Making the Case for Solar Energy Isn’t Just Economic. It’s Civilizational.
We live in a moment defined by twin, sometimes conflicting truths: We have more technological power than ever before—and we're late, achingly late, in deploying it to solve the existential challenges in front of us. Climate change is not a distant threat. It’s here. It’s now. And the energy systems that got us here aren’t the ones that will get us out. Especially if they are more expensive, polluting, and a limited resource.
That’s where solar energy enters the conversation—not just as an alternative to fossil fuels, but as a rethink of how energy works in a society. Solar isn’t just clean. It’s distributed. It’s democratic. It decentralizes power—literally and figuratively. And in a world where the stakes are high and the solutions urgent, that kind of transformation matters.
So, let’s not just talk about solar – let’s keep our focus on driving it forward. Not as a trend, not as a tech, but as a solution with five overlapping, reinforcing benefits that suggest it should be central to how we think about our energy future.
We tend to talk about energy scarcity. Oil prices rising. Gas shortages. Winter blackouts. But sunlight isn’t scarce. It's overwhelmingly plentiful. Every hour, the sun beams more energy onto the Earth than humanity uses in an entire year.
And yet, for decades, our infrastructure has largely ignored it.
To say that solar is renewable is technically true. But it understates the drama. This isn’t just a sustainable energy source. It’s the only one with the scale to remake our systems entirely. Solar flips the script from "how can we reduce demand?" to "how can we better capture the supply?"
And now, thanks to rapid declines in cost—solar prices have fallen by over 50% in the last decade, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)—the ability to harness that energy is within reach for more people than ever before.
Let’s compare that to other fossil fuels for a moment. Take coal, even labelled as clean, it is costly to extract and the environmental cost is exorbitantly high. While there’s plenty of coal in the ground – at producing mines, there’s an estimated 20 years and the total demonstrated reserve base comes to 422 years according to the EIA – but to use that coal, cleanly, carbon capture and storage would need to be retrofitted on existing plants and new ones built. It’s expensive to say the least – coming in at around $100 billion annually to develop carbon capture and storage, according to the 2019 Global CSS Institute.
There’s a myth that clean energy is a luxury—more expensive, less reliable, good for the environment but bad for your wallet. That was once true. It’s not anymore.
Solar is now among the cheapest forms of electricity ever created. SEIA reports that utility-scale solar costs have dropped by 82% since 2010, making it cheaper than new coal or gas plants in most U.S. markets.
Add to that the most ambitious climate legislation in U.S. history passed in 2022—and the economics of solar start to shift decisively. The Investment Tax Credit (ITC) was extended through to 30% through at least 2032, offering major savings for both residential and commercial systems, but its support cannot be relied upon and clean energy producers such as PureSky are adapting how they do business to account for a changing economic reality.
Some of the changing reality includes bonus credits for projects that meet domestic content requirements or are built in low-income or energy transition communities—pushing solar adoption where it’s most needed, and where it can have the biggest social and economic ripple effects.
Community solar is especially affordable - driving savings to the people who are least able to afford to install solar, while replacing peaker plants and other high-polluters from being used in these communities.
These renewable energy incentives - even topping out at $15.6 billion in 2022 - are relatively inexpensive compared the fossil fuel subsidies. In 2022, they totaled $757 billion with $3 billion in explicit subsidies and $754 billion in implicit fossil fuel subsidies in the U.S., according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
Climate change is a collective action problem wrapped in a technological challenge buried under political gridlock. We need solutions that are fast, scalable, and emission-free. Solar checks all three boxes.
The average home solar system avoids three to four tons of CO₂ emissions per year. Multiply that across millions of homes, schools, warehouses, and office buildings, and you begin to see the outlines of an actual transition—not a symbolic one.
Clean energy legislation from the Biden administration supercharges this by aiming to build 950 million solar panels, 120,000 wind turbines, and 2,300 grid-scale battery plants by 2030. That’s not incremental change. That’s an attempt to build an entirely new energy economy in a single decade.
Solar doesn’t just help clean up the grid. When paired with electric vehicles, heat pumps, and battery storage—all incentivized—it can clean up whole sectors of the economy. Few tools offer that kind of cascading impact.
There’s a social justice story buried in solar, and it doesn’t get told often enough.
Historically, energy systems have been centralized and hierarchical. Big utilities. Big plants. Big infrastructure. And in many cases, vulnerable communities have paid the price—living near polluting plants, exposed to environmental and economic harms, with little say in the system.
Solar is different. It can be deployed locally. It can be community-owned. It can create resilient, distributed systems where individuals and neighborhoods have a stake—and a say—in how energy is produced and consumed.
American clean energy legislation adds real weight here: it includes targeted funding and bonus credits for “energy communities” (areas historically dependent on fossil fuels), low-income census tracts, and Tribal lands. The goal is not just a clean transition—but an equitable one.
There’s this idea that the green transition means sacrifice—jobs lost, industries disrupted, costs borne. But solar has consistently defied that narrative.
It’s one of the fastest-growing job sectors in the country. According to SEIA’s 2023 Solar Market Insight Report, the U.S. solar industry employed over 263,000 workers in 2022—a number expected to double by the end of this decade.
And American clean energy legislation is expected to create nearly 1.5 million additional clean energy jobs by 2030, many of them solar. These are not abstract numbers. They’re electricians, technicians, sales teams, and project developers. Many of these jobs are local, well-paying, and available to those without college degrees.
Nearly 1.5 million U.S. jobs are at risk from eliminating clean energy legislation.
And beyond jobs, solar helps shield communities from fossil fuel price shocks, supports local tax bases, and brings investment to rural and underserved areas. It’s not just climate policy. It’s sound economic development policy.
And that what makes the current energy trajectory in the U.S. extraordinarily frustrating. Renewable energy has a strong business case and is far less costly to produce than clean coal, but is being stymied, not based on the facts but on its association with ‘wokeness’, and the vagueness that this term evokes.
The real question is, since when has it been an American value to ignore good economics, that also is good for America. Is good business while doing good such a terrible goal?
The story of solar isn’t just about technology. It’s about policy. About political will. About what we choose to build—and what we choose to delay. We’ve reached a point where solar makes sense on just about every axis: environmental, economic, even geopolitical. What’s needed now is acceleration.
That means faster permitting. Smarter interconnection policies. Transmission investments. Workforce training. And above all, a shift in how we think about energy—not as something we passively consume, but as something we can generate, share, and control.
The energy system of the past was centralized, carbon-heavy, and brittle. The one we need is clean, local, and resilient. Solar won’t get us all the way there. But it’s hard to see how we get there without it.
The sun is rising—literally and metaphorically. The question is whether we’re ready to build fast enough to meet it.