In a long interview with Everything Electric, Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council, argues that solar has quietly become the fastest growing and cheapest source of electricity ever built. The Council is the worldwide industry body for solar and battery storage, and Dunlop says the cost of panels and batteries has fallen by roughly 90 percent over the last 15 to 20 years. Her headline number is that about 75 percent of the new electricity capacity added to grids worldwide each year is now solar paired with storage. She frames the shift as largely bottom-up, driven by households and businesses doing the maths rather than by government mandates, and accelerating further as the recent Gulf oil scare reminds countries how exposed fossil fuel supply really is.
What makes solar different, Dunlop argues, is that it is a manufactured technology rather than a fuel, so its price keeps falling as production scales, while the inflation-adjusted cost of fossil energy has barely moved in two centuries. That distinction is worth holding up against the UK's own situation, which the video spends time on. British retail electricity remains among the more expensive in Europe because prices are still set by gas, even on days when little gas is burned. Spain offers the counter-example: after a heavy rollout of solar and wind, the video says it now has close to the cheapest power on the continent and has been partly shielded from the latest gas price spikes, to the point that energy-hungry industries are relocating there. The UK currently charges zero percent VAT on home solar systems until the end of March 2027, a real-world incentive the piece does not dwell on but buyers should note.
The most striking case Dunlop describes is Pakistan, where she says roughly six in ten homes now have rooftop solar, with the boom creating about half a million jobs and saving the country an estimated 12 billion dollars in fossil fuel imports. She says fossil fuel demand there has dropped by around 40 percent, and that the surge came from ordinary people investing their own money rather than from any state program. The interview ranges widely: balcony solar that plugs straight into a wall socket and is set to be allowed in the UK this summer without an electrician, around 7.5 million people working in solar and storage worldwide, and panels that Dunlop says are about 97 percent recyclable. She also points to Australia and the UK as grids learning to run on high shares of solar and batteries. She also points to Australia, where she says more than 4 million households now have rooftop solar and parts of the grid have at times run on more than 100 percent rooftop generation, and to China, which she says accounts for around half of all solar and storage being deployed globally. India, she adds, is targeting 10 million solar homes, while France now requires solar over large car parks. These are her figures and the Council's, presented in the video and not independently checked here.
Bottom line: Dunlop runs the global trade body for solar, so this is an advocate making the strongest possible case, and it should be read that way. Even so, the core claim is hard to argue with: when the cheapest new power is also the one you can bolt to your own roof, adoption stops needing a subsidy to make sense. The Pakistan story is the one to sit with, because it shows demand moving faster than policy. If you rent or own in the UK, the genuinely useful takeaway is plug-in balcony solar, which could finally make small-scale generation worth it for people without a spare 10,000 pounds.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.