I listened to a podcast this week with David Sirota interviewing Bill McKibben about the state of solar energy. One of the familiar criticisms came up: “the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow.”
It’s a neat phrase. Easy to nod along with. And true — if your world ends at the edge of your window. But take a step back. The sun is always shining somewhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere. Unless we’ve all quietly become flat-earthers, the problem isn’t whether the sun is shining; it’s whether we’ve built a system to share it.
McKibben points to batteries as the key to solving intermittency. And yes, storage matters. But I keep thinking we’re framing this too locally. What if the real breakthrough isn’t just batteries in basements but networks that span horizons?
Think of the Earth as a rotating band of waking and sleeping. As one region dims into night, another brightens into day. Why should energy stop at national borders? Why shouldn’t it flow like data does — across cables, across oceans, across time zones — so that supply always meets demand?
This isn’t science fiction. It’s physics plus willpower.
What’s already happening
The momentum behind solar is no longer tentative — it’s accelerating. In 2023, solar PV generation grew by more than 25%, adding ~320 terawatt-hours to the global supply. Solar now contributes roughly 5.4% of global electricity, and clean energy as a whole is already supplying ~40% of global power.
China is by far the biggest mover in this space. In 2024, China installed about 329 GW of new solar capacity — over half of all new global capacity — giving it a ~55% share of additions worldwide. Its cumulative PV capacity has crossed into the terawatt scale, making it the undisputed leader.
But the story isn’t just about blazing deserts or tropical sun scapes. Germany is a striking counterexample. In 2024, Germany’s installed solar capacity stood around 90 GW, and solar accounted for roughly 15% of its electricity generation. That matters — Germany isn’t anyone’s idea of a sun holiday destination, yet it has proven solar can thrive in a temperate, cloud-prone climate.
The implication is powerful: you don’t need to live in Arizona or the Sahara to exploit solar. You just need to see the sun, and build the infrastructure to catch it. If China can build at continental scale and Germany can embed solar deep into its mix, then nearly every country on Earth has untapped potential waiting to be claimed.
Meanwhile, China dominates nearly every step of the solar value chain — from polysilicon to wafers to panels — driving down costs worldwide. That dominance comes with risks, but also with the undeniable benefit of making solar cheaper than fossil fuels almost everywhere.
So yes — solar is scaling fast. But it’s not a play reserved for sunny nations. The real frontier now is policy, transmission, networks, and equitable access.
The global grid vision
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines already move electricity thousands of kilometres with relatively low losses. China has built some of the longest HVDC projects on Earth, sending hydro and solar power from remote western provinces to its megacities on the coast. Europe too trades electricity across borders, smoothing supply when wind drops in one country but rises in another.
What if we scaled that thinking globally? Not “send solar from New Zealand to New York,” but stitch together the band of daylight with the band of demand. As one region sleeps, its neighbours share their surplus. As another wakes, it passes the torch.
Storage still matters. Home batteries, community co-ops, pumped hydro, or hydrogen will buffer local grids. But the heavy lifting — the thing that makes the whole system resilient — could be this planetary network, as seamless and invisible as the internet.
The internet doesn’t care where the content originates; it just routes the packet. Imagine electricity treated the same way. You don’t worry if the electrons lighting your room came from Spanish wind, Greek sun, or North Sea tides. You just flick the switch, and it works.
Energy as a right, not a racket
Here’s where I may sound naive. I’m not an engineer or a policy wonk. I’m an outsider looking in, imagining. But I can’t shake the idea that we’ve made energy too fragile, too captured by profit.
After all, this is power from the sun we are harnessing. Charging extortionate rates for it feels like charging for air — or like bottling water and selling it back to people who already have a tap. Yes, there are brands, luxuries, and excesses in that market. Some people may want to drink only from a certain label, or use excessive amounts. But the rest of us can do perfectly fine living off the basics.
Energy should work the same way. We all pay for the maintenance, the upgrades, the supply — the things that keep the service running. And then we all get a fair share of the output. Imagine it like a mobile phone plan: a connection to the grid plus a certain allowance of energy included each month. Many households would live comfortably within that. Those who genuinely need more — whether because of industry, consumption, or indulgence — can pay for the extra.
Right now, that’s not how it works. In many EU countries, the average annual energy bill is now more than a month’s wages for low-paid workers. A whole month, gone on nothing more than keeping the lights on. Even a high earner can imagine how painful that would feel — and for those already on the edge, it’s devastating.
In that model, energy stops being a disproportionate tax on those with the least. It becomes a service, not a racket. Something steady, predictable, and fair — like turning on the tap.
Challenges, yes. But not impossibilities.
Transmission isn’t free. Even HVDC lines lose some power. Building global interconnectors would take colossal investment and cooperation. Geopolitics could unravel it. Cybersecurity risks would multiply. And yes, entrenched fossil fuel interests will fight tooth and nail to delay.
But every major human infrastructure has faced the same arguments. Railroads, undersea cables, telecom networks, the internet itself — all once dismissed as too hard, too expensive, too politically fragile. And yet, here we are, scrolling on devices connected across oceans in milliseconds.
Why should electrons be any harder to move than bits?
A different kind of legacy
If I had billions to spend, this is the project I’d want to stamp my name on. Not another vanity rocket. Not another social media platform. But the self-charging starship called Earth: a global energy network that outlasts companies, brands, and quarterly earnings.
Because companies rise and fall, absorbed and forgotten. But an energy backbone that gives every human reliable, clean power — that would live in history. That would be remembered for centuries.
Bringing it back to now
Right now, wholesale electricity prices are collapsing thanks to renewables, but households don’t feel the benefit. Right now, local co-ops are springing up, but lack the interconnections to thrive. Right now, batteries are dropping in cost, but still seen as luxury add-ons.
We can do better. We can build a system that works at human scale, but also planetary scale. Local jobs maintaining local grids. Global standards tying them together. Skills that travel anywhere on Earth, for anyone willing to help keep the lights on.
It starts with a vision. And from there, it’s just engineering, politics, and persistence.
I may not be an expert, but I know this: the sun is always shining somewhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere. If we build the right networks, that will always be enough.
Further Reading & Proponents
This idea only really struck me this week — and now that I’ve dug in, I can see I’m late to the game. Versions of it are already being worked on, studied, and even piloted. The technology exists. The question is willpower — or maybe whether we need different people at the energy table.
- Global Energy Interconnection (GEI) — proposed by China’s State Grid Corporation, a plan for ultra-high-voltage lines linking continents. Read more »
- The Global Grid — an academic vision (Chatzivasileiadis, Ernst & Andersson, 2012) outlining how a worldwide electricity network could stabilize renewables. Read more »
- One Sun One World One Grid (OSOWOG) — an India-led initiative to link solar generation across Asia, Africa, and beyond. Read more »
- Asian Super Grid — a proposal to connect China, Japan, Korea, and others through HVDC lines. Read more »
- Regional interconnectors — Europe’s cross-border electricity trade, Morocco–UK’s Xlinks project, and others are smaller but real steps toward a global backbone. Read more »
The bones of the idea are here. The engineering is possible. What remains is deciding whether we build a system for shareholders, or for citizens.
As always, be excellent to each other.
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