The Era of 24/7 Solar Has Begun

Battery storage is turning solar power from a daytime-only resource into all-hours electricity, experts said this week, as they declared that the “era of anytime solar has begun” and that solar’s role in global power systems can be far bigger than previously thought possible.”

Solar has been meeting an ever-growing share of global electricity, but delivering almost all of it at midday, leaving non-sunny hours a stronghold for fossil generation. But the good news is that batteries are now scaling fast enough to defeat that dilemma. A new report from the energy thinktank Ember suggests that battery storage is now scaling fast enough to break the nighttime dominance of fossil fuels, which pick up the slack when the sun stops shining.

According to Ember, 2026 has seen a 50 percent increase in battery additions globally - enough to shift an average of 34 percent of new solar generation to non-sunny hours. In Bulgaria and Chile, which are leading the way, the figures are now an admirable 77 percent and 76 percent respectively.

“Cheap daytime solar has become the most powerful transformative force reshaping power grids globally, growing faster than any other source of electricity,” said Kostantsa Rangelova‍, Ember’s global electricity analyst. “Now batteries have become cheap and good enough to unlock the next stage of solar growth with anytime solar. Delivering solar in non-sunny hours changes everything: solar’s role in global power systems can be far bigger than previously thought possible.”

The economics are already very attractive. Solar has become “the cheapest form of electricity in history“, according to the International Energy Agency, since 2020. More recently, battery economics have improved dramatically in just the last two years. Following a sharp 40 percent fall in turnkey battery costs in 2024, 2025 saw another big fall of 31 percent. Previous Ember analysis has shown that falling battery costs and improving storage technologies are making round-the-clock solar electricity increasingly viable, enabling it to meet 90 percent of electricity demand efficiently in solar-rich countries like Mexico, and helping them become global solar superpowers.

Batteries will not (yet) solve every seasonal challenge, but they remove solar's daily limit, allowing cheap daytime solar to power the non-sunny hours and unlocking its next phase of growth.