There is a number that keeps coming up in conversations about electric vehicles and renewable energy, and most people are not ready for it. One in four new cars sold globally right now has a plug. Not in Norway, not in some optimistic forecast — globally, right now, in 2026. That number was essentially zero fifteen years ago.
The transition is not coming. It is already underway, and it is moving faster than almost anyone predicted.
The Numbers Nobody Talks About
Global EV sales hit 17.8 million units in 2024 — a 25% increase on the year before. In China, more than 35% of new car sales are now electric. Denmark generated 70% of its electricity from wind and solar last year. More than 90% of new renewable energy projects being built globally are now cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives they are replacing. Battery grid storage costs have fallen by more than two thirds in three years.
These are not projections. They are figures from the International Energy Agency, the Rocky Mountain Institute, and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, all published in the last few months.
The reason this does not feel like a revolution is that revolutions rarely do while they are happening. They feel like gradual, uneven, occasionally frustrating progress — until suddenly the old thing is gone and the new thing is just how things work.
Why It Is Moving Faster Than Expected
The standard assumption was that the energy transition would be slow because it required people to change their behaviour. But the change that actually drove adoption was not behavioural — it was economic. When solar panels become cheaper than coal and EV batteries become cheaper to manufacture each year, the market does what markets do. It follows the money.
Battery costs are the key number. In 2010, the cost of an EV battery pack was around $1,100 per kilowatt-hour. It is now below $100. That price trajectory — faster than most analysts predicted at every stage — is why the economics of electric vehicles shifted from “environmentally motivated purchase” to “rational financial decision” for a growing number of buyers. Lower fuel costs, lower maintenance costs, and a narrowing purchase price gap have changed the calculation.
BYD, the Chinese manufacturer that overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest electric vehicle maker in 2025, recently introduced solid-state battery prototypes with energy densities that would give an electric car a range of 600 to 800 kilometres on a single charge. The range anxiety argument — the main psychological barrier to EV adoption for years — is running out of road.
The Infrastructure Problem Is Being Solved
The other objection has always been charging. The UK now has over 119,000 public chargers. The real answer to the charging question, though, is not public infrastructure — it is the fact that most EV owners charge at home, overnight, while they sleep. The petrol station model, where you make a special trip to refuel, is replaced by simply plugging in when you park. For the majority of daily driving, this is genuinely more convenient than the alternative, not less.
The transition to renewable electricity also changes the grid calculus. As more renewables come online, the grid gets cleaner — which means the emissions case for EVs improves automatically over time, without any additional action from the owner. An electric car bought today will produce fewer emissions each year as the grid it charges from becomes greener.
Australia Is Behind But Not as Far Behind as It Feels
The Australian experience of the energy transition has been characterised by politics making the conversation harder than the technology warrants. For years, energy policy was a topic that ended careers. The result is a country with extraordinary renewable resources — among the best solar irradiance on the planet — that was slower than it should have been to use them.
That has shifted. Rooftop solar penetration in Australia is among the highest in the world. Several states are now regularly generating more renewable electricity than they can use at certain times of day, creating the grid management challenges that come with success rather than failure. The EV adoption numbers are still modest compared to Europe or China, but the trajectory is upward, and the infrastructure is building.
The economic case for solar and batteries in Australia — given electricity prices, solar resource quality, and the falling cost of battery storage — is now straightforwardly compelling for many households. The conversation has shifted from “should you” to “when.”
The Part That Is Easy to Miss
The energy transition tends to get framed as a sacrifice — as something that costs more, works less well, and requires everyone to accept a diminished version of the life they have now. That framing was always mostly wrong, and it is increasingly obviously wrong.
Solar panels and battery storage have made energy independence — genuine independence from the grid, from oil prices, from geopolitical disruptions — available to ordinary households for the first time. Electric vehicles, for most people’s driving patterns, are cheaper to run, quieter, and more pleasant to drive than what they replace. The technology has moved past the point where adopting it requires any ideological commitment. It is simply, in many cases, the better product.
The transition will not be smooth or evenly distributed. There are real challenges in grid management, supply chain dependencies, and the social costs of stranded assets in fossil fuel industries. The people who work in those industries, and the communities built around them, deserve serious policy attention rather than being told to simply adapt.
But the direction of travel is no longer seriously in question. The only real uncertainty is the pace.
One in four new cars globally has a plug. That number will be one in two within a decade, and almost all of them within two decades after that. The forecasters who called this transition slow were wrong at every stage. There is no particular reason to assume they have suddenly become right.
These are personal observations and opinions. Almost Sunny is a personal blog.
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