An open letter signed by Bill McKibben, former UN Climate Secretary Christiana Figueres, and Canada's former Environment Minister Catherine McKenna calls for clean, affordable energy for "everyone, everywhere by 2030." The ambition is clear: close to one billion people still lack reliable electricity, and billions more remain locked into expensive fossil fuels. The signatories want governments, businesses, and institutions to treat solar deployment as a civilizational priority rather than a market outcome. The numbers behind the push are genuinely striking. Solar power grew 30% year-over-year in 2025, its highest growth rate in eight years, and has risen more than tenfold since 2015, according to the energy think tank Ember. For the first time in a century, renewable energy sources overtook coal in the global electricity mix. Solar is now the cheapest form of electricity in human history — a fact that was unthinkable a decade ago. But the gap between current trajectory and the stated goal is enormous. Global installed solar capacity stands at 3 terawatts, with roughly 1TW of new photovoltaic capacity added each year, most of it in China. Physicist Eicke Weber, former director of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, says a full global energy transition to renewables would require approximately 50TW. At current installation rates, that is a 47-year runway — not a 3-year sprint. The Sub-Saharan Africa problem makes the timeline even more acute. Roughly 655 million people still lack access to electricity. McKenna says the pace of electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa must triple to achieve universal access by 2030. The opportunity is real — these regions can leapfrog fossil infrastructure entirely — but the financing mechanisms barely exist. McKenna calls for blended finance involving governments, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the private sector. The fossil fuel lobby remains the central obstruction. Hans-Josef Fell, who drafted Germany's landmark Renewable Energy Sources Act and now heads the Energy Watch Group, says the political and societal will for a full transition is "currently lacking around the world because public debate is dominated by fossil fuel interests." His think tank calculates that in a fully renewable global energy system, solar would account for 60-70% of supply, with wind and other sources covering the rest. Weber offers the most honest timeline: while Germany could theoretically transition in two to three years with political will, a global target of 80-90% renewable electricity would realistically require until 2040. The technology is not the constraint — manufacturing overcapacity already exists. The constraint is capital allocation, grid infrastructure, and the political will to redirect subsidy flows away from incumbents. The letter's "everyone, everywhere by 2030" framing is aspirational rather than operational. But the underlying economics are no longer debatable. Solar is cheaper, faster to deploy, and more resilient than fossil alternatives. The question is whether political systems designed to protect incumbent energy interests can be reformed fast enough to match what the technology already makes possible.
