By Mira Rojanasakul
A constellation of satellites orbiting 250 miles above Earth’s surface shows how solar and wind have taken off in recent years:
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Source: Global Renewables Watch
Note: Includes onshore wind and utility-scale solar installations.
A new analysis shared with The New York Times shows how countries around the world are rapidly adding solar and wind capacity, now cheaper and more reliable than ever.
To track these changes, researchers created Global Renewables Watch, which maps all onshore wind and every large-scale solar farm in the world by using artificial intelligence and detailed satellite imagery to create a “living atlas.”
The collaboration — between The Nature Conservancy, Planet, and Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab — is designed to track the spread of wind and solar over time, so that planners can better understand where and how to build new clean-energy projects, large and small.
Choosing the right location is important because electric grids can’t always handle new sources of energy or carry electricity from sunny and windy locations to the population centers where it is needed. Where open land is limited, energy projects frequently involve tradeoffs with farmland and natural habitat. And often, many of the best spots are already taken.
“A lot of the development has grabbed the low-hanging fruit,” said Joseph Kiesecker, a lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy who has contributed to Global Renewables Watch since the work began two years ago.
The data offer a snapshot of existing clean-energy capacity on land, and where there’s room to grow, in every country. (It does not include rooftop solar.)
Source: Global Renewables Watch
Note: Capacity estimates were derived by multiplying solar farm area and wind turbine count by a simple capacity factor.
China leads the world in installed solar and wind capacity by a wide and growing margin. The pace has rapidly increased, with sprawling projects marching across the country’s interior. But in China and many other developing nations, the use of coal and gas is also still rising.
In the United States, electricity from solar and wind combined surpassed coal for the first time last year. Solar alone accounted for more than 80 percent of new capacity added in 2024, a third of which was installed in Texas. And in California, the addition of utility-scale battery storage helped to extend solar power after dark and to stabilize nearby grids.
In the European Union, solar and wind generated nearly a third of the region’s electricity, more than all fossil fuels combined. The blustery coasts of northern Europe are well suited to wind power, which accounted for nearly 60 percent of Denmark’s electricity in 2024. But solar has ramped up quickly as well, much of it at the household scale, as people turn to inexpensive Chinese-made panels.
“The costs of solar panels have come down so drastically over the past 10 years,” said Dave Jones, global insight director at Ember, an energy research organization. Combined with high gas prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “that makes a really compelling business case for installing large amounts of solar power.”
Solar panels
Battery
cells
$100
per watt
$400
per kwh
200
$50
$78
$0.31
2023
2013
2024
1975
Solar panels
Battery
cells
$100
per watt
$400
per kwh
200
$50
$78
$0.31
2023
2013
2024
1975
Solar panels
Battery
cells
$100
per watt
$400
per kwh
200
$50
$78
$0.31
2023
2013
2024
1975
Sources: IRENA (2024), Nemet (2009), Farmer and Lafond (2016) via Our World in Data; BloombergNEF.
Note: Prices are inflation-adjusted.
Those low prices are largely attributable to enormous manufacturing advances in China, which supplies around 80 percent of the international market for solar panels. After the Netherlands, the top importers of Chinese panels last year were Brazil, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and India.
Improved battery technology is another factor in solar’s spread. Cheaper, better storage makes it possible to power homes after the sun has set and people are home cooking, doing laundry or watching TV.
While wind projects face growing obstacles, solar has emerged as the more viable option to add capacity quickly, cheaply and at any nearly any scale.
Source: Global Renewables Watch
Note: Capacity estimates were derived by multiplying solar farm area and wind turbine count by a simple capacity factor.
Ambitious plans to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050, along with an influx of government money, have added enough solar to Australia’s grid that the sun now generates a quarter of the country’s electricity. In Brazil, major investments in solar and wind have helped offset fluctuations in its vast hydropower system caused by drought.
Across many emerging economies — like Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam — solar energy has expanded faster than wind farms.
Global Renewables Watch shows utility-size solar projects and not the small-scale solar found in many developing countries that are trying to expand access to electricity. Pakistan, for instance, was the third-largest importer of Chinese solar panels last year, but people installed nearly all of it on rooftops or near local farms and factories to avoid high electricity bills and blackouts.
The recent growth in solar and wind energy doesn’t mean renewables are inevitable. Somalia’s solar electricity generation, for example, went from zero to 17 percent in the past decade but Power Africa, the USAID program that supported that growth, was largely dismantled by the Trump administration last month. Development in Vietnam accelerated after the government guaranteed it would pay premium prices to developers for solar electricity, but a proposal to retroactively end the policy now threatens billions in investment. And in the United States, the Trump administration is promoting fossil fuels and working to slow the transition to renewables.
The world’s reliance on fossil fuels continues to grow, and global temperatures continue to climb. The amount of renewable projects added each year would need to double to meet the most ambitious goal set under the Paris climate agreement, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Researchers say they hope that making their data and model available to the public will help improve the planning and installation of that new capacity. “We want to see renewable energy get built,” Dr. Kiesecker said. “We want to see the transition happen as rapidly as possible.”
Charts are in order of combined solar and wind capacity. Each chart is on its own scale. To compare all the regions on the same scale, click the “shared scale” button.
Source: Global Renewables Watch
Note: Capacity estimates were derived by multiplying solar farm area and wind turbine count by a simple capacity factor.
Methodology
Data on wind and solar construction come from Global Renewables Watch, with research contributions from Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, The Nature of Conservancy and Planet.
Researchers trained a machine-learning model to detect onshore wind turbines and utility-scale solar farms in quarterly, high-resolution satellite imagery. Planet provided the satellite data, which came as quarterly mosaics at 4.7 meter resolution, from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2024.
Model training incorporated OpenStreetMap data on known solar and wind installations, and involved additional training and manual checks to improve accuracy and remove false positives.
The model was not trained on urban areas, where rooftop solar is far more prevalent. The areas designated as solar farms do not account for spacing of the panels. Capacity estimates were derived by multiplying solar area and wind turbine count by a standard capacity factor and do not account for actual solar or wind technology installed or for variations by country.
Full methodology available here.
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