Solar Power Is Booming in Emerging Markets
Crude Inventories Drop amid Continued SPR Draws Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… Solar energy is going gangbusters.
The world is adding photovoltaic solar panels at a blistering rate, shattering its own records year after year, buoyed by aflood of ever-cheaper solar panels out of China.
“We have a plentiful and cheap source of electricity that can be built quickly, almost anywhere in the world,” NewScientist wrote in anarticlepublished late last year.
“Is it fanciful to imagine that solar could one day power everything?” But the growth of solar power is uneven around the globe, with some regions seeing a rapid transformation while others see their numbers plateauing.
Interestingly, it is some of the world’s poorest countries that are now leading the solar revolution, while some of the richest and most avid champions of the clean energy transition are lagging behind.
“Europe likes to think of itself as a champion of renewable energy, the Economist wrote in an August report, when in reality, solar additions in 2025 barely topped those of 2024, and in 2026 “new deployments are set to fall in every big EU country except Italy.” SetOilPrice.comas a preferred source in Googlehere.
Europe’s solar slowdown is in large part thanks to the constraints of the continent’s energy grid.
During peak production hours, the grid is overly congested and lacks sufficient energy storage, leading to energy wastage, negative energy prices, and even the threat of grid failure and catastrophic blackouts, such as the one thattook almost all of Spain and Portugal offline in 2025.
European leaders areracing to add storage capacityto the grid in order to address these mounting issues and avoid yet another energy crisis, but in the meantime, adding even more solar to the overloaded grid will only serve to intensify these issues.
But one dark horse country managed to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to energy storage development, and is therefore now emerging as a surprise solar frontrunner in 2026.
“Unlike many western European countries, Romania is deploying storage relatively early in its solar build-out, rather than trying to catch up after large amounts of solar capacity have already been installed,” Antonio Arruebo, an analyst at SolarPower Europe, told the Economist.
Much of this growth comes in the form of small-scale and residential solar-plus-battery systems.
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