Solar That Never Sleeps: Why 24/7 Clean Electricity Is No Longer a Fantasy
For decades, solar’s Achilles’ heel has been its dependency on daylight. We could flood the grid with photons at noon, sure but when the sun ducked behind the horizon, fossil fuels filled the void. That equation, baked into decades of energy planning, is now outdated.
According to Ember’s latest June 2025 report, Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything, we’re standing on the edge of a radically different energy landscape. With battery prices plunging and performance surging, it’s now possible, and cost-competitive, to deliver near-continuous, round-the-clock solar electricity in sunny regions. Not by building sci-fi fantasy infrastructure, but by simply scaling the solar and storage tech we already have.
The implications are massive. Not just for energy providers or grid operators, but for data centre managers, industrial operators, policymakers, and sustainability officers trying to keep one eye on emissions and the other on costs.
Let’s break this down.
From sunny-day power to near-permanent supply
At the heart of Ember’s analysis is a simple premise: match 5 kW of solar panels with a 17 kWh battery, and you can deliver a steady 1 kW of power across all 24 hours of the day, in places like Las Vegas, Muscat, or Mexico City.
Scale that up to 6 GW of panels and 17 GWh of battery storage, and you’ve got the bones of a utility-scale setup that can maintain 1 GW of continuous solar electricity 97% of the time. For context 1GW is roughly the output of a nuclear reactor. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s today’s physics and today’s pricing.
Even better, it’s affordable. The levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) to hit that 97% target has dropped to $104/MWh, cheaper than coal ($118) and vastly more economical than nuclear ($182), according to Lazard’s June 2024 benchmarks. Just one year ago, that figure was $132. A 22% drop in 12 months.
Battery prices alone fell an incredible 40% in 2024 - part of a decade-long plunge that’s seen lithium-ion costs drop nearly 90% since 2014.
Why this matters - far beyond the grid
This isn’t just a story about cleaner electrons. This is about radically expanding where, when, and how electricity can be delivered, and what that unlocks.
For industrial players, data centres, hydrogen electrolysers, desalination plants, EV gigafactories, uninterrupted electricity is table stakes. They don’t care whether it’s sunny or not. They care about reliability, price predictability, and emissions. Solar-plus-storage, properly sized, can now offer all three, and do it in regions where grid connections are congested, delayed, or nonexistent.
Consider the UAE’s gigawatt-scale 24/7 solar project: 5.2 GW of solar PV paired with 19 GWh of battery, aimed at delivering a reliable 1 GW supply. Or Google’s Mesa data centre in Arizona, sourcing clean, continuous power via a 260 MW solar array and 1 GWh of storage.
In West Virginia, molten titanium furnaces, some of the most electricity-hungry industrial processes on Earth are being powered by solar microgrids. In Saudi Arabia, a massive solar microgrid with 1.3 GWh of battery storage is already running a 100% solar-powered tourism resort and infrastructure hub.
These aren’t pilots. These are systems in operation - and they're only part of the story. Innovations like agrivoltaics, where solar panels coexist with crops and/or livestock, and floating solar farms on reservoirs or canals, are expanding solar’s utility while conserving land and water.
Cutting through a bottleneck of wires
One of the most underappreciated implications of solar-plus-storage? It cuts grid expansion costs and delays dramatically.
Today, more than 3,000 GW of renewable projects globally are stuck in grid connection queues. Building new transmission is expensive, slow, and politically fraught. But batteries let you store excess solar generated during the day and push it into the night, allowing far more capacity to be installed behind existing grid connections.
According to Ember, in some cases up to five times as much solar capacity can be connected using the same grid infrastructure, just by adding battery storage. That kind of capacity factor shift, from 20% up toward 100%, changes the economics not just of clean power but of grid infrastructure planning.
In short, batteries let us do more with what we already have - making solar not only more flexible but more resilient in the face of extreme weather, and unlocking decentralised access in remote regions.
A global trend, not a regional fluke
Now you might be thinking: “Sure, that works in Vegas or Muscat, but what about Madrid? Or Birmingham?”
Fair question.
The report’s data shows that while ultra-sunny cities can approach or even exceed 97% round-the-clock solar reliability, many moderately sunny cities can still reach 60–90% with well-sized solar and storage configurations. Madrid, for example, hits 88% of the way there. Abuja, Nigeria clocks in at 92%. Johannesburg, 95%. That’s not nothing.
Even Birmingham, with its infamous winter gloom, gets 62% of the way there, enough to materially contribute when integrated with local wind and hydro resources.
In real-world terms, a data centre in Manchester could meet more than half its load with solar-plus-storage alone, while trimming grid reliance and carbon exposure.
For companies pursuing 24/7 carbon-free energy matching, like Google and Microsoft - this kind of granular, hourly clean power capability is no longer out of reach. It’s arriving faster than corporate procurement teams and regulators can adapt.
Still, it’s not magic. Trade-offs matter.
Yes, we’re getting close to 24/365 solar reliability. But let’s be clear: squeezing out the last 3% to hit true full-year continuity is, for now, prohibitively expensive. The jump from 97% to 99.4% today requires doubling battery capacity, a wildly inefficient return on investment.
And cloud cover isn’t going away. Extended cloudy stretches still pose a challenge, particularly in winter or during monsoons. This is where grid interconnections, flexible loads, demand-shifting, and long-duration storage (compressed air, flow batteries, etc.) still have a critical role to play.
What solar-plus-storage does do is dramatically reduce the amount of backup or fossil capacity needed, and does so with far shorter lead times and lower complexity than traditional infrastructure projects like gas plants or new transmission corridors. It flattens the curve. It shrinks the peaks. It gives planners breathing room.
And in many off-grid or remote contexts, like mine sites in Australia or industrial zones in the Sahel, it may simply be the only viable clean electricity solution.
The policy lag is now the real blocker
If there’s one theme that screams from this report, it’s this: the technology and economics are no longer the limiting factors. Policy and perception are.
Many regulators, financiers, and system operators still think of solar as a “daytime-only” resource. Storage is treated as an add-on rather than a default. Procurement rules, market structures, and even permitting processes are years behind where the hardware is.
Even in countries racing to decarbonise, the planning frameworks haven’t yet caught up to what’s possible, or optimal.
India, to its credit, has started integrating storage into renewable tenders. SECI’s 2025 round-the-clock (RTC) tender included strict financial and performance guarantees, setting a precedent. But more is needed, particularly in emerging markets where solar potential is highest and grid constraints are steepest.
The real unlock now lies in letting 24-hour solar be procured, planned, and deployed at scale without bureaucratic friction or outdated assumptions.
What the next decade holds
The convergence of declining costs and digital optimisation paints a promising picture for the years ahead.
If you look at the trendlines, not just the datapoints, it becomes clear we’re nowhere near the ceiling of what’s possible. Between 2014 and 2024, the cost of lithium-ion batteries fell by nearly 90%, and solar module prices dropped by more than 98% since 2010. Even in the past 12 months alone, battery costs fell another 40%. LFP (lithium iron phosphate) chemistries, now dominant in the grid storage space, are cheaper, safer, and less reliant on critical minerals than their predecessors. Emerging technologies like sodium-ion could push costs even lower, removing lithium from the equation entirely. At this pace, reaching 97% solar reliability won’t just be limited to Las Vegas or Muscat, it could become feasible in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and even cloudy northern cities that today can only achieve 60% solar reliability.
This matters because energy decisions made today lock in infrastructure for decades. With AI and digital twin technologies increasingly used to model, monitor and optimise solar-plus-storage systems, the performance gap between forecast and real-world delivery continues to narrow.
For businesses, this isn’t just a power procurement update, it’s a strategic inflection point. Supply chains, ESG performance, and cost competitiveness are increasingly tied to clean, reliable energy access. Boards that recognise this are repositioning early.
Organisations updating their energy strategies now need to factor in a world where solar and storage aren't niche supplements, but the primary energy backbone. The business case for overbuilding clean energy and storing the surplus isn’t just a climate decision, it’s a risk hedge against fuel price volatility, a resilience upgrade against grid instability, and a competitive advantage in low-carbon supply chains.
The countries that master round-the-clock solar early will be tomorrow’s clean manufacturing hubs, drawing in battery factories, data centres, and green hydrogen exporters, while laggards risk energy insecurity and industrial decline.
For governments, this is the moment to stop subsidising 20th-century energy and start investing in infrastructure, regulation, and market signals that support 24/7 clean electricity as the default. If today’s leaders don’t prepare for that shift, they’ll be caught flat-footed by those who did.
The bottom line
Solar isn’t just a midday resource anymore. With batteries, it’s becoming a round-the-clock workhorse. The numbers stack up. The deployments are happening. And the implications for business, policy, and global development are far-reaching.
Now it’s up to energy leaders to stop thinking in old constraints and start planning for new capabilities.
Photo credit Jonathan Cutrer on Flickr
Article originally posted on TomRaftery.com