A few years ago, solar power became the “cheapest electricity in history”, but it still lacked the ability to meet demand 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.
Since then, there have been significant improvements in the cost and performance of batteries, making it cheaper than ever to pair solar with energy storage using batteries.
In our new Ember “white paper”, we present modelling showing that solar with batteries in major sunny cities, such as Las Vegas or Mexico City, can now get more than 90% of the way to continuous generation, at costs below those of coal or nuclear power.
Even in cloudier cities away from the equator, such as Birmingham in the UK, it is possible to run on solar plus storage across the majority of hours in the year.
The white paper sets out how near-continuous “24/365” solar power has become an economic and technological reality in sunny regions.
Solar and storage ‘gamechangers’
A solar panel generates most electricity when the sun is shining, meaning it cannot provide constant power throughout the year. Put another way, 100 watts (W) of solar capacity only generates around 20W on average – and that output will be concentrated in daylight hours.
Our report shows that battery energy storage can unlock solar’s full potential, by turning daytime generation into around-the-clock electricity.
Indeed, when paired with sufficient battery storage, that same 100W of solar capacity can provide electricity around the clock – up to 100% of the time.
This also means up to five times as much solar generation can be delivered using the same connection to the electricity network, reducing the need for costly grid upgrades.
Battery energy storage is now cheaper than ever, with global average prices falling by 40% in 2024 alone. The cost of a full battery system fell to a record-low $165 per kilowatt hour (kWh), according to BloombergNEF.
Additionally, there have been a number of technological improvements boosting battery energy storage.
Recent innovations mean almost all grid batteries are now cobalt- and nickel-free, reducing the need for so-called “critical minerals”. They are longer-lasting than ever, with some batteries now having 20-year warranties. And they are safer than ever – with fire risk improving by a hundred-fold since 2019.
Improved container design has also cut maintenance and installation costs.
Our white paper shows that supply is ready to scale, with manufacturing capacity already exceeding demand. There is also significant new production capacity under construction outside of China.
The next frontier is sodium-ion “salt” batteries, which would eliminate the need for lithium and drive prices down even further. One large salt-battery plant has already been commissioned in China.
These technological advances and declining costs mean the world’s first “24/365” battery and solar plants are now coming online:
- In Hawaii, several solar-plus-battery projects are providing electricity through the night after the decommissioning of the last coal power plant in 2022.
- In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), at 100 megawatt (MW), Moro Hub is the world’s largest 100% solar-powered data centre, commissioned in 2022.
- In Saudi Arabia, a tourist mega project, including 16 hotel resorts that are all powered entirely by solar electricity, was completed in 2023.
- The first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar project is already under development in the UAE. Emirati state-owned renewable energy company Masdar is leading the project, which was announced in January 2025 and will consist of a 5.2 gigawatt (GW) solar photovoltaic (PV) plant coupled with a 19 gigawatt hour (GWh) battery storage system to provide 1GW of uninterrupted solar electricity supply to the grid.
These examples show that 24/365 solar electricity has already been supplying customers and that it will increasingly start being used to power parts of the grid.
Cheaper in the sun
In order to investigate the potential for 24/365 solar, Ember’s white paper modelled a hypothetical system, using real weather data, for a series of cities around the world.
The modelling is based on a system with 6GW of solar capacity and 17GWh of battery storage, because there are roughly 15 hours of darkness in winter in the mid-latitudes.
The modelling shows that solar and battery in the sunniest cities could already get more than 90% of the way to 24/365 solar generation, covering almost every hour of every day in the year.
For example, Muscat in Oman could draw on 1GW of continuous solar electricity for 99% of hours in the year, if it paired 6GW of solar panels with 17GWh of battery capacity.
Las Vegas in the US, Mexico City in Mexico and Johannesburg in South Africa could all rely on such solar-plus-storage systems for at least 95% of hours in the year.
Even Birmingham in the UK could achieve 1GW of solar output for 62% of hours annually. (This is lower than for sunnier cities due to a stronger seasonal cycle and cloudier weather.)
In the sunniest places, solar and storage could generate reliable output, close to 24/365, for around $100 per megawatt hour (MWh), based on average global costs for solar and batteries in 2024.
For each city, the yellow shading in the figure below shows the share of hours each year that it could rely on 1GW of solar output if it installed a 6GW solar plus 17GWh battery system, given historical weather conditions.
Over the past year alone, the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) for solar-plus-storage systems fell by 22%, driven by a 40% fall in battery prices. This is based on $165/kWh, which was BloombergNEF’s assessment of the global battery pack price at the end of 2024. The LCOE of solar and battery had fallen by 28% over the previous four years.
This makes solar with battery storage cheaper than both coal and nuclear when compared with US-based LCOE, as shown in the chart below.
There is evidence that 2025 solar and battery prices will continue to fall again. Already in early 2025, tenders for large-scale battery storage projects in Tabuk and Hail, Saudi Arabia, reported battery prices as low as $72/kWh.
Cloudy day challenges
Our modelling shows that the greatest challenge to generating constant, year-round electricity from solar plus storage is not nighttime, but clouds.
In the mid-latitudes, with around 15 hours of darkness in winter, around 17 hours of battery capacity is sufficient to bridge the period from sunset to sunrise.
This is because batteries typically do not fully charge and discharge to maintain high performance over time.
However, getting to 24/365 solar is harder, as while every day has daylight, not every day has full sunlight. Even though clouds do not reduce solar generation to zero – and despite batteries being cheaper than ever – extra battery storage is still not an economical option for bridging cloudy periods across multiple days.
The graphic below illustrates this, based on the same 6GW solar plus 17GWh storage system as described before, generating electricity under the weather conditions and seasonal cycles of the same 12 cities around the world.
The chart for each city runs from January to December on the horizontal axis and across 24 hours of each day on the vertical axis. Direct use of solar power is shown in orange, with stored solar from the battery shown in yellow and periods with a shortfall in dark blue.
The figure shows that, even on the cloudiest day of the year in Muscat, this solar-plus-storage system would generate constant electricity for 18 hours. Madrid in Spain would see lower output on some shorter and cloudier days in November, December and January. In contrast, Hyderabad in India would be impacted in the summer by cloudy monsoon days.
Overall, the figure shows that the sunniest cities would only fall slightly short of 24/365 solar electricity, but clouds would have a larger impact elsewhere.
The trade-off
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has described solar power as offering the “cheapest electricity in history”.
For example, solar power costs just $41/MWh in Las Vegas, according to Ember’s calculations using average global equipment and borrowing costs. However, this is only delivering electricity through daytime hours. As a result, on average around the world, solar has a “capacity factor” of 21% – meaning each unit of solar capacity generates 21% of its maximum theoretical output.
Raising this all the way to 97% raises the price to $104/MWh. However, this also substantially improves the value of solar, now that it is delivering close to 24/365. However, as the chart below shows, meeting the last few percent of demand from solar and storage alone significantly increases the price.
The best value between solar alone or solar with plentiful storage depends on the use case.
It may be optimal to build solar without a battery, so long as a factory can access cheap grid electricity when the solar panels are not generating, for example.
On the other hand, it may be optimal to build solar and batteries to get to 99.7% for an off-grid data centre that values reliability over price. Even in the most sunny places, exactly 100% supply will generally be uneconomic – but it is possible to get very close.
For many cases and based on current prices, the sweet spot may be to size the system for a constant supply of solar electricity for 60-90% of the time, our modelling suggests.
This provides cheap, low-carbon solar power most of the time. It would enable electricity to be used flexibly through the night or during high-price hours.
If widely deployed, such systems would allow for a significantly downscaled need for grid investment, whether they are large-scale solar farms exporting more electricity to the grid or industrial sites drawing from public supplies less often.
The post Guest post: How solar panels and batteries can now run ‘close to 24/365’ in some cities appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How solar panels and batteries can now run ‘close to 24/365’ in some cities
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrat