FINANCE

From virtue signalling to value For a decade, backing clean energy meant paying a moral premium and hoping the returns caught up. Two forces flipped that logic. The first is cost. Solar power is now the cheapest electricity in history, and the IEA expects solar panels alone to attract more than US $ 500bn this year, more than the world will spend finding new oil. Economics of that order do not care which way a state votes. This May, deep-red Utah drew more electricity from the sun than from anything else for the first time, solar edging past both natural gas and the coal the state was practically built on. The second is security. After Russia’ s war turned gas into a weapon, treasuries everywhere learned that a wind farm cannot be embargoed.“ We are in the midst of the largest energy security crisis the world has ever faced,” says Fatih Birol, the IEA’ s Executive Director,“ and I believe this will reshape investment strategies globally, with parallels to the major changes the energy world witnessed after the oil shocks of the 1970s.” Read that way, the clean-energy record is less a green triumph than a hard-nosed hedge. The cheapest, most secure electron tends to win, and lately it happens to be low-carbon. Then came AI, with an appetite for power that has stunned even the utilities. Training and running models devours electricity, and the hyperscalers, from Microsoft to Google to Amazon, have become green finance’ s new anchor buyers, signing power deals longer and larger than most governments would dare.

Solar investment expected in 2026, more than global spending on new oil supply

Source: IEA

96 September 2026