Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. We have solved fusion at a distance with solar and batteries. We're arguing speed and cost of deployment for the collection and storage system. The technology drops in cost rapidly, it lasts for decades with no moving parts and minimal maintenance. It can be trivially recycled today with no further technology advancements needed. It fails gracefully.
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-... (solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled)
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline (lithium-ion battery prices fell by 19% every time global cumulative production doubled)
Ember Energ: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
The Economist: The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
(think in systems)