Solar to dominate energy by 2035, but AI data centers will keep fossil fuels in business
A new report from BloombergNEF predicts that solar energy will become the dominant power source by 2035, surpassing fossil fuels. This transition is driven by economic factors, as solar becomes increasingly affordable. However, data centers are expected to continue relying on fossil fuels for a significant portion of their energy needs due to their operational capabilities.
- ▪Solar energy is projected to become the largest source of power, overtaking coal, oil, and natural gas.
- ▪Data centers will drive significant demand for energy, but fossil fuels are expected to provide over half of their incremental generation by 2050.
- ▪Solar panel prices are anticipated to drop by another 30% by 2035, making it more competitive than coal and natural gas.
TechCrunch files mainly under tech. We currently carry 594 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/solar-to-dominate-energy-in-2035-but-data-centers-will-keep-fossil-fuels-in-business/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T10:00:54.217Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T10:52:45.236Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 8OxRDMX7-1UG |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Solar will become the largest source of power in the next decade, surpassing coal, oil and natural gas, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. The tectonic shift will occur alongside a historic rise in the use of energy driven by AI and the electrification of entire industries. “Solar is winning the race,” Matthias Kimmel, head of energy economics at BloombergNEF, told TechCrunch. BloombergNEF expects the shift to happen on economic grounds alone — solar is simply too cheap to ignore. Pakistan, for example, has added 25 gigawatts of solar power in the last two years after natural gas prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The transition could be even swifter if countries take more aggressive measures to curb their carbon emissions.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from TechCrunch
