Global Solar Council: Why Solar Will Win, and What’s Still Standing in Its Way

Mark Wakeford is Chairman of EvoEnergy, Strategy Director of the Global Solar Council, Chair of the West Midlands Solar Taskforce and host of The Building Podcast. This article draws on his conversation with Andrew Birch, known as Birchy, co-founder and CEO of OpenSolar and Treasurer of the Global Solar Council, who has spent more than 25 years in solar, including leading BP Solar’s early policy work in Australia.

I’ve been involved with the Global Solar Council for some time now, as its Strategy Director, and I still learn something every time I talk to the people at the heart of it. Birchy is one of them. He has campaigned for solar for his entire career, and from his seat on the GSC’s management board he has as clear a view of the global picture as anyone I know.

We covered a lot of ground: what the Global Solar Council actually does, why solar’s growth is far bigger than most governments realise, the very human barriers slowing it down, and what it will take to build a workforce big enough to deliver it. This is my write-up of that conversation.

Key takeaways

• The Global Solar Council’s job is barrier removal, not handouts. It advocates for an open energy market so customers can access the lowest-cost, cleanest power available.
• Solar’s growth follows an S-curve. It has grown at roughly 34% a year since 2000. If it sustains even 25%, Birchy’s arithmetic has solar supplying around half the world’s energy within about a decade.
• The constraints are man-made. Materials, capital, sunlight and talent are all available. Distorted pricing, red tape and outdated grid rules are what hold solar back.
• The cost of solar is now mostly people, not panels. Software, AI and standardisation can cut the “soft costs” of selling, designing, permitting and administering systems.
• Skills and competence are bankable. Investors who fund training are seeing better yields and fewer outages, and the GSC wants funders and insurers to demand it.

What is the Global Solar Council?

The Global Solar Council (GSC) is the international industry body representing solar and storage. It was founded at the 2015 Paris climate conference and brings together national and regional solar associations alongside many of the sector’s leading companies, from manufacturers to developers.

What fascinates me about the GSC is its reach. It has members in China and members in North America, and it can speak to both at the right level. Very few global trade bodies can say that right now.

Birchy described the GSC’s purpose in a way I think is worth repeating. It’s an industry body, but its real goal is to reduce the cost of energy, increase energy access around the world and solve the climate challenge. As he put it: “We’re not out there like an industry lobbyist asking for money.”

That’s an important distinction. Solar isn’t asking for subsidies. Ironically, it is now the fossil fuel industry that has to lobby for support to stay competitive against a technology that has overtaken it. The GSC’s work is about barrier removal: making sure end customers can actually get access to clean, low-cost power.

As Treasurer, Birchy’s own role is focused on capital formation and on the “boring but important” processes, governance and systems the GSC needs to scale up. The organisation is growing fast because the industry it serves is growing fast.

How big is the solar opportunity?

This is where Birchy really comes alive, because the numbers are extraordinary. Solar has grown at a compound rate of around 34% a year since 2000. To put that in context:

Global installed capacity passed 3 terawatts in early 2026, according to SolarPower Europe’s Global Solar Market Outlook 2026–2030. It took the world 68 years to reach the first terawatt and only a few more years to reach the next two.

That’s the nature of an S-curve, and Birchy’s concern is that governments, financial markets and even many energy analysts still don’t fully understand it. If solar keeps growing at even 25% a year, annual installations pass 1,000 GW within about five years. Cumulative capacity heads towards 20 terawatts within a decade, which by his reckoning would supply roughly half of the world’s energy. The Global Solar Council has set two targets that reflect this ambition:

1. 8 TW of installed solar by 2030, which means adding around a terawatt a year.
2. 300 Million Solar Homes by 2030, doubling the number of homes with rooftop solar from around 150 million today. Australia became the first country to endorse the Global Rooftop Solar Declaration behind this initiative in October 2026.

What excites me most is that this is local generation. Birchy estimates that roughly a quarter of global solar is on residential roofs, a quarter on commercial roofs and half is utility-scale, and even utility-scale solar is far more distributed than the giant coal and nuclear plants it replaces. It democratises energy, and it creates local jobs: around 10 million today, and many more to come.

Can global supply chains keep up?

I put this to Birchy directly. Growing a workforce by 25% a year is one hell of an ask, and so is churning out a terawatt of new panels annually, especially when we’re also repowering early installations from 15 or 20 years ago.

His answer was a confident yes, and the physical perspective he gave was striking. The global material economy moves around 100 billion tonnes of product a year, of which fossil fuels account for something like 17 to 20 billion. The material needs of solar and batteries are a tiny fraction of that. The tonnage of consumer electronics and cars dwarfs it.

There’s enough manufacturing capacity, enough capital and, with the right training, standards and software, enough talent. And there is thousands of times more sunlight than our economies need. The only real barriers, in Birchy’s words, are “what we decide to put in front of it.”

What’s holding solar back?

Birchy admitted that 25 years ago he looked at the spreadsheet, saw solar was about to become the cheapest energy available and assumed the job was done. Instead, it has been a constant fight against bad policy. Solar has economics and physics on its side. What slows it down are human, political choices. He identified three.

1. Distorted market pricing

The first distortion is the tariffs and taxes we put on the technology itself, often geopolitically motivated, such as 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs in the United States.

The second is subsidising the competition. Governments want their industries to have access to cheap energy, so they make fossil fuels cheaper rather than supporting consumers directly. The International Monetary Fund put global fossil fuel subsidies at a record $7 trillion in 2022. Around four-fifths of that is “implicit”: environmental and health costs that the polluter doesn’t pay for and the taxpayer ends up carrying. As Birchy pointed out, the world is on fire, agricultural yields are suffering and trade routes are at risk from warming seas, and none of those costs appear in the price of fossil fuel.

We discussed the energy price support in Europe after the war in Ukraine as a case in point. It was the right thing to do to protect people. But a blanket price cap also teaches consumers that the market is less volatile than it really is, weakens the incentive to invest in solar, batteries and efficiency, and goes to people who don’t need the help. Birchy’s alternative is to write a cheque of a few hundred pounds to the households who need it most, and let the price signal keep working for everyone else.

I recently attended a national emergency briefing for lawyers in the City of London where the “polluter pays” principle was discussed for fossil fuel companies. If that were ever applied properly, it would be a game changer. The wheels of governance move slowly, but in some cases I do believe they are moving in our favour.

2. Bureaucracy and red tape

This is the one that should make everyone angry. Birchy shared the figures that led him to set up a non-profit tackling residential solar permitting in the United States around a decade ago. American homeowners pay around $3.40 a watt for solar. In Australia, the same panels cost around a dollar a watt installed. In India, around 60 cents.

The main difference is paperwork. The US has around 16,000 permitting jurisdictions, each with its own process, which adds about two months to a typical installation and doubles the size of installers’ teams. That work led to SolarAPP+, the automated permitting platform developed by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which can issue instant permits for code-compliant residential systems.

It isn’t just a residential problem. In Europe and India, utility-scale projects can wait five to ten years. All of it, Birchy argues, can be solved with smart policy and grid protocols.

3. A grid market that shuts out distributed energy

The grid is the thorniest problem of all. I saw this first-hand when I was part of the team behind the UK’s Solar Roadmap. We are moving from a handful of large generation points to a decentralised system, and the grid has to flex to accommodate that.

Birchy’s view is that the grid needs complete reform, so that every owner of an energy asset is treated equally. If you plug a battery into the grid and it helps avoid a costly network upgrade, you should be paid for that value. You should know what capacity you can connect, and you should get access to that public asset with minimal paperwork.

A couple of years ago he wrote a paper called The Electric Protocol, arguing that we need for the global grid what the internet protocol did for the worldwide web: an international best practice that every country can adopt. The GSC is now working to bring together the various standards and industry bodies to make that happen.

What can the world learn from Australia?

Australia comes up again and again in these conversations, and for good reason. It has the highest solar capacity per person in the world, at over 1.4 kW for every man, woman and child. Here in the UK, with around 23 GW installed, we have roughly a third of a kilowatt per person. We are a long way behind.

The most striking example is South Australia. On 31 August 2026, rooftop solar met 99.9% of the state’s electricity demand, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator. Birchy says the state’s grid reliability is now better than it has ever been, residential solar energy costs around 5 cents a kilowatt hour, and all of this was achieved without massive grid infrastructure investment, because solar and storage were deployed wisely, right where the power is used. Household batteries are booming too, with more than half a million applications under Australia’s federal home battery programme.

And it didn’t happen because one company advertised heavily. Birchy described how Australia went from around 10% to 40% rooftop penetration in a decade largely through word of mouth: people telling their friends they’d cut their energy bill by 80%. He saw it happen himself when a neighbour went solar and, within a week and a half, his friend had too.

A British reader will rightly say we don’t have South Australian sunshine. But Birchy pointed to other routes: large-scale solar in sunnier regions such as North Africa, connected by high-voltage DC cables, could in his view deliver power to Britain far more cheaply than new nuclear. Between macro-grid and micro-grid solutions, there are many ways to get there.

This is one of the Global Solar Council’s most valuable roles. It takes these case studies and proof points to energy ministries in India, Indonesia, Kenya, South America, the UK, the US and beyond, so they can see exactly how it was done and replicate it faster.

Should the solar industry take on politics?

We are seeing the rise of political parties across Europe and elsewhere that campaign against net zero. I asked Birchy whether the GSC should be doing more to counter those negative stories.

His view was clear: focus on what matters most, which is the lowest-cost energy. Climate has become politicised, and the industry doesn’t need to win that argument to succeed. He gave up campaigning for a carbon tax ten years ago, because solar is already cheaper even with fossil fuel subsidies in place and carbon unpriced. Solar now makes up more than half of new power capacity added worldwide.

What matters to customers, to jobs and to national competitiveness is cost. If businesses in Britain and America end up paying two or three times as much for energy as competitors in China and India, which are electrifying rapidly, that will “do the talking quite quickly”.

My concern is time. We need those decisions taken now. Birchy agreed, and his answer was that everyone involved with the GSC should make sure the Financial Times, the BBC, CNN and every major outlet understands that solar now costs roughly half as much as fossil fuel power, and that the countries embracing it are winning. In his words, “almost forget net zero in this” and focus on the competitiveness of our economies. Not everyone in the industry will agree on that approach, but it’s a pragmatic one.

As for the climate itself, Birchy reminded me that around 80% of greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuel energy. Scale solar, and we solve most of the problem.

How is OpenSolar helping solar contractors scale?

Alongside his GSC work, Birchy runs OpenSolar, which tackles a very practical barrier. To grow at 25% a year, the industry needs to go from around 10 million people to something closer to 100 million over the next decade. Training and standards are part of the answer, but software can dramatically reduce the training burden.

OpenSolar gives any solar contractor in the world, “from Bangalore to Baltimore”, the kind of toolkit only big companies used to have, completely free:

• Professional sales proposals that help installers win work.
• Accurate system design, using data and imagery from Google, which is also an investor.
• A bill of materials (BOM) calculator that works out which inverters match which batteries, the stringing requirements and the full parts list, removing months of design engineering learning.
• Automated back-office tasks, including invoicing, collections, finance and payments, so a tradesperson isn’t losing every Friday to admin.

It’s free to contractors because the revenue comes from suppliers: finance providers, payment services and manufacturers who pay to market their products to the platform’s users.

This matters because of how the cost of solar has changed. When Birchy started, panels cost $8 to $10 a watt and made up around 80% of a system’s cost. Today in the US they’re less than 5%, and in many countries about a quarter. The remaining cost is inverters, racking and, above all, sales, marketing, permitting and administration. As Birchy put it, solar is now a people business, and the innovation that will speed up the S-curve is as much in that people-to-people side as in the hardware.

He’s also thinking about operation and maintenance, which is a growing worry across the industry as we put more electrical systems on more roofs. Many small installers see O&M as a cost. OpenSolar wants them to see the revenue: payments for battery grid services such as peak shaving and voltage control (an area where the UK is now one of the leading countries), O&M agreements customers are willing to pay for, and referrals from satisfied customers, which are the cheapest leads any installer will ever get.

Why do skills and competence matter so much?

Birchy turned the tables on me here and asked about the vision for the GSC’s skills work, which I’m closely involved with.

I’ve been involved in skills nearly all my working life, first in construction and now in solar. We are a young industry, and we don’t yet have the systems, governance and institutions that sectors like construction have had for generations. So we are working hard to quantify the skills we need and decide how to train them.

The emphasis is on competence, not just skills. Here in the UK, the law already requires people carrying out regulated activities, such as electrical work, to be competent, and I think that is the right standard to aim for globally.

There’s a compelling case study from India. Where investors have funded training alongside their solar installations, they are seeing lower operating costs, less downtime, fewer outages and assets that last longer than installations where that training wasn’t provided. That shows how much people matter to the yields and returns that investors and owners receive.

So the focus of the GSC skills group is to get that message to funders and insurers: if you want the returns your developers are promising, or want to reduce the risk of not getting them, you should be funding, promoting and specifying skills.

That’s more achievable in solar than in construction because we’re much closer to the money. A UK construction supply chain might be six, seven or eight companies deep, and the priority on quality gets diluted at every step. In solar, it’s two, possibly three. The quality, good or bad, is much more visible.

The GSC is also working with the Global Wind Organisation on the Global Solar Training Standards, the first unified international training framework for utility-scale solar PV technicians, covering both safety and technical competence. For young people, that means something very attractive: qualifications that travel. Train in the UK and you can build a competent, technical career anywhere in the world.

When software standardises the design work and training ensures competence in the field, you have the whole package. It becomes much easier for people to join the industry, and we can offer them what they’re really looking for: not just a job, but a career. And we’ll need them for a career, because beyond new installations there’s the operation, maintenance and repowering of everything we’ve already built.

What does this mean for UK businesses?

For our clients at EvoEnergy, the message from this conversation is simple. Solar is no longer a niche green choice. It is the lowest-cost source of energy available, and the businesses that generate their own power will be more competitive than those that don’t.

Commercial roofs account for around a quarter of all solar installed globally, and the UK has a huge untapped resource on its warehouses, factories, distribution centres and offices. Add commercial battery storage and a business can use more of its own generation, protect itself from price spikes and, increasingly, earn revenue by providing services to the grid.

If you’d like to understand what solar and storage could do for your organisation’s energy costs, talk to the EvoEnergy team.

Birchy’s advice to the next generation

I always end the podcast by asking my guest what advice they’d give to young people coming into the industry. Birchy’s answer was: take control of your own destiny.

Vote, and vote intelligently, but don’t wait for government to do it for you. The tools are there now. Anyone can open a free account, access the software, the training and the support of industry bodies, and get into a market that is growing at extraordinary speed and needs every kind of talent, “from art to science and everything in between”. As consumers, we should decide where our energy comes from. And as professionals, we should join an industry that is solving the problem, because it’s rewarding, empowering and fun.

Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. I couldn’t agree more. We have 300 million solar homes to reach, and every bit of help is welcome.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Global Solar Council?

The Global Solar Council (GSC) is the international industry association for solar energy and storage. Founded at the 2015 Paris climate conference, it brings together national and regional solar associations and leading solar companies worldwide. Its mission is to remove the barriers that slow solar adoption, including market distortions, red tape and outdated grid rules.

What is the Global Solar Council’s 2030 target?

The Global Solar Council is targeting 8 terawatts (TW) of installed solar capacity worldwide by 2030, which requires adding around 1 TW a year. Global solar capacity passed 3 TW in early 2026.

What is the 300 Million Solar Homes initiative?

300 Million Solar Homes is a Global Solar Council initiative to double the number of homes with rooftop solar from around 150 million to 300 million by 2030. It is backed by partners including the Global Covenant of Mayors, the Smart Energy Council and Solar Citizens, and Australia became the first country to endorse its Global Rooftop Solar Declaration in October 2026.

What is OpenSolar?

OpenSolar is a software platform that gives solar professionals free tools for sales proposals, system design, bill of materials, payments and back-office administration. It earns revenue from finance providers, payment services and equipment suppliers rather than charging contractors.

What are the Global Solar Training Standards?

The Global Solar Training Standards, developed by the Global Solar Council with the Global Wind Organisation, are the first unified global training framework for utility-scale solar PV technicians. They cover safety training and technical training, giving workers recognised qualifications they can take between countries.

About the Author

Author

Mark Wakeford

Chairman · Industry Leader

Mark Wakeford is Chairman of EvoEnergy bringing decades of experience across engineering, construction and renewable energy. He plays a key role in shaping EvoEnergy’s long-term strategy while contributing to the wider development of the UK solar industry, with particular focus on skills, supply chain resilience, industry standards and the transition to net zero.

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