Which Asian Countries Actually Run on Solar?

Solar was 0.56% of Lebanon's recorded generation in 2019 and 28.8% in 2022; in 2024 it was 29.96% of demand. The cause is the grid, not the climate. A financial crisis began in late 2019, and by summer 2021 the state had failed to secure the foreign currency to buy fuel, Human Rights Watch reported. Since then Électricité du Liban has struggled to supply more than one to three hours a day.

Households and businesses filled the gap with panels, batteries and diesel generators, an industry HRW valued at around $3 billion. LBCI reported imports of solar panels and batteries rising from $54 million in 2021 to $930 million in 2022. IRENA counts 1.505 GW of solar. On 29 December 2025 Energy Minister Joe Saddi said existing capacity delivers 8 to 10 hours a day at best, with the utility supplying about a third of demand.

Treat the 29.96% with care. Recorded generation fell about 80% from 2019 to 2022, so part of the rise is a shrinking denominator, and the share dipped to 22.3% in 2023. We also could not confirm whether Ember's figure includes private diesel generators, which the World Bank estimated supplied 8.1 of Lebanon's 22 TWh in 2018. If excluded, the share overstates solar's weight in what households use.

If solar only won where grids failed, Jordan and Israel would not be second and third. Solar met 16.56% of Jordan's demand and 14.22% of Israel's on working grids: Ember's data show Jordan importing just 0.06 TWh of 23.7 TWh, and Israel a net exporter of 6.4 TWh.

Both got there by policy. Renewables supplied about 27% of Jordan's electricity in 2024, per Ministry of Energy data, and its energy minister said in May 2025 that the 31% target could arrive in 2027 or 2028, ahead of 2030. Israel, with 7.363 GW, targets 30% renewable electricity by 2030, and its 2025 solar share is already 16.2% in Ember's data.

So the same percentage can come from a failing grid or from a plan. The map cannot tell them apart; the history can.

Why Households Bought · Tariffs Up 290%

For a household using 230 kWh a month, overall tariffs rose 290% between 2014 and 2023, the International Growth Centre found. Ember and Renewables First put grid power at about PKR 40 a kWh, against about PKR 20 for solar with a medium battery and about PKR 120 for diesel. Ember linked the 17 GW of panels imported in 2024, double 2023, to expensive contracts with privately owned thermal plants.

Reliability pushed too: Ember says distributed solar has eased chronic daytime loadshedding. Residential systems account for 16.9 GW, industry about 10 GW, agriculture 8.1 GW and commerce 3.3 GW. Cheaper hardware helped, since $100 bought 6.1 times the watts of bare panel in 2025 that it did in 2015. A 2026 shift to net billing trimmed the household advantage.

Why We Use 38 GW · Not IRENA's 3.717 GW

IRENA reports 3.717 GW, identical in 2024 and 2025, and its series excludes distributed and rooftop systems. It cannot be right: the 19.84 TWh of 2024 solar generation in the data would need a capacity factor above 60% from that fleet, against IRENA's own 17.4% global average for new utility-scale plants (our arithmetic). So Pakistan's row uses Ember and Renewables First's 38 GW at the end of June 2025.

The 38 GW was triangulated three ways: Chinese export data gives 47 GW cumulative, an upper bound; TransitionZero satellite imagery gives 27.5 GW; a survey of 5,300 households and businesses gives 33 GW. The official register is far smaller: net metering held 4,124 MW at the end of 2024, against 17 GW of panels imported that year.

The map's 11.3% is a calendar-2024 figure on a demand basis. Ember and Renewables First estimate distributed solar alone at 28% of generation in fiscal 2025 (July 2024 to June 2025), up from 10% in fiscal 2023, but that is a different year and basis, so it stays out of the ranking.

Yemen's 11.24% rests on a real collapse. The International Growth Centre found in November 2021 that three-quarters of households with electricity got it from solar, calling it "not a story of success, but rather of the collapse of the grid, such that solar power represents a much larger share of a dramatically reduced overall supply." The systems are tiny: about 250 W in cities, under 100 W in rural areas.

The number is less stable than the story. Ember's recorded generation for Yemen jumped 69% from 2022 to 2023, to 5.12 TWh, while solar barely moved, cutting the measured share from 16.8% to 10.2%.

Afghanistan's measured 1.61% understates a different reality. A World Bank and Samuel Hall survey, sampled from June 2018 to May 2019, found about 57% of households used solar home systems as their main electricity and about one in three had grid access. It is a research sample, not a census, and small systems supply little energy, which is probably how both facts hold. Ember counts 85.5% of Afghanistan's supply as imported.

Capacity is a stock; share is a flow. IRENA puts the global weighted-average capacity factor for utility-scale solar commissioned in 2024 at 17.4%, within a range of 11.5% to 22.6%, so a gigawatt yields roughly 1.5 TWh a year (8,760 hours at 17.4%, our arithmetic). China generated 10,087 TWh in 2024, and its demand grew 5% in 2025.

Coal still produced 54% of China's electricity in 2025, down from 70% in 2015, according to Ember. Solar rose from 8.33% of demand in 2024 to 11.1% of electricity in 2025 as the fleet grew 35.5%, from 887.1 GW to 1,202.2 GW.

Saudi Arabia shows the timing effect: 11.9 GW, ninth in Asia, yet 1.81% of demand in 2024, because capacity went from 2.44 GW at the end of 2023 to 6.20 GW in 2024 and 11.93 GW in 2025, on a 454.6 TWh grid that burns almost entirely gas and oil.

The build is not slowing: IRENA says Asia added 371.2 GW of solar in 2025, up from 317.1 GW in 2024, out of 511 GW worldwide. Because this ranking pairs 2025 capacity with 2024 shares, fast builders are understated; Israel is 16.2% in 2025.

Mostly yes, and the exceptions are the story. Across the 49 countries the rank correlation between installed capacity and share of demand is +0.69: bigger fleets generally carry more of the load, partly because 21 countries have under 1 GW and sit near the bottom of both lists. China, India, Japan, Pakistan and South Korea hold 91.9% of Asia's capacity.

The break is in the middle. The six countries above 10% hold 50.2 GW, 3.1% of the total, and what unites most of them is circumstance, not size: failed grids in Lebanon and Yemen, a price shock in Pakistan, plans in Jordan and Israel. Armenia reaches 11.52% from 0.706 GW; we did not research its drivers.

No Asian country gets even a third of its electricity from solar. Where it carries real weight, something else gave way or someone decided it should.

Capacity is end-2025; share is 2024. Ember's own 2025 shares cover only 28 of the 49 countries, so 2024 is the only year that keeps all of them, and it understates fast growers: China is 8.33% for 2024 but 11.1% for 2025.

Share is solar divided by demand: domestic generation plus net imports. Our World in Data's published series divides by generation, which inflates import-dependent places. Only 5 of the 49 countries move by more than one percentage point; Lebanon and Yemen, which import nothing, do not.

Asia follows Our World in Data's regions: Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are in; Russia and Cyprus count as Europe, Egypt as Africa. We downloaded the full global datasets from Our World in Data and filtered the 49 Asian countries ourselves, so this is FactsFigs' cut, not a view Our World in Data publishes.

Pakistan's capacity comes from a different source than the other 48 rows, and its 11.3% share is not a like-for-like measure of that fleet. Weak rows: the Maldives is carried forward, with identical figures for 2022 to 2024, and Syria's and Iraq's capacity and generation do not reconcile. Capacity bases (AC or DC) may differ by country.