It’s easy to dismiss solar as a bit energy player. Look at the most recent Energy Information Administration data and you’ll see that utility-scale solar provided around 9.3 terawatt-hours of U.S. electricity in 2013, a mere 0.23 percent of total generation.

But here’s the thing: Those numbers and other current data on solar are fast-fading snapshots in time. Solar energy generation is on course to nearly double in the U.S. this year, for example, and fresh reports from the International Energy Agency are now highlighting solar’s potential to dramatically remake the global energy picture.

In newly released “roadmaps” for PV and solar thermal, the IEA has ratcheted up its targets for solar energy production in 2050 – to about 27 percent of the world’s electricity, from the 22 percent it was envisioning just four years ago. Combined, that would make solar the largest global producer of electricity. For the United States, those 9.3 terawatt-hours of solar energy would grow into well over 1,500 TWh by midcentury.

“The rapid cost decrease of photovoltaic modules and systems in the last few years has opened new perspectives for using solar energy as a major source of electricity in the coming years and decades,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement accompanying the release of the reports.

The IEA emphasized that the roadmaps aren’t projections. Instead, “they detail the expected technology improvement targets and the policy actions required” to reach levels of solar production that the IEA believes are achievable and necessary to respond to the threat of climate change. And the roadmaps come with the caveat that solar technologies are very capital intensive. “Lowering the cost of capital is thus of primary importance for achieving the vision in these roadmaps,” van der Hoeven said.

Still, the IEA’s scenarios aren’t pulled out of a hat (or any other suspect location); they’re based firmly on solar performance over the past few years – and it’s PV that’s been the over-achiever extraordinaire.

In its 2010 roadmap, IEA envisioned solar PV providing 11 percent of the world’s electricity in 2050. But since then, solar has grown faster than expected, and the agency now thinks that with the right policies in place, PV can account for 16 percent of global electricity by midcentury.

“The 210 GW (gigawatts) of cumulative capacity expected to be reached by 2020 is now likely to be achieved five years earlier, and the capacity now expected for 2020 will be over twice what was foreseen in the 2010 roadmap,” the IEA said in its PV report. “Moreover, the system cost milestones for 2020 in the original roadmap have already been reached in the most advanced markets, except for the smallest rooftop capacities.”

Solar thermal hasn’t performed as well as PV in recent years – or as well as the IEA had hoped in its 2010 outlook. And the IEA sees PV carrying most of the burden of solar’s growth until 2030 – demonstrating the complementary nature of the technologies, it said.

“When reaching shares between 5% and 15% of annual electricity generation, PV starts to lose value in wholesale markets,” the IEA said. “Massive-scale STE (solar thermal) deployment takes off at this stage thanks to CSP plants’ built-in thermal storage, which allows for generation of electricity when demand peaks in late afternoon and in the evening, thus complementing PV generation.”

While the IEA’s solar scenario might strike some renewable energy doubters as pie-in-the-sky, the agency said raising expectations was not only necessary to achieve success, but well in order based on solar’s performance. It’s notable that the first among three policy dicta that van der Hoeven emphasized in introducing the new roadmaps was the need for policymakers to “set or update long-term targets for solar electricity that take full account of the important cost reductions already achieved and of the serious prospects for further cost reductions.”

Beyond that, van der Hoeven – alluding to the brewing fights over net metering policies – called for market signals that fully value solar’s contribution, as well as policies that de-risk financing in order to lower the cost of capital for solar development.