If you had to guess which country gets the largest share of its electricity from solar, you might understandably toss out the name of a balmy island nation. Or perhaps you’d pick a country with swaths of blistering desert. At the very least, somewhere notoriously hot and sunny. Right?
Well, you would be wrong. The global leader is Hungary, according to a recent report from think tank Ember that pulls from full-year 2024 data and only considers nations that generated over 5 terawatt-hours of solar.
The Central European country got nearly one-quarter of its electricity from solar panels last year, leapfrogging Chile, which had held the top spot since 2021. Hungary’s win is no fluke: From January through October this year, solar grew to account for about one-third of power generated in the nation of 10 million.
It’s quite the shift. Just five years ago, Hungary got only 7% of its power from solar. Ember attributes the rapid growth to robust policies supporting both utility-scale and residential installations.
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By the way, next time you hear someone say “We are too far north for solar to work”, be advised that Hungary is more northerly than large parts of Canada.
Other top ten countries for solar, like Germany and the Netherlands, are at the same latitude as Hudson Bay.
That Ember study contains some of the most statistical statistics – in the sense of ‘Lies, damned lies, and statistics’ – that I’ve read in some time. For a start, it covers the electricity generated in-country, but in 2025 Hungary imported more than twice as much power from Slovakia and Austria as it got from solar, and an even higher percentage from its own nuclear plants. Solar provided 6.8 out of 43 terawatt hours, about 12%. Then there’s ‘Poland, Czechia, and Hungary are surging ahead, with Slovakia falliing behind…’ Slovakia, with about 1% of solar power, actually has the lowest electricity emissions of the four, thanks to completing its sixth reactor recently. Hungary is already building two more large reactors, Czechia has contracted to build two as well, probably going to four. Poland, with no nuclear, and by far the worst emissions profile, also has the most aggressive nuclear plans. As you say, these countries are well north : solar does nothing for them on those long winter nights, while nuclear not only works better with colder coolant water – it can also be hooked up to provide CO2-free district heating for nearby towns.
Solar and wind are cheaper, can be built faster, don’t generally melt down, and have far fewer actual problems than reactors, although the lunatic far right has certainly been able to come up with a huge array of imaginary problems and outright lies. The whole mix of renewables is beautiful, effective and can supply all the energy we need.
If ARFs (anti-renewable fanatics) put 1/10th as much effort into solving problems as they do do into making up lies and spreading them, the world would be CCC at least 90% powered by renewable energy already. Actually, we’d be there already if they just stopped lying and did nothing else.