How the energy establishment disses solar PV so much it doesn't even count it properly!

Readers of this blog will be aware of how the rise of solar PV around the world has taken the energy establishment by surprise. But not everyone knows how they are still dissing the technology. They don’t even count it properly! There’s a reason for that. It does not fit in with their model of how the energy industry works, so information that suggests that the system is radically changing is just being ignored. Massive increases have been occurring in solar PV deployment in Pakistan and Africa, and massive increases in deployment have occurred in recent years. Yet you would not believe this if you looked at the analyses and projections published by organisations such as the Energy Institute and the International Energy Agency.

Some of this represents implicit rather than explicit bias. Energy databases will use official governmental or international trading agencies as the sources of data. But much of the growth in solar PV is occurring in a decentralised way that often does not figure in these statistics.

Implicit bias in Counting

For example, in 2025 (reporting on 2024) the Energy Institute’s Review (see HERE) reported that total of electricity production in Pakistan was 133.7 TWh - a decline, so the figures said, of 3.7% on the previous year. Solar PV production was put at a mere 1.66 TWh - barely more than 1 per cent of total production. Yet solar installations were increasing rapidly. Could it just be that the observed decrease in electricity production was not a decrease at all but merely a decrease in centrally generated production? And could it be that the Energy Institute simply didn’t count solar production because it only relied on the official government statistics?

The ghost in the machine seems to be decentralised solar PV. Indeed, it has become a massive ghost. According to statistics on sales of solar panels to Pakistan, the nation’s solar electricity production seems likely to top 40 per cent of total Pakistan electricity consumption by the beginning of 2026 (on an annual basis). According to analyses of solar panel import data, around 30 GW are likely to have been installed (see HERE). Assuming Pakistan-relevant capacity factors (say, conservatively, 25%), that means about 66 TWh of production. - Compare this with the Energy Institute’s figure of 133.7 TWh of electricity production in 2024. (note: a capacity factor is the proportion of annual production that has occurred in a year divided by what would be generated if the plant is generating at peak capacity all of the time in a year).

A broadly similar story is emerging about solar power production in Africa. According to the Africa Solar Energy Industry Association ‘Africa’s total installed capacity to date could be as high as 63.9 GW’. (see HERE) That is using data on solar panels imported from China. Of course such data are not reflected in official figures such as that from the Energy Institute.

Now I am certainly not suggesting that the Energy Institute (EI) has been deliberately omitting the data on the solar PV build-up. Rather, I think that the EI has been engaging in implicit, unconscious bias, I suspect, by only counting figures issued by official governmental agencies. That is, solar PV will be counted only if it is reported by the governmental or national electricity system agencies. Often only ‘utility scale’ solar PV is reported by these agencies.

In other words, decentralised solar PV, which is massively underreported, needs to be counted properly. This bias needs to be corrected with urgency. I wait for the 2026 edition of the Energy Institute’s World Statistical Review of Energy to see the extent to which this has happened.

Biased energy projections

But some under-counting in the area of energy projections cannot be explained away by anything other than explicit bias. Here, I mention the International Energy Agency (IEA) in particular. Despite some improvements in its projections, it has persisted to under-project increases in the rate of solar PV. It’s past record, even until very recent times, in making projections for solar PV, is notorious in the way it has failed to project the increase in deployment.

Chart 1 shows the difference between the various projections by the ‘World Energy Outlook’ (WEO) projections made by the IEA and the outcome of deployment of solar PV around the world. As can be seen the blue line (with the arrow at the end) massively outpaces all of the IEA projections.

Chart 1

IEA solar PV projections compared to reality

Source: G. Lopez, Y. Pourjamal, C. Breyer ‘Paving the way towards a sustainable future or lagging behind? an ex-post analysis of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook’ Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review, 212 (Apr. 2025), Article 115371 see HERE

Why is the bias happening?

Some supporters of solely centrally supplied electricity seem to regard decentralised solar as being a problem and a threat to centralised systems. Of course, the electricity systems have to adapt rather than try and suppress decentralised solar power. Less attention seems to be paid to the ways in which decentralised solar has helped centralised systems.

A shining (pun intended) example of this is in South Africa. Here, the grid’s poor performance and regular blackouts since 2008 have done great damage to the South African economy. The number of blackouts has fallen in recent times in part because of the growth of decentralised solar. This has improved the economy as a whole. People wanted to ensure power supplies, so they installed solar PV. This, in turn, greatly reduced the pressure on the centralised electricity system and allowed it, on top of other measures, to recover.

Although most people in the world now have access to grid-supplied electricity, a lot of this supply is unreliable. This includes South Africa, where solar mini-grids are being promoted as a measure to ease fuel poverty (see HERE). Please note, I am mentionng South Africa here, not because most of the African decentralised solar is being deployed here, but simply because there has been a fair amount of coverage of it in the media.

The IEA is itself under pressure. On the one hand, it is encouraged to include unrealistically optimistic projections for nuclear power (at the expense of solar and wind). On the other hand, it is being threatened with defunding by the Trump Government for suggesting that countering climate change is a priority. At the end of the day it is an organisation hobbled by the politics of the nations that give it the most money.

Rapidly expanding decentralised solar PV

A rapidly expanding trend around the world is for domestic and business consumers, even industrial consumers, to build their own solar PV schemes. This is sometimes driven by Government policy (perhaps most notably in Australia). Unbeknown to the policymakers and many commentators, it is also driven by the unreliability of grid-supplied-electricity. Grid-supplied-electricity is now said to be available to over 90 per cent of the world’s population, but the supply of reliable electricity to people is to a much smaller percentage of world population. Often, hospitals and businesses in developing countries have diesel generation as their main form of supply.

Solar PV has become cheaper and more convenient compared to diesel generation. Allied to the fact that solar PV is (almost universally) the cheapest form of generation directly to the grid (and often directly to the consumer) solar PV is certain to become the dominant form of electricity generation in the world in not too long. Wind and hydro will be the other major contenders.

Of course, as the proportion of solar PV on the electricity systems rises, the so-called ‘capture value’ of the solar PV will fall unless batteries are installed alongside the solar PV. What I mean is that solar PV will rival or be more than electricity demand at more and more times of the day, meaning that the value of the solar generation (‘capture value’) will fall. That is, unless of course, the power is stored in batteries for use later on. However, as even the International Energy Agency points out, battery prices are plunging ever lower. With more and more solar PV co-locating with batteries (at both utility and buildings-based levels) the ‘capture value’ problem facing solar will be conquered. Batteries will be a key means by which solar PV will consolidate its dominance of world energy markets.

The energy establishment as a blocker

The institutions of the energy establishment, and indeed a lot of trained energy economists, are blinkered and act as a drain on progressive renewable energy development. They now have to favour large-scale renewable development. Indeed, large-scale windfarms and sometimes solar farms are now proving to be very profitable for utilities around the world. That fits into their investment paradigm, and that’s great as far as it goes - but it does not reach everywhere.

Yet the energy establishment has a tendency to relate everything to a corporately organised, utility-led approach. Grudgingly, large-scale solar farms and batteries are often tolerated, if underestimated in scope, because, so the argument runs, their capital costs are cheaper than (to the utilities) those disruptive decentralised solar PV systems. But that is for the benefit of the electricity system, not its consumers. This energy-corporate-led perspective loses sight of the fact that the electricity system should exist for the benefit of the consumers, not the other way around.

Often, energy consumers will find that, for them, decentralised systems are economic in that they allow them to save money and carry on living and doing business. This is regardless of what corporately inspired spreadsheets may claim. The costs and income structures of the energy-corporates are not the same as the costs and income streams of their consumers. See my earlier commentary on this (HERE).

However, the disdain that the centralised utility approach has felt for decentralised energy has not, so far, ebbed. That is clear from the way that decentralised solar PV is undercounted, and more generally, in the way that solar PV in general is constantly being underestimated.