“What does a sustainable civilisation look like, and how can we get there?” As stated in the Solarpunk Manifesto, this is the founding purpose of solarpunk, a literary, aesthetic and cultural genre that portrays an equitable society sustained by renewable energy and living in harmony with nature. It hopes that fossil fuel’s extractive damage will be replaced by solar power’s renewable light, which will change not only how we power buildings and manufacturing, but how we design and organise our cultures.
Solarpunk was born online in the mid-2000s and thrived on blogs and in independent literature. Around the turn of the decade, it started to influence wider media. The depiction of Wakanda, the African city featured in the 2018 film Black Panther, was a joyful moment for solarpunks, showing how a civilisation could combine the benefits of cutting-edge technology with living in balance with its environment.
The movement’s themes are increasingly present in video games like Solarpunk, Terra Nil and Loftia, and Solarpunk ideals have started to be co-opted by brands. In 2021, yoghurt company Chobani released an animated advert that showed a solarpunk society: in the future pastoral, a multigenerational family eats locally harvested food against a backdrop of floating wind turbines, green skyscrapers, a flying school bus and orange-picking robots.
The next year, solarpunk was Disneyfied. The film Strange World tells the story of a progressive civilisation that is powered by a plant called “Pando” – a stand-in for fossil fuels – and must transition away from using it. It performed poorly at the box office.
Solarpunk got a big political endorsement in 2023, when US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated on social media that she ascribes to solarpunk instead of climate doomerism. This brought new fans to the movement, and new critics.
As it graduates from a marginal internet subculture to a movement with growing influence, solarpunk is necessarily becoming more real. The open question is if it can do so without losing its guiding principles, its aesthetic appeal and its progressive and anti-capitalist centre.
Solarpunk finds great value in DIY, hacked and bolted-together solutions, in services and products ranging from homemade internet services to locally networked energy and backyard bioreactors. Italian architect Carlo Ratti has envisaged self-powered spaces in which a range of renewable energies – small wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, a vibraphone that converts music into electricity, and a carousel powered by the children who play on it – all contribute to community generation.
In Liverpool, the local authority is planning Mersey Tidal Power, a barrage system along the River Mersey to generate clean energy for the entire city for the next 120 years, while also providing flood defences for the city as climate change worsens.
But it’s solar power that inspired the movement’s name, and it’s solar power that tends to most capture the public imagination. As the world heats, solarpunks envisage a photon-powered society emerging, in which not only our energy production but also the rhythms of our lives follow the sun and its light.
Solarpunk revolves around a central vision of abundant solar power – and thanks to better and cheaper panels and battery storage, that vision is firmly within sight today. Solar energy is now the fastest-growing energy technology in history.
We are becoming used to seeing solar panels fitted to rooftops, but increasingly they will fit into our environment in much more dynamic ways. Photovoltaic facades could be used to dress buildings in solar textiles, while seas and lakes could be scattered with floatovoltaics: floating circles of solar panels that follow the sun to increase their efficiency while cooling the water and helping to prevent algal bloom.
Mobile solar is changing transport: German company Sono Motors has developed solar panels that can be integrated almost invisibly on to the doors of cars. Toyota’s next-generation Prius can be fitted with solar panels on its roof, which charge the car’s battery while it’s parked.
One of the breakthrough technologies at tech industry trade show CES in 2024 was photovoltaics the size of a postage stamp. Made by a company called Ambient Photonics, they charge from minimal levels of ambient light, which means that everyday devices that use relatively little energy – like sensors, keyboards and headphones – could run entirely on ambiently gathered solar energy, requiring no batteries and little maintenance.
Solar panels are increasingly being combined with other systems and uses, creating compound benefits. Placed over car parks, they bring energy generation directly into urban areas, where energy is likely to be used in higher quantities, including by the EVs parked underneath; placed over canals, they can reduce excess evaporation.
Hanging solar panels over crops of tomato and jalapeño plants has been found to increase the yield of the plants substantially, reduce water use and increase the output of the solar panels. Used with greenhouses, solar panels can extend growing seasons and increase crop yields.
Photovoltaic farms can also be designed to be pollinator-friendly, encouraging biodiversity by growing wildflower meadows amid the panels. At Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts, horticulturalists have observed birds nesting beneath the solar panels, and they say the solar farm is humming with insect life.
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Alongside the innovation and creativity that solar energy inspires, and the changes it brings to how we design our world, it will also necessitate some changes to how we live. Despite the continued record growth rate of renewable energy, fossil fuels continue to provide more than 80% of the world’s primary energy consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions from energy reached a record high of 34.4 billion metric tons in 2023.
Solarpunk advocate Andrew Dana Hudson has described the idea of a photon-powered society organised around high-tech days and low-tech nights, where people plan activities for when energy supply is plentiful and reduce activity when it’s not going to be available. Dutch designer Boudewijn Buitenhek took this idea to an extreme with his Living with the Sun project. He lived without gas and electricity for a week, only using power he was able to generate himself – from a flexible solar panel that he could move around his balcony and a pedal-powered generator.
“I believed I had prepared myself,” he told me by email, “but I still feel like I underestimated how much I would miss a hot or cold drink or food of any kind. My kitchen was mostly useless, as my stove, microwave and fridge all far exceeded the energy I could collect from the sun.”
To make himself a cup of coffee, he built a solar-powered water boiler and coffee roaster, and moved his coffee time from the morning to the afternoon to enable him to roast the beans and heat the water effectively in time. “It led me to ponder potential future implications for property value being more closely linked to sunlight accessibility,” he said.
Since the experiment ended, he has installed a solar panel and battery that enable him to watch a couple of hours of solar-powered TV each day. “It still brings me joy when I see the battery fully charged in the evening.”
Solarpunk futures explore what it could mean to live within the sun’s beams, but they also entail becoming more entangled with nature as a whole. Technology is integrated into the environment in creative ways – and as climate breakdown becomes more advanced, direct action to alter the environment is becoming more of a talking point.
Solarpunk visions of nature are less about skyscrapers covered in plants and more about urban gardens, compost systems and algae biopanels. In short, they’re less clean and green, more messy and experimental – but often equally cutting-edge. Seed bombs, guerrilla gardening and permablitzing – one-day events in which volunteers create a food garden, construct a grey-water system or plant trees – are recurring themes.
Other projects combine nature with technology to create innovative concepts that draw on living intelligence. Mexican company Greenfluidics produces window panels that are filled with water rich in algae, fed by carbon dioxide emissions, to shade buildings while producing a source of biofuel to power them.
Light Bio engineers bioluminescent plants using genetic enhancement. Its first product, the Firefly Petunia, has the soft glow of moonlight, making it possible for gardens to be naturally illuminated at night.
Natural intelligence is also informing how information is stored and how computers could be built – or grown – in future. Biotech company Grow Your Own Cloud is developing ways to store data in the DNA of plants. It has prototyped data gardens that sequester carbon while storing kilobytes of information, such as an image file; its future visions include forests that double as data archives for petabytes of data.
Bristol-based Unconventional Computing Laboratory has conducted feasibility studies of fungal computers, in which mycelium forms part of an electronic circuit and can receive and send electrical signals.
As depicted in the Chobani advert, robots are a common sight within solarpunk futures. US start-up farm-ng has developed a series of modular farming robots that growers can build, Lego-like, at low cost, customising the robot according to the type of crop and task, such as weeding, seeding and spreading compost.
German company Nature Robots uses AI and robotics to assist regenerative and small-scale farming specifically. Its autonomous robot can navigate forests and tunnels.
Robots that actively restore and regenerate environments could be the next stage. Dubai-based designer Mazyar Etehadi has designed A’seedbot, a robot that tackles desertification by identifying fertile areas of barren land and planting seeds based on data from its sensors and navigation.
The imagination that powers solarpunk, coupled with its premise of radical hope, makes it an energising and uplifting movement. Plenty of its ideas and projects are not strictly necessary, but are inventive, pleasing and perhaps slightly strange.
Transport is one area in which the more playful and exuberant side of solarpunk lifestyles shines through. Airships are a recurring motif through solarpunk fiction, tapping into a visual vocabulary of lightness and airiness that also includes sail-powered boats and kites.
UK-based company Hybrid Air Vehicles builds four types of airships, called Airlanders, which it intends to produce as electric, zero-emissions vehicles from 2030. Its first hybrid airship is set to enter commercial use in 2028 and will be used by French tour operator Grands Espaces for voyages to the Arctic.
Because the solarpunk airship can take off from any flat surface, including ice, its destinations can reach beyond those possible for other aircraft, opening up amazing travel experiences. With space for up to 100 passengers and a top speed of 130 km/h, the airships will have spacious, relaxed lounges, with plump chairs and chaise longues, bar seating and floor-to-ceiling windows.
The next generation of airships, if they take off, will revive a form of transport that was last popular almost 100 years ago. Other projects are giving new momentum to boats, using high-tech variants on a much older technology: sails.
Mitsubishi’s Pyxis Ocean ship completed a six-month voyage in 2023, equipped with WindWings sails, which reduced the ship’s fuel use by three tonnes a day, rising to 11 tonnes in optimum sailing conditions.
Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno has been experimenting with creating a hot-air balloon powered by wind and sun. In 2020, his Aerocene Pacha set multiple records flying over the Salinas Grandes salt flats in Argentina – the first time humans have flown freely, without using batteries, lithium, solar panels, helium or hydrogen.
The penultimate line in the Solarpunk Manifesto is that solarpunk “is beautiful”, and it’s these projects – ideas that not only show what we could do to repair ecology and improve our societies, but also illustrate the experiences in which we will find pleasure, meaning and excitement – that bring solarpunk to life to its fullest.
Designing Hope: Visions to Shape our Future by Sarah Housley is published by the Indigo Press
