The conflict in the Middle East has reminded the world of something it keeps having to relearn. When oil and gas supply is disrupted, everyone pays. Prices surge, supply chains buckle, and governments that spent years talking about long-term energy transition suddenly find themselves scrambling for short-term fixes. I have watched this cycle repeat throughout my career in the solar industry. The difference now is that the alternative is no longer theoretical.
Over the past decade, solar power has evolved from a promising alternative into the world’s most compelling economic choice for new electricity generation, but the events of recent months have made its additional benefits clear. With solar paired with storage, the energy you generate at home cannot be blockaded, sanctioned, or priced by a conflict on the other side of the world, and can generate power faster than most other alternatives. This makes solar not just an energy asset, but also an economic asset, and a political asset.
Fossil fuel markets have always been volatile, but price shocks once described as exceptional are becoming routine. That volatility has a cost that goes well beyond the price of a barrel of oil or a unit of gas. It shows up in energy bills, in cost of living, in lost industrial competitiveness, and in the decisions businesses and governments make about where to invest.
Together, solar and storage give communities stable, predictable power with no exposure to commodity markets. Solar with battery storage is a fully dispatchable system, capable of storing power when generation is high and releasing it when demand peaks. The practical benefits flow through every level of an economy. Businesses can plan and invest with confidence. Manufacturers can make long-term commitments without hedging against fuel price swings. Hospitals, schools, and public services can operate without the risk of supply disruption. For households, predictable energy bills mean one less source of financial anxiety.
Meanwhile, new electricity demand is arriving faster than legacy energy infrastructure can respond. Electrical vehicles (EVs), data centres, industrial electrification, and manufacturing reshoring are driving consumption at a scale and speed the existing grid was never designed for. A new data centre that needs energy in eighteen months cannot wait a decade for a new power station to come online. Solar can be planned, permitted, and built in a fraction of that time and a fraction of that cost. In most markets around the world solar+storage is now the cheapest source of new generation by some distance, which is why it is increasingly the most realistic answer to meeting that demand.
The countries making the most of solar right now are doing so on the strength of its economics and reliability, and Pakistan illustrates that better than anywhere. Pakistan’s solar boom was not born in a policy paper, but from depleted gas reserves, rising import costs, and a population tired of unreliable power. It is now one of the world’s largest solar markets, and the savings on import costs have been transformative. In Kenya, off-grid solar has reached communities that centralised energy infrastructure never did, not as a stopgap, but as the permanent solution. The pattern is spreading, country by country, for the same reasons.
The barriers holding solar back today are regulatory, not technical or financial. Our grids were designed for power flowing in one direction from large centralised producers. Now, solar flows from rooftops, farms, and communities back into systems that were never built to operate in a bidirectional way. The real brake on progress today is permitting regimes that take years, connection queues that stretch even longer, and market rules written before distributed energy existed. The technology has moved, prices have plunged, but the regulation has not kept pace, and until it does, solar will keep delivering less than it is capable of.
The democratisation of energy generation, however, is a powerful force that goes hand in hand with the electrification of our society, and this time it’s a shift that benefits both the global north and the global south. Rooftop solar and battery storage are putting control directly into people’s hands – cutting bills, reducing exposure to price spikes, and giving households and businesses a resilience that simply didn’t exist a decade ago – while giving communities and countries ownership over their own, home-grown electricity. That’s what energy security looks like at the individual level, and that’s what sets solar apart from every energy system that came before it.
Governments that match that urgency will be better placed for what comes next. Those that wait will find themselves having this conversation again, in harder circumstances.
Lennart van Walsum is Director EMEIA & Americas at the Global Solar Council.
