Our World
in Data
Data

Total solar capacity

See all data and research on:
Energy

About this data

Total solar capacity
Total solar (on- and off-grid) electricity installed capacity, measured in gigawatts. This includes solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power.
Source
IRENA (2024) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
November 1, 2024
Next expected update
November 2025
Date range
2000–2023
Unit
gigawatts

Related research and writing

legacy-wordpress-upload

Renewable Energy

Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser and Pablo Rosado

Explore charts that include this data

Solar energy generation vs. capacity

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The renewable power capacity data represents the maximum net generating capacity of power plants and other installations that use renewable energy sources to produce electricity. For most countries and technologies, the data reflects the capacity installed and connected at the end of the calendar year. The data is presented in megawatts (MW) rounded to the nearest one megawatt, with figures between zero and 0.5MW shown as a 0. The data has been obtained from a variety of sources, including: the IRENA questionnaire; official statistics; industry association reports; and other reports and news articles.

Some technologies include others, following this schema:

  • Total renewable capacity (on-grid and off-grid)
    • Hydropower
      • Renewable hydropower (including mixed plants)
      • Pumped storage (note that this is included in total hydropower capacity, but not in total renewable capacity)
    • Marine energy
    • Wind energy
      • Onshore wind energy
      • Offshore wind energy
    • Solar energy
      • Solar photovoltaic
      • Concentrated solar power
    • Bioenergy
      • Solid biofuels and renewable waste
        • Renewable municipal waste
        • Bagasse
        • Other solid biofuels
      • Liquid biofuels
      • Biogas
    • Geothermal
  • Total off-grid renewable capacity
    • Off-grid hydropower
    • Off-grid solar photovoltaic
    • Other off-grid renewable energy
Retrieved on
November 1, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2024/Mar/Renewable-capacity-statistics-2024
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
IRENA - Renewable capacity statistics 2024. International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi (2024).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Total solar capacity”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Energy”. Data adapted from IRENA. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

IRENA (2024) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

IRENA (2024) – processed by Our World in Data. “Total solar capacity” [dataset]. IRENA, “Renewable Capacity Statistics” [original data]. Retrieved November 24, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity