For people who are interested in this space should very much read EMBER. They make digestable, data rich reporting.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
- Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
- For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%)
- For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix...
This is a great link. The most interesting feature of the solar graph is the amplitude of the seasonal variations. It looks like we typically generating ~100% more solar power in July than December.
If "we need to store solar energy from summer to winter" is indeed a significant issue, maybe you could use the extra power in summertime to make natural gas [1] and then store the gas until you need it in the winter.
Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections.
To completely decarbonise we probably will need to eventually make liquid fuels for long distance air travel. But it may make more sense to do that nearer the equator to maximise the return on the capital investment by running it constantly rather than only during the summer.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...