DNV Outlook Sees Solar Becoming the World’s Largest Power Source From 2031

Solar photovoltaics will become the single largest source of the world’s electricity from 2031, according to the 2026 edition of DNV’s Energy Transition Outlook, published on 7 October. The Norwegian assurance and advisory firm’s tenth annual forecast also finds that countries that import fossil fuels are expanding clean energy roughly three times faster than exporters, a gap it attributes to energy-security concerns sharpened by this year’s Middle East conflict.

From 2.6 TW today to 28 TW by 2060

DNV puts global installed solar capacity at 2.6 TW at the end of 2025. It expects that figure to double by 2030, reach about ten times today’s level by the late 2050s and hit 28.1 TW in 2060, according to the report’s findings as summarised by PV Tech. By 2060, DNV forecasts solar will supply 46% of global electricity and wind 31%, with total generation rising from about 33,000 TWh in 2025 to 84,000 TWh, roughly 2.5 times today’s demand. On DNV’s numbers, wind and solar together will out-generate all fossil-fired plants from 2033.

The path is not a straight line. DNV expects annual solar additions to peak in 2026 and stay broadly flat for several years, as curtailment and grid constraints in Europe and Greater China slow new connections. That is pushing developers toward pairing panels with batteries: the share of installed solar capacity co-located with storage is forecast to climb from 14% in 2025 to 30% in 2040 and 35% in 2060. Grid-queue pressures of this kind are already visible in markets such as Japan, where battery applications have swamped connection requests.

Investment follows the same curve. DNV expects annual spending on solar PV to rise from an average of $240 billion a year over 2016–2025 to $600 billion a year over 2026–2035, about double what it forecasts for wind. Annual storage additions, PV Tech reported, grew 25-fold between 2020 and 2026, against five-fold growth for solar and two-fold for wind. “Driven by solar, wind and increasingly battery storage, electricity is emerging as the clear winner of the energy transition,” said Sverre Alvik, DNV’s director of energy transition research.

Importers move faster than exporters

The report’s sharpest new theme is a split between energy importers and exporters. In importing regions, the non-fossil share of primary energy rose from 19% in 2021 to 22% in 2026, an increase of 2.2 percentage points, compared with 0.7 points (13% to 14%) in exporting regions. China, India and Europe expanded non-fossil energy at more than three times the pace of the Middle East, North America and Russia, according to DNV. “Energy security is redrawing the map of the energy transition,” said Ditlev Engel, CEO of DNV’s Energy Systems business.

The outlook also models the effect of the conflict itself. If fighting in the Middle East continued through 2030, DNV estimates global oil and gas demand would be 4–6% lower while it lasted and remain 2–5% below its main forecast afterwards. It now expects the Middle East to supply about 40% of global oil production in 2050, down from the 50% it projected in last year’s edition. Policy packages such as South Korea’s $747 billion K-GX plan, unveiled this week, are the kind of importer response the report describes.

Hydrogen and CCS cut, nuclear and data centres up

Not every low-carbon technology fares well. DNV cut its long-term forecast for hydrogen by 29% and for carbon capture and storage by 15% compared with last year’s outlook, reported Maritime Gateway, which carried the company’s launch announcement. Nuclear capacity, by contrast, is forecast to grow 30% over the next decade and 170% by 2060.

Data centres are a growing part of the demand picture. DNV expects their global electricity use to rise from about 400 TWh in 2025 to 1,100 TWh in 2030, with AI workloads overtaking conventional computing in 2031 and data centres accounting for about a third of North America’s growth in power generation through 2030. US hyperscalers are already signing long-term supply deals to secure that power, such as Google’s 890 MW nuclear agreement with Constellation.

The faster electrification does not, on DNV’s forecast, deliver the Paris Agreement goals. The outlook projects energy-related emissions will fall 44% by mid-century, implying warming of about 2.3°C and net-zero emissions not before the 2090s. DNV publishes a single “most likely” forecast rather than a set of scenarios, so its figures are projections, not targets.

Sources

• DNV, “Energy Transition Outlook 2026”, 7 October 2026 — dnv.com — primary report; solar 2031 milestone, wind-and-solar vs fossil 2033, 2060 shares.
• PV Tech, “DNV: Solar PV to become largest global contributor to electricity mix from 2031”, 7 October 2026 — pv-tech.org — solar capacity path, co-location shares, investment, generation totals, storage growth, importer/exporter data.
• Maritime Gateway, “Energy-importing countries scaling clean energy three times faster than exporters: DNV”, 7 October 2026 — maritimegateway.com — conflict scenario, Middle East oil share, hydrogen/CCS/nuclear revisions, data centres, emissions and warming, quotes.

Illustrative image. Photo: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source