08What gets built, and how fast?
Renewable capacity, country by country
How much solar and wind has each country installed, and how does its fleet compare with the world, the EU, China, the United States and India?
At the end of 2025, Germany had 106 GW of solar and 78 GW of wind installed, according to Ember's yearly statistics.
Worldwide, solar reached 2 391 GW at the end of 2025; China's fleet stood at 1 202 GW and the EU's at 366 GW.
A year-end figure counts capacity that ran for only part of the year.
What a year-end capacity figure says, and what it leaves out
Installed capacity is the nameplate power of every plant connected to the grid on the last day of the year, added up. It is the number a country reports to the statistical agencies and the one that appears in headlines about records. It says how much a fleet could produce at full output in a single moment. It does not say how much the fleet produced over the year, because a solar panel in Germany runs at full output for the equivalent of about a thousand hours a year and a gas plant for as many hours as somebody pays it to. The share of the year a plant runs at full output is its capacity factor.
The figure is taken at the year's end, which matters when a fleet is growing fast. A country that adds a fifth of its solar capacity in a year had, on average, only around nine tenths of the year-end figure available across that year. So a year-end figure overstates the fleet that produced the year's electricity, and any figure derived from it, a capacity factor above all, comes out low.
The source is Ember, a research group that assembles the national statistics into one yearly file on one set of definitions, published under an open licence. Its capacity figures come from the International Renewable Energy Agency for renewables and from national statistics for the rest. Two things follow. First, the comparison between countries uses one set of categories: solar is solar everywhere in the file. Second, where a national office publishes a different figure, as Germany's grid regulator (the Bundesnetzagentur) does for solar, the gap comes from definitions: which plants count, and at what power rating. The chart shows Ember's figure and names the gap. The latest year covers the countries that had reported by the time of the release; the rest end a year earlier and the chart shows the gap.
The second chart puts the chosen technology for the world and four large economies on one axis. The world figure dwarfs any single country, so those lines are drawn as an index against the fleet of 2015, with the absolute figure in the tooltip. What that chart shows for solar is the shape of the decade: China's fleet grew faster than anyone's and by the end of the period stood above the European Union's several times over, while the United States and India grew more slowly.