

Here’s the thing. Pakistan has less than 50 gigawatts of electricity capacity in total! So they are putting in over a third of that in the form of solar just in one year. And this is not being spear-headed by the government, which is in disarray.

What we have to underline is that this remarkable solar gold rush is the work of ordinary consumers and private businesses and not government industrial policy. It shows that governmental inaction, of the sort so starkly on display at COP 29 in Baku and of the sort we may expect from the incoming president, Donald Trump, may not be a fatal obstacle to our saving the earth from a chaotic, torrid climate. The world’s people may demand clean solar, not because they understand climate change or are primarily driven by that consideration but because the cost of solar goes on plunging much faster than most analysts can now imagine. China’s government put $130 billion into its solar industry in 2023, and the technology responds to that kind of R&D money with big strides in efficiency and cost savings. And we are only at the beginning of this transformation.

DW’s Charli Shield tells the story of Shafqat Hussain, whose mother almost died during a summer heat wave — and what else is summer in South Asia? — when their government-supplied power went out. Such outages, called “load shedding” in Pakistan, are common. His mother had to go to hospital with heat stroke.

So the Hussain family put in solar. She quotes Shafqat Hussain as saying, “When you don’t have any electricity, forget about the air conditioning. Your fans are not working. You don’t have refrigerators on. You don’t even have any cold water to drink.”

The family’s energy bill has nose-dived by 80% and they no longer suffer from brown-outs or black-outs of electricity, gaining what she says Hussain called a “sense of safety.”

Pakistan’s politics is messy, dominated by two great political dynasties that are often at daggers drawn, and by a populist insurgent, former cricket star Imran Khan, who was jailed by the corrupt dynasties, throwing the country into turmoil. People have been in the streets this week in large numbers demanding Imran Khan’s release, and the army shot some down, raising the specter of further instability.

Americans don’t hear much about Pakistan, but it is a major player. At 240 million, it is the world’s fifth most populous country. It is the world’s 24th biggest economy by purchasing power GDP, though only the 46th nominally. In nominal terms, its economy is in the same ballpark as Egypt’s and South Africa’s. Its military is ranked 9th in the world, and it is a nuclear power.

In 2020, Chinese solar modules cost $240 per kilowatt, but they plummeted to $110 per kilowatt this year, as the post-COVID polysilicon shortages eased and the industry was hit with overproduction. That translates into about 11 cents per watt. China put out 310 gigawatts of cells in the first half of this year, representing an increase of over a third from the previous year. At the beginning of 2024, China already had 4/5ths of the world’s solar module manufacturing capacity. In general, the cost of solar pv modules has fallen 90% since 2010.

In fact, China is betting the farm on green energy. Wood McKenzie notes, “The government has identified the “new three” export industries – solar, EVs and batteries – as critical for its strategy of strengthening economic growth in the face of headwinds from past over-investment in property and high levels of debt.”

Although tariffs keep Chinese panels out of the US even under Biden, it is a big world out there. If Trump, knee-caps the US solar panel industry and hurts the value of the Chinese yuan, it would have the effect of making China’s panels cheaper and of removing a great deal of competition, cementing Beijing’s continued dominance in this field.

Pakistan imports most of the fuel it uses to generate electricity and after rate hikes this summer it has some of the higher electricity costs in Asia, far more than in neighboring India or in Bangladesh. Costs of electricity to businesses in Pakistan are especially high, giving them an impetus to install solar panels.

There are lots of potential problems with Pakistan’s solar boom. As customers desert the big utilities, they have to raise prices for everyone else, and many installations depend on steady energy generation to work — but some of them are having to shut down and then slowly come on line when needed. The government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif could become sufficiently alarmed to put obstacles in the way of further panel imports. But what the Pakistani public is demonstrating is that people want and need electricity and will find a way to get it cheaply. Coal and fossil gas can no longer provide it. Coal is 9.5 cents a kilowatt hour in a lot of places, and gas is 6.5 cents per KWh. But in Pakistan solar can be 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour. Ironically, these fossil fuels are heating up the earth so fast that people absolutely need air conditioning, as Shafqat Hussain discovered. And it is increasingly solar and wind that can provide cheap air conditioning that doesn’t just make things worse. I wouldn’t advise governments to stand in the way of families rescuing their grandmas from heat stroke.

—-

Bonus video:

Bloomberg TV: “Pakistan’s Solar Boom Helps Millions, But Harms Grid”

Since I study the Middle East, I’ve had to learn about energy markets and security. One time about a decade ago I was doing some energy consulting with the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Japan had had to deal with the closure of many of its nuclear plants after the Fukishima disaster by importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from the Middle East. They were nervous about the security of the region, though. I told my Japanese colleagues that they would be better off going in for wind and solar. One replied that Japan had very little land available for solar farms. I don’t know how sincere this reply was. I think those bureaucrats were just wedded to nuclear power. In fact, Japan now has over 87 gigawatts of solar power. It has been adding about 6 gigs of solar a year recently.

One solution to this problem that is increasingly being tried out is agrovoltaics, putting solar panels on farms but in such a way that they help crops grow. So far in the US, most agrovoltaic set-ups are for sheep raising, since grass can grow under the panels. In fact, the panels help the grass thrive in hot, sunny environments by providing shade and allowing retention of moisture, which is also good for “tomatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, and peppers.”

Solar panels are rapidly becoming more efficient, which will allow this form of energy to produce electricity while taking up less space.

In the meantime, another possible solution is to put the solar panels on floating platforms. Japan has put them on lakes, for instance.

The panel arrays can also be placed offshore. Fish and other marine life like structures such as the steel truss platform piling used for China’s offshore solar farms. It gives them places to hide from predators, e.g.

China is the most advanced solar society in the world with over 600 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, which saves the country billions of dollars a year over paying for imported fossil gas. The US is in comparison backward, only having about 130 GW of solar.

It is therefore no surprise that Beijing has, as Aman Tripathi reports, just connected to high capacity transmission wires the world’s large offshore solar plant off the coast of Shandong Province, a 1-gigawatt facility. The facility also does fish farming.

The nearly 3,000 photovoltaic platforms are attached to fixed pilings in the sea floor and are spread over an area of some 4 square miles. It will generate enough power to provide electricity to 2.6 million people.

And this installation is only the beginning. China is aiming to have 60 gigawatts of offshore solar in only 3 years from now — an incredible build-out if it happens.

China also already has 61 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity.

Wind, water, solar and battery are clearly the way forward on meeting the world’s power needs while avoiding massive carbon pollution. Solar plus battery in my view has the greatest potential over the medium to long term. The issue of where to put the PV panels is not in my view a very serious problem. If there is a will to use them to cut carbon dioxide production, as there is in China, then places will be found to put them — as China is demonstrating.

And by the way, if the US government under the incoming Trump administration puts roadblocks in the way of solar power, it will just accelerate American decline and help propel China further toward great power status. The future is solar panels and electric vehicles, and China is already eating our lunch on those two. If that goes on for a while, we’ll be poor, breathing dirty air, and paying trillions for climate catastrophes, while China replaces us as the world’s leading superpower.

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

News.Com.Au : “China’s Massive 1-gigawatt Offshore Solar Cell Platform Now Connected To The Grid”

All in all, 59% of German electricity, almost six tenths, has come from renewables this year, with hydro the main source aside from wind and solar. In 2023, renewables only accounted for 52% of Germany electricity, so there has been a substantial advance. Half of that advance came from new solar installations, Ember says.

An amazing 11 gigawatts of new solar capacity has been added this year. As of mid-summer, Germany had 92 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, exceeding its 2024 goal of 88 GW.

Through the end of July, fossil fuel electricity generation plummeted 14.5% from the same period in 2024, reaching the lowest levels on record. The consumption of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, fell by 39% through September of this year compared to the same months in 2023.

Germany’s carbon emissions dropped by 10% in 2023 compared to the previous year, and are expected to fall again this year. If all industrialized countries met Germany’s performance, the climate crisis would be less severe. Energy-related carbon emissions in the US. fell last year, but only by 3%.

The rapid advance of solar, Ember explains, is the result of government policy changes, including the reduction in bureaucracy and easier permitting and “simplified grid connection for small PV systems,” as well as better remuneration for consumers who sell their electricity back into the grid.

“German Solar,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Wind installations kept pace with those of the previous year, at 2.3 gigawatts. Wind-generated electricity was up 7% this year. Although wind’s progress was not as spectacular as that of solar, it still did make impressive advances, and there is a lot of capacity in the pipeline. Germany won’t quite meet its goals for total wind installations of 80 gigawatts this year, but those goals are the most ambitious in the European Union.

Winds have been anemic in the summer and fall, but are expected to pick up in the last two months of the year. Wind has had to be replaced with expensive fossil gas for the moment. Emissions will likely still fall, since electricity demand is lower. Wind plus battery will smooth out some of these fluctuations in the future.

There are also legal reasons for which wind will advance even more in future. Ember writes, “The German government has declared renewables to be in the overriding public interest, a privileged legal status which unlocks faster permitting and simplified procedures. Furthermore, German states are now required to allocate around 2% of their land for wind turbines.”

Ember doesn’t say so, but battery capacity is also rapidly increasing in Germany, where battery storage reached 9.9 gigawatts so far in 2024. Reuters reports that grid battery capacity in the country is up by 1/3 in 2024, an incredible advance. In the next two years, through the end of 2026, battery storage in Germany is set to increase five-fold, according to Clean Energy Wire. Battery storage allows solar energy to be captured during daylight and released at night.

CEW adds that “more than 80 percent of smaller photovoltaic rooftop systems are already being installed in combination with battery storage systems.” That combination is not nearly as common in the United States, but it should be.

Two big issues loom over Germany’s energy situation. One is the closure of the country’s nuclear plants at the insistence of the Green Party, which has been in government off and on (it is part of the present shaky coalition). Despite predictions of gloom and doom, the transition to wind, solar and battery has gone well.

Clean Energy Wire observes, “Decades of debates came to an end in April 2023, when Germany finally shuttered its last nuclear power plants after the energy crisis. One year on, predictions of supply risks, price hikes and dirty coal replacing carbon-free nuclear power have not materialised. Instead, Germany saw a record output of renewable power, the lowest use of coal in 60 years, falling energy prices across the board and a major drop in emissions.”

The other issue is the Ukraine War and Germany’s attempt to wean itself off Russian fossil gas. Germany cut its natural gas imports by nearly a third last year, and is pressing the EU to end imports of gas from Russia, still 20% of Europe’s usage. There isn’t any doubt that replacing both nuclear and fossil gas with wind, water, solar and battery is saving Germany money and allowing it energy independence from Russia.

In 2025, as Trump comes back into office, Americans should remember the cost savings offered by renewables, the environmental benefits of reducing carbon emissions and avoiding climate catastrophes, and the significance of energy independence for the US and its allies. Germany has overtaken Japan to become the world’s third largest economy.

Winter is ending in Australia, but it is worrisome that their August was among the hottest on record this year, presaging a hot dry summer to come, and raising the real risk of further massive bush fires of the sort that scorched the countryside and killed billions of animals in 2019-2020. The continent-country is highly vulnerable to climate change, with its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, right on the sea and facing coastal erosion from sea level rise. It is unfortunate that so many Australian politicians and firms have found it so difficult to let go of coal and fossil gas. Although Australia is a relatively small country, the emissions of which are not all that consequential, it just sets a poor example for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries, if a very vulnerable country like Australia is a big coal user. How can it scold China and India for using so much coal, which really is consequential for the fate of the world, if Canberra is itself so irresponsible?

Although Australia has had a love affair with coal, the dirtiest and unhealthiest of the fossil fuels, even that addiction is beginning to subside. Less that 50% of the country’s electricity now comes from coal, an unprecedented development. Obviously, not all the states are as environmentally conscious and ambitious as South Australia.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory are particularly bad actors, actually expanding their use of coal and fossil gas.

Some other states have made great strides and have ambitious goals. South Australia has gone in big on solar energy and has largely dumped coal, and is employing batteries to store and use the solar energy when it is needed at night and at usage peaks during the day. The state wants to have all its electricity come from renewables by 2027, in only three years. And it is a highly plausible plan. Already, 70% of the electricity in South Australia comes from renewables, the best record of any large state by far, though the small Australian Capital Territory in which the capital of Canberra nestles has reached 100% renewable electricity generation and in Tasmania it is 98.2%. South Australia is lightly populated, but some of the more populous states are beginning to make strides as well.

In the country as a whole, there is good news. Since 2018, Australia has doubled the share of renewables in its electricity grid, and much of this increase in clean electricity has been spearheaded by states and territories rather than the federal government.

With a population of 26 million (a little bigger than Florida, a little smaller than Texas), Australia has about 10 million households. A full 3.6 million of them, about 36 percent, have rooftop solar installations. Half of all households in Queensland now have panels on their roofs.

“Outback Solar,” Digital, Dream /Dreamworld v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024.

In the US, a country 13 times the size of Australia, only 4.5 million households have rooftop solar. To be at the same level as Australia, we’d need 47 million households with rooftop solar. Given how sunny it is in the US south and southwest, it is crazy that we don’t have more, but conservative state legislatures in the back pocket of Big Carbon have often legislated obstacles. Australia’s homeowners clearly have managed to outmaneuver the Coal Lobby there. (We have solar panels and even in Michigan they much reduce our bill most of the year.)

The most populous Australia state, New South Wales, with over 8 million people, has made some strides in renewables. Some 35.6% of its electricity is from renewables, and 34% of its households have rooftop solar. 13% of its travel uses shared transportation, and there is an uptick in purchases of electric vehicles, though the absolute numbers remain small. NSW has banned offshore drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

South Australia, despite its thin population, is a technological leader in renewables. Not only do renewables supply 74.4% of electricity, but it has large battery projects that allow sunshine to be captured and used at night and at peak hours. The state hopes to phase out gas electricity plants in only a few years.

Batteries have also been key to California’s remarkable uptake of renewables.

Now Australia as a whole has six enormous battery projects in the pipeline.

At $1.7 trillion, Australia has the 13th largest GDP in the world. If the G20 states can get to carbon zero by 2050, that will solve the bulk of our climate worries, since all the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution will be absorbed by the oceans over time. The temperature will immediately stop rising and will decline over time. If we go on spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere after 2050, however, we will outrun the capacity of the oceans to absorb them, and the world will get very hot, and the climate could go chaotic.