Ember report says batteries have unlocked anytime solar

Solar supplied just over 10 per cent of the world’s electricity in the first half of 2026, and the batteries expected to be installed this year could in theory move 34 per cent of newly added daily solar output into hours without sunlight. Those are the two central findings of “Batteries have unlocked the era of anytime solar”, published by the energy think tank Ember on 12 August 2026. The anytime solar framing describes a shift from solar as a midday resource to solar as a dispatchable one, and Ember argues the constraint is now market design rather than panel cost.

Solar’s share rose from 5.6 per cent of global electricity in the first half of 2023 to 8.9 per cent in the first half of 2025 and just over 10 per cent this year. Generation reached 1,564TWh in the first half of 2026, against 769TWh three years earlier, while total global generation grew 12 per cent over the same period. Ember notes that solar generation grew 18 per cent year on year in the first half of 2026, falling below 20 per cent for the first time this decade.

The daily shape problem behind anytime solar

Ember built a world hourly solar profile from national hourly generation and demand data for 14 countries that together account for 82 per cent of global solar generation. China’s hourly shape is estimated from representative profiles scaled to its actual monthly solar share, and the remaining 18 per cent of global solar is spread across the day using regional average profiles. Profiles are aligned on local time. These are Ember estimates rather than a full set of metered global data, and the think tank says so.

On that basis, solar met around 25 per cent of global electricity demand between 11am and 2pm in the first half of 2026, and more than 50 per cent of midday demand in markets where solar supplied over 20 per cent of electricity across the half year. Between 8pm and 5am solar output falls to near zero. Chile reached 71 per cent of demand at noon, the Netherlands 58 per cent at 1pm and Germany 55 per cent at noon, with all three near zero by 9pm.

That shape reshapes fossil generation rather than removing it. In India, fossil output at 1pm fell to 125GW in the first half of 2026 from 135GW three years earlier, while the average across 5pm to 7am rose 22GW to 168GW. The swing from midday to the 7pm peak is now about 50GW, which Ember compares to more than seventy 660MW coal units. In the European Union, midday fossil generation between 11am and 2pm fell from 86GW to 69GW over the same period, but the 7pm to 9pm evening peak moved only from 106GW to 101GW.

How much solar batteries can actually move

Battery additions are expected to reach 459GWh in 2026, up 50 per cent from 307GWh in 2025. That forecast is BloombergNEF’s, cited by Ember rather than produced by it. Applied to the growth in solar generation, Ember calculates that this year’s battery additions could shift 34 per cent of new daily solar generation into non-sunny hours, up from 18 per cent in 2025 and 4 per cent in 2021.

Ember is explicit that this is an upper bound: “This is a theoretical ceiling: in practice, not all batteries are used to shift solar, and many remain underutilised.” The figure applies to newly added daily solar generation, not to all solar on the system.

Bulgaria and Chile pair batteries with solar faster than the US or the EU

The national picture varies widely. Ember ranks countries by how much of their 2025 new daily solar generation their 2025 battery additions could shift.

Source: Ember, “Batteries have unlocked the era of anytime solar”, 12 August 2026.

Bulgaria is the sharpest change. It went from virtually no battery capacity in 2024 to around 3GWh of additions in 2025, and total installed capacity reached 8.6GWh by May 2026, according to figures Ember attributes to SolarPower Europe and Balkan Green Energy News. Ember adds an important caveat: ENTSO-E’s Bulgarian solar category includes charge and discharge of co-located batteries, so standalone battery output is estimated by Ember as a residual rather than metered directly.

The evening results follow. Solar and batteries together met nearly a quarter, 24 per cent, of Bulgaria’s electricity demand between 7pm and 9pm, and averaged 10 per cent of demand across 7pm to 7am. In Chile, batteries helped solar meet over 10 per cent of demand through the evening. In California, solar plus storage supplied more than a quarter of demand in the 7pm to 9pm window in the first half of 2026, up from 6.8 per cent in the first half of 2023.

The cost picture explains the shift. Installed battery costs have fallen 95 per cent, from $2,634 per kWh in 2010 to $140 per kWh in 2025, according to IRENA figures cited by Ember. IRENA also estimates that around 25 per cent of new utility-scale solar deployed globally in 2025 was co-located with batteries. Ember’s separate report “How cheap is battery storage?”, published on 11 December 2025, put the levelised cost of storage at $65/MWh based on $125 per kWh all-in capital cost as of October 2025, drawn from auctions in Saudi Arabia, India and Italy plus expert interviews, and covering markets outside China and the United States. That definition excludes the cost of charging electricity. Batteries are also being used differently: BloombergNEF classes 74 per cent of batteries installed in 2025 as energy-shifting, against 47 per cent in 2020.

What Ember says needs to change

Ember’s recommendations are about market rules rather than subsidy. The report argues that “better market design and optimisation are needed to ensure batteries are used to their full potential”, that batteries should be able to stack revenues across energy arbitrage, ancillary services and capacity payments, and that “markets also need to ensure batteries can participate fully across electricity markets, so they are used where they deliver the greatest value”. Utilisation data supports the point: Chinese standalone batteries cycled 299 times in 2025, up from 146 in 2022, while co-located systems managed 199 against an international benchmark of around 350 cycles.

The report is also clear about the limits. Batteries are economical for daily cycling and, in Ember’s words, “will not solve every seasonal challenge”, including prolonged low-wind, low-sun periods in Europe. A balanced mix of wind, hydro, nuclear and long-duration storage remains necessary. Ember analyst Kostantsa Rangelova, the report’s author, wrote: “Now batteries have become cheap and good enough to unlock the next stage of solar growth with anytime solar. Delivering solar in non-sunny hours, the current stronghold of fossil power, changes everything: solar’s role in global power systems can be far bigger than previously thought possible.”

One inconsistency is worth noting for anyone comparing Ember publications. The Global Electricity Review 2026, published in April, put 2025 battery deployment at an estimated 250GWh and the shiftable share of new solar at 14 per cent. The August report uses 307GWh and 18 per cent for the same year, apparently after a data revision. The two vintages should not be mixed.

The findings sit alongside a wider deployment record covered on this site, including solar and storage setting new records in the first half of 2026 and the mechanics set out in our explainer on grid-scale battery storage. They also bear directly on the long-running argument about whether renewable energy is unreliable because of intermittency.

About Ember

Ember is an independent not-for-profit energy think tank, the trading name of Ember Energy Research CIC, a community interest company registered in England and Wales. It began in 2008 as Sandbag, working on reform of the EU carbon market and the European coal phase-out, and relaunched under the Ember name in March 2020 with a global electricity focus. Its stated aim is to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy, and it gathers, curates and publishes open power-sector and coal-mine-methane data. Bryony Worthington is founder and chair of the board; Aditya Lolla is managing director. Funders listed on its website include the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the European Climate Foundation, The Sunrise Project, ClimateWorks Foundation, Boundless, Sequoia Climate Foundation and Tara Climate Foundation. Recurring publications include the annual Global Electricity Review, the European Electricity Review, the Global Coal Mine Methane Review and the China Energy Transition Review. Its seventh Global Electricity Review, published on 21 April 2026, reported that renewables reached 33.8 per cent of global generation and overtook coal at 33.0 per cent for the first time in the modern era, with solar meeting 75 per cent of net demand growth. The August battery report extends that analysis from annual shares to the hour of the day, where solar’s remaining constraint has always been the evening.

Sources: Ember; Ember; Energy-Storage.News; Ember; Ember

Featured image: photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels (free Pexels license).

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Figen Sekin

I specialize in sustainability education, curriculum co-creation, and early-stage project strategy. At WINSS, I craft articles on sustainability, transformative AI, and related topics. When I’m not writing, you’ll find me chasing the perfect sushi roll, exploring cities around the globe, or unwinding with my dog Puffy — the world’s most loyal sidekick.