It takes time for statistical agencies to compile reports. I haven't yet found reports covering the growth in renewable generation (actual terawatt hours) for all of 2025. But this covers 3 quarters of the year:
In the first three quarters of 2025, solar generation rose by 498 TWh (+31%) and already surpassed the total solar output in all of 2024. Wind generation grew by 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they added 635 TWh, outpacing the rise in global electricity demand of 603 TWh (+2.7%).
Ember is an absolute treasure. Often you'll see articles on HN from places like Elektrek which are blogspam linking back to Ember's original reporting.
Their electricity data explorer is to my knowledge the most complete on the open internet.
>At the global level, 2025 also saw a sharp rebound in non-renewable additions, which nearly doubled compared to 2024," IRENA noted. China led that drive, with 100 GW of non-renewable capacity added last year, most of which was coal.
Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.
Is it just the need for power when the sun is not shining? Or is it something else?
My understanding is that China is planning to build a coal-backed renewable grid. Renewables, including storage, will provide the majority of the electricity generation, and then coal will step in when renewables aren't available. This involves building modern coal plants that can be spun up and down as needed, and then paying them not to generate. This is why actual emissions have plateaued and dropped, even as new coal capacity comes online.
We are (or were) doing something similar in the US, just using natural gas as the fuel rather than coal.
- They need something to provide electricity when the sun is not shining, while they install enough batteries and more than enough solar to use during the day and charge those batteries.
- They need some backup in case the Sun is dimmed for a few days, while they install enough solar to not need this anymore.
- They need some backup in case they grow too fast and the solar installations don't keep up.
- They need some backup in case there's some natural catastrophe, or some stupid dictator somewhere decides to start a war or something and destroy some vital energy infrastructure.
Their government has explained this a few times, but not on those words. It probably helps that those are government projects, and failing to deliver government projects is a very rude attitude that can end people's careers. But the rationale is sound too.
Mostly it's that solar doesn't work at night. That means you have to use batteries, which are impractical to store more than a certain amount of energy, after which you need another very large and stable energy source. So a nation-state that can't go dark must have a constant load source, such as nuclear, hydro, or coal. There's also limitations of geography, industry, production capacity, and other issues.
Part of China's "new" coal capacity is modern, efficient coal plants with lower emissions being built to replace old, inefficient, highly polluting ones.
Wait this is actually amazing, I had no idea it was that high. I can’t even believe what the US admin is doing, this is clearly the winning technology.
At the time, I stupidly thought Blockbuster would see what was coming and use their at the time larger size to pivot and do what Netflix had demonstrated would work. Kind of like when the Yellow Pages bought early Google.
Oh wait...
Blockbuster did start offering mail in DVD rental subscriptions just like Netflix, in fact it was better because you could return it to a nearby store if you didn't want to wait for mail. But it was too late. (This was even before streaming.)
US is divesting from renewables because it planned to go to war with the rest of the world, which it depends on for renewables (rare earth materials). As a result it's forced to focus on oil and coal instead because it can produce that within the northwestern hemisphere. New strategic plan is likely to take over greenland, drill in arctic, expand rigs in gulf of mexico, spin up coal plants, and do deals with govt they install in Venezuela. This is the "America First" plan - reject globalism, completely control the home turf like Russia, build up warfighting apparatus, use that to go take over more countries and extract wealth there. (Guess who came up with the plan? US isn't a threat to Russia if US stays on its side of the ocean)
Installed capacity is a misleading number. If you assessed the trucking industry by simply sum-ing the rated capacity of all the hardware you'd be rightfully laughed and and called a liar on the basis of all the times the trucks are empty and all the trucks that run out of volume before weight. Renewables is a similar situation.
Some panel in a solar farm in Canada is not gonna see the conditions that let it produce rated capacity nearly as often as one in Arizona. So the guy in Canada installs more capacity to get the same power. Meanwhile the guy in Arizona doesn't have enough copper leading out of his site to handle the power he could produce at peak on the best days, because he over-provisioned too, in order to be able to produce a given amount earlier/later in the day. The actual generation hardware is so cheap that this is just the sensible way to deploy renewables, but it makes for stupid misleading numbers.
Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
> Installed capacity is a misleading number. If you assessed the trucking industry by simply sum-ing the rated capacity of all the hardware you'd be rightfully laughed and and called a liar on the basis of all the times the trucks are empty and all the trucks that run out of volume before weight. Renewables is a similar situation.
OK, but what if someone looked at the rated capacity of all trucks and noted that in the last 5 years it went up by 24%, 22%, 28%, 54%, and 45%? That would strongly suggest that the amount trucks actually being used is growing rapidly because people aren't going to be buying new trucks unless they have to.
Yes, unless people had some incentives to show an increase in the trucking capacity in order to meet some metrics and get more funding etc. (not saying that's what's happening, but just as a counterpoint to your logic)
This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install. Current geopolitical events spiking LNG costs make the math even more favorable towards renewables.
> Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
Legacy power is ridiculously expensive in comparison. Who will invest in fossil gas generation when ~20% of LNG exports have been taken offline for the next 3-5 years?
Fossil fuels are over, it's just how fast we get to "done." Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30-60 minutes to power humanity for a year. Solar PV and battery manufacturing continues to spool up, and year by year, more fossil generation is pushed out.
California is routinely operating at 80% renewables, 90% low carbon generation during daylight hours as they work towards installing battery storage to replace their fossil generation (~52GW target by 2045), for example, while having plans for 10s of GWs of additional solar to come online over the next decade.
> This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install.
I looked it up because I was curious, according to Wikipedia average PV capacity factor is 25 % in USA, 10 % in the UK or Germany.
Nuclear has 88 % capacity factor worldwide. Meaning to replace 1 GW of nuclear installed capacity you need 8.8 GW of PV installed capacity in Germany or 3.5 GW of PV installed capacity in US.
Which might still be economically worth it, I don't know. But it is a number that surprised it.
It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar, the US ~4-5GW/month. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment.
Yes, the biggest advantage of solar and wind is that they can be built as many small projects, instead of few gigaprojects we seem to have lost the ability to execute in the West.
Why is this even a crises? Sure there's fossil fuel price shocks but watching mission control for Artemis and comparing it to the Apollo missions the difference in tech can't be understated. We've made massive progress in only 50 years as a civilization collectively. We used to basically waste energy powering giant displays. Now we use a fraction of the energy on far better ones. 50 years from now we're likely to have so much solar and batteries deployed that it might actually hit "almost free" levels.
Modern grids favour flexibility over fixed baseload generation (like nuclear) though. When you turn off a nuclear power plant its operating costs basically stay the same, which is horrible when you could cover your whole consumption with basically free solar/wind.
actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is deadly to the economics of nuclear.
France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet, and they cannot get a reactor built within reasonable capital costs. Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons. California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE data product I've cited in my other comment in this thread).
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 15.45% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
The reason EDF had to be nationalized is because the government used the company as a "price shield" to protect consumer against energy price rise on the European market in 2022 with a mechanism named TRV (Tarif Régulé vente). That digged up EDF dept tremendously.
> Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons
Span deprecated their nuclear government because their current Socialist government is aligned with Ecologists that are, like everywhere in Europe, antinuclear.
Additionally, the lack of spinning generator in Spain is currently partially what caused the Blackout in Spain in 2025 due to a lack of inertia in the system.
> EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says
This is over 25 years and will prolong-ate the lifetime of the 56 reactors by 20 more years. These produce 70% of the country need in electricity.
In comparison, the German energiewende cost 400 billions for 37% of electricity of 2025 produced by solar and wind. With production medium that will need to be entirely renewed in 20 years.
> California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE
That is also wrong.
Because LCOE calculation does not take into consideration the price of the grid consolidating necessary for renewable nor the necessity of backup generation in case of dunkleflaute.
The cost of the energy transition in Germany is sometimes cited as €300 billion, €500 billion, or even €1.5 trillion.
These figures are worthless because no reputable source publishes a specific figure along with the scope of the project (some aspects of the investments needed for the electricity grid are independent of the energy source) and at least a timeframe.
These figures are actually projections published by various sources, covering distant deadlines (2050, etc.) and the entire electricity system, including non-renewable energy sources (whose additional costs are often overestimated).
>> France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet
>That's just wrong.
No, it's correct, the total costs of the 2022 bailout was almost 10bn, and that was to get control over a company that had over 50bn in debt.
Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.
Of course, the TRV didn't help, it caused a loss of 18bn in 2022 on top of everything else, but things were bad already.
So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't - it would take 15-20 years to cover the bailout that has already taken place. The 100 billion of investments until 2035 is in addition to that.
And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?
Unfortunately nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea. Which is likely the main reason it's still around.
> No, it's correct, the total costs of the 2022 bailout was almost 10bn, and that was to get control over a company that had over 50bn in debt.
Bailout of 2022 alone was around 22bn€, which was added on top of it the historical debt.
Revenue of EDF in 2025 is over 100bn€ to put things into perspective.
> Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.
That is also wrong. The immediate maintenance in 2022 was related to "corrosion sous contrainte" which has nothing to do with carelessness. It was mainly the French nuclear regulator (ASN) over-reacting to some non-critical cracks find in some pipes. They have themselves said afterward that the immediate actions were not necessary. The actions were overreactive (from EDF side) and the calendar was very unfortunate.
> So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't -
Indeed. Profits in 2025 were currently over 8bn€, so well over 5bn€.
5bn€ just concern the profit made by the exports.
This is not hard to understand: Making a profit by selling valuable nuclear energy during evening peak consumption while buying cheap intermittent solar during low consumption time is an easy game.
People generally do not understand that Nuclear is a CAPEX game, not an OPEX one.
> And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?
By selling nuclear electricity at 180€/MWh every night when the sun do not shine.
(This is the average price, every evening peak this month)
Meaning-while, the profitability of solar operators will sink to the ground due to the overcapacity causing negative price during the day as soon as the sun shine. Many of them will die if not state subsidized with public money.
> nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea
It is currently the best low-carbon energy around.
And will continue to be for the next 2 decades.
The current Co2/kwh emission of France is 27g/kwh.
The comparison with country like Germany (397g/kwh) or state like California (190g/kwh) that spend >100Bn$ on renewable speak for itself.
I can safely bet that in 15y from now, the French grid will still be greener than the German one.
> making a profit by selling valuable nuclear energy
EDF adjusted economic debt at the beginning of 2026: €81.7 billion
After decades of massive help (nationalisations building it, monopoly, gift-loans, debt cancellation...
> the profitability of solar operators will sink to the ground due to the overcapacity causing negative price
Wait for storage (V2G...) and hydrogen to kick in.
> France
> Germany
France's transition to nuclear power began in 1963 and is now complete.
In other countries (Germany...), transitions to renewables began with the advent of their industrial versions, around 2005. The current context makes these transitions more challenging, and they are still underway.
Therefore, any comparison of their results, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, must be based not on snapshots (which currently favor France since its transition is complete), but on their progress: speed, costs, impacts, etc.
> EDF nuclear fleet is highly profitable with around 92TWh exported in 2025
Nope. Electricity exports are officially exported at a loss, since the average price per MWh exported is generally slightly lower than the average French spot price ( https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2025-04/2025-04-09... , page 87). According to the sound approach established by Mr. Boiteux, this price must compensate for production costs as well as investments.
The average market price is decreasing because the renewable energy sector is expanding across the continent, thus supplying more and more electricity at a production cost that is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power.
According to RTE, France will export 92.3 TWh in 2025 (page 75), paid €5.4 billion (page 15), meaning that the average price per MWh will be €58.7. However, this renewable energy sector (considered fully amortized) will produce electricity at a cost of €60.3 according to the CRE (which considers it fully amortized and therefore neglects the bulk of the investment), and at around €78 according to EDF ( https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/epresspack/6300/CP_Con... ), which wants to build EPR2 reactors and therefore needs to have the necessary funds.
In short, France is exporting at €58.70 a year when it needs to sell for at least €78 to finance its future reactors, thus "using up" its current fleet without setting aside enough money to replace it.
Worse still: if the costs of the EPR2 reactors exceed forecasts, as all EPR construction projects (Finland, France, China, and the UK) have done, the deficit will increase even further.
Fixed costs (investments, maintenance, depreciation of the EPR alone, etc.) are by definition paid whether the fleet produces or not. Therefore, exporting at a price higher than the variable costs (paid only if the plant produces) is a lesser evil because the difference covers a portion of the fixed costs: it is less expensive to export at a slight loss than not to produce and lose more (in technical terms: the gross margin helps cover fixed costs).
However, claiming that nuclear power is profitable simply because of electricity exports is misleading, and the ideal solution would be to produce electricity at the lowest possible cost, therefore using renewable energy sources.
Furthermore, a portion of France's electricity is generated from renewables, so attributing exports solely to nuclear power is misleading.
I didn't say they weren't cheap. I said you were being misleading. I'm not rebutting your thesis. I'm rebutting your defense of it.
They're so cheap they get over-provisioned on purpose. Can you imagine some guy speci'ng switchgear and transmission lines for a coal or gas plant that can't handle the plant running full tilt? Yeah me either. But that's exactly how it's done for renewables because that's where the sweet spot of cost-benifit is.
A dozen 10mw turbines might be fed through 100mw of transmission hardware. They can never produce their rated 120mw because liquid copper would happen if they did. But they were intentionally provisioned that way so that based on weather patterns and whatnot they'd be able to expect say 80mw a certain number of days per year.
There are untold numbers of renewable installations out there that cannot supply their nameplate capacity to the grid in such a manner.
There is nothing wrong with over provisioning cheap renewable power generation when it is economically superior to building fossil assets that will end up stranded. As long as grid demand is met and it is cheaper to build renewables and batteries to do it, it will be done, and that is the path we're on.
If gas plants cannot economically compete, they will not be built or fired. And the evidence shows they cannot compete, regardless of their competing capacity factor and dispatchability.
> There is nothing wrong with over provisioning cheap renewable power generation when it is economically superior to building fossil assets that will end up stranded.
Solar cannibalises solar, so the price when the sun shines may tend to zero, but that does not ensure the price to the consumer of the electricity they need tends to zero, or even lower than it was.
Australia is currently giving away free power for the peak three hours of sunlight a day, due to solar overcapacity until battery uptake increases. They are also working on a market scheme to transition primary grid services from thermal generators to battery storage.
They only have 22GW of coal generation remaining to replace, which should take no longer than 5-10 years. These generators are already at the end of their life, so they have no other choice but to go forward with renewables and storage.
A glimpse into the future, as is Spain, as is California. Some are further on their journey than others. Those at the frontier will teach the rest of us how to solve for the hardest parts.
Do you have some links to how someone scaled up storage? I know that scaling up solar is easy, but I don't know of any nation that build significant storage.
You are still arguing against a strawman. Cucumber3732842 is just saying that nameplate capacity is a systematically flawed metric when comparing renewable generation, because their capacity factor is consistently lower than for conventional plants.
A better metric would simply be annual production, where we're in the ~30% range globally (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...). Even that comparison portraits renewables very favorably, because dispatchable power is easier to handle than the same output from intermittent sources.
If you look beyond electricity (heating/total primary energy use) the picture gets even worse.
This is not an argument against renewables, this is against premature cheering and misleading use of numbers.
I think you misunderstand. We are cheering trajectories, not the point in time. Renewables and storage will continue to be deployed, fossil fuels will remain expensive, and build outs will continue over the next decade or two. If these trajectories hold, and growth rates continue to grow for clean energy deployments, what happens? The outcome is obvious, is it not?
Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.
The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. We are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.
> As the world’s largest manufacturer of clean technologies, data on China’s cleantech exports provide an important early insight into the pace and scale of the energy transition. In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.
Trump could become an accidental environmental ally in the same way the 2008 credit crisis and Covid did. Just blunders in and in the wreckage might be something ok.
Worked on the software side of increasing the rate of solar penetration in electricity networks between 2016-2020 via global solar radiation forecasting. The uptake of the software was slow the first year but then rapid once more electricity networks were struggling with knowing how much solar was in the network. Once it is easier to predict, the network becomes easier to manage, and more can be safely added, and make it economically profitable. Sucks this was a commercial operation, but excited to see all the hard work across various industries is solving problems to get more renewable energy into networks.
Makes sense - solar especially. It's just more financially smart to buy something that will generate electricity for 20-30 years with little to no maintenance than a plant that requires constant fuel, and is fairly complex mechanically with fluids and heat exchangers and turbines and so on. Panel efficiency keeps going up and prices keep going down, it's a snowball at this point.
That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.
Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.
> The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring
A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone.
China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.
> True but having capacity allows for generation - doesn't work the other way around.
The issue is that comparing "capacity" as a percentage is misleading. A baseload generation source can have average generation above 90% of its rated capacity, solar at something like 25%, wind something like 25-40%. Which means that saying "nearly 50%" of capacity can imply something closer to 15% of generation, and potentially even less if the amount of local capacity is high, because then you get periods when renewable generation exceeds demand and the additional generation has nowhere to go, which effectively reduces the capacity factor even more.
And on the other side, natural gas peaker plants can have a capacity factor even lower than solar and wind because their explicit purpose is to only be used when demand exceeds supply from other sources, so that "nearly 50%" in a grid which is entirely renewables and peaker plants could actually imply more than 50% of total generation. This is much less common in existing grids but it makes looking at the nameplate capacity even more worthless because you can't just multiply it by a fixed factor to get the real number.
Whereas if they would just publish the percentage of actual generation, that's what people actually want to know. But then you'd have to say "13%" or "24%" or whatever the real number is, instead of "nearly 50%".
The graph at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-energy-consumpti... seems to indicate the real world outcome is something more like 12.9%. That is, pick a dot on the graph and look at the capacity (watts) versus how much was generated in 2024 (watt-hours), and the number ends up vaguely looking like 1000 watt-hours generated for every watt of capacity. Given that there's 8760 hours in a year, that's vaguely in the 12% range.
The number for "World" is 2,110,000 GWh consumed for 1,866 GW of capacity, which means 2110000÷(1866×8760) = 12.9% of "capacity". Running the numbers for every country (there's a csv!) shows expected cloudy/northerly countries down near 8-9% (UK, germany, norway) and the sunnier ones near 20%... The USA is 19.8% which tracks given how popular solar is in the sunnier regions in particular.
Nobody in their right mind should be surprised by this, since the sun doesn't always shine, it gets dark at night, etc... it's unrealistic to assume this number will ever meaningfully change for solar. It's just the baseline expectation.
So yeah, "capacity" is misleading indeed. It means that for solar, "50% of global capacity" would mean something more like "6% of energy consumed".
But it's still super exciting to see the clear exponential growth here. (Speaking as someone who installed a 14KW array on his roof last year, solar makes me super excited.)
The point is that its a proxy for more renewables being deployed on the grid. Thats the take away. It is a piece of good news. From one fellow energy nerd to likely another one - don't get hung up on the details. There is still a lot of work left to do.
I'm too lazy to double check the numbers, but as far as I remember, Germany in order to increase it's average generation by 10% had to expand capacity by 70% in solar plus wind. With stats like this, there's a thin line between progress and waste. And all this while we have nuclear.
(How the world really works, Vaclav smil if anybody is less lazy than me)
I would say as electrician in Bavaria: there are enough empty roofs for solar. Especially in poorer neighborhoods. I saw similar numbers and they are scary: to reliably replace conventional power plant one needs 20x the power of wind and solar. And this hardware must be imported from China, there is no large scale production of solar equipment in Europe.
A lot of renewables have intermittent generation. If daytime electricity demand is already saturated, adding more solar panels increases capacity but doesn't increase generation (or to be more specific, it doesn't increase generation that actually fulfills demand).
We can also time shift many of the things we do. Does your fridge need to run between 3-5pm in the heat of summer? or can it make sure its a little cooler to avoid running then? (trivial example, probably not a good one)
I'm sure there are better examples, but your fridge idea doesn't work. Fridges already operate on the edge of freezing, so if you make it a little cooler you will ruin all your food. Also 3-5pm is peak hangry time.
This is why a major part of the solution is electric vehicles. Why put batteries in a warehouse and then run vehicles on petroleum when you can put batteries in a vehicle, install twice as many renewables because you now have more demand for electricity, and then charge the vehicles when generation is a large percentage of rated capacity and still have enough to run the rest of the grid when it's a smaller percentage?
This is correct in the sense that, if you were to build a zero emissions energy system from scratch with today's technology, your conclusion would be that you'd eventually have to do this.
But in much of the world, setting up PV is economically sound simply because it displaces a certain amount of kWh generated over the course of a year from other sources that are more polluting and more expensive.
In this regime, the dynamics of production over time don't matter yet.
At some point, when renewable generation has very high penetration, you'll reach a point where building more is uneconomical, and to then displace the remaining other power sources you'll need to overpay (ignoring externalities).
However, that's assuming no technological change on the way there, which is a whole separate topic.
So massively overprovision them. It’s still cheaper than fossil fuels, especially if you price in all the externalities. Seems like all these hungry datacenters we’re building can soak up any excess capacity anyway.
What does cheap mean? You aren't paying for the same thing - a ccgt plant is super fast and works independent of the weather.
I'm in favour of having it but the reason why you need to over provision is because of the intermittency. This can also push out proper base load (e.g. nuclear) although it's not simple.
You have to think about the portfolio.
In Britain at least there is also a bit of a sleight of hand where the marginal costs are reported but not the CFD strike prices used to incentivise the buildout.
Used to be this was almost entirely explained by hydro. Not a lot of new dams going in, and they take a long time.
The solar component is usually with caveats: the majority of growth. Because growth is slow otherwise. Solar is what part of renewables now? I couldn't easily see that stat in the noise.
A lot of people who are cheering right now are going to be screaming bloody murder in 10-20yr when the "below this population density generation and storage makes more sense than grid" threshold creeps up into the lower end of suburban population densities and some industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.
Energy independence is a two way street. This is essentially a domestic internal soft power lever that is going to go away or be nerf'd.
Why is it bad if some industrial users of electricity buy fields around their factories and set up their own power generation there instead of hooking up to the power grid?
> industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.
Domestic users can just do the same. Some of us already have.
Yes, it’s not alway possible but a huge portion of domestic usage can be covered with a small install. Payback 5-10 years.
First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).
Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
You're absolutely right it applies to suburbia too, not just rural areas and industry in rural areas.
> you can just regulate against it, problem solved
I think that is exactly what you'll lose the ability to do. If Marvin Heemeyer didn't need the town's septic connection we wouldn't know his name.
A huge fraction of regulatory enforcement exists in the gray area of "the government is wrong, or their enforcement of it is wrong but it's cheaper to bend over and take it than to fight it through a courtroom". If farmer Johnson can slap up a building kit on his property and power it with stuff he bought online and doesn't need the power company, Joe Schmo can do the same with an ADU. Yeah, they'll both get dragged through court but $50-100k of court costs to be proven right is a much smaller threat when the project can be done and generating income for the duration of the court case (it also renders the typical tactic of dragging out such cases much less effective).
And at a slightly larger scale, if some business interest can negotiate purely with a municipality to take over some disused factory and bring it back into use and get their power via bunch of panels and not get bogged down with state permitting to get a transmission line and substation the state loses a huge number of levers over the business interest and also they lose levers to control poorer municipalities (who'd happily take the business). Once again, they'll get dragged through court by the state, but spending 5yr and $200k just to be right isn't a dealbreaker when your widget factory has been operating the whole time.
Yes, of course governments can do worse things if they feel like it, but they run into problems of political optics and will more or less instantly.
You already see this kind of thing in some of the highest cost areas. Certain demographics in the greater NYC area often do building and land development things this way. It costs the same at the end, but by doing it without asking you get to use it while the whole process runs.
The electrical utility DTE, in Michigan, required Google to do this for their new datacenter ("Project Cannoli") to avoid increasing consumer energy prices. They are building solar and battery storage to serve the load, as it is the cheapest and fastest new generation that can be built.
I see nothing wrong with power users committing to clean energy and storage to accelerate their development plans, or to allow them at all. I am unsure who is going to complain about this model. Lease or buy as much land as you need to deploy clean energy.
> Google’s data center operations will be served by 2.7 gigawatts (GW) of new resources for the grid, including solar power, advanced storage technologies and demand flexibility. This Clean Capacity Acceleration Agreement with DTE (the same structure as the Clean Transition Tariff) will bring new, clean resources online, while supporting the state’s transition away from coal-fired power. As part of our standard approach to building new data centers, Google will fully cover its electricity costs and infrastructure needs, helping to ensure that its growth protects local ratepayers and actively bolsters the long-term resilience of the state’s electricity grid.
The problem is in power transmission. Transmission fee is a big part of the cost. Anything helping for at home generation should be encouraged.
Right now plug in solar is starting to appear. It is big in Germany. Utah has passed a law to cut the red tapes to allow home owners to install plug in solar themselves. More states should follow.
The rub is that people don't want transmission networks to go away. They just don't want to pay for the maintenance.
In many US municipalities the cost of infrastructure is rolled into the per unit fee meaning high consumers pay more. This works fine until folks adopt solar and their consumption goes negative.
The right answer is a connection fee based on the cost to maintain your hookup to the grid.
Solar capacity is always misleading because it’s intermittent. Capacity of a gas power plant can’t be compared to capacity of a solar power plant, even though it sounds like you are comparing the same thing. Would love to know total kWh generated.
Yep. The key difference is that a gas power plant can be cut off completely at any time. For example if a trigger happy leader decided to cause military mayhem in an unpredictable region supplying a large proportion of the world’s gas.
The sun, however, keeps on shining.
I didn’t mean to compare them, implying that gas or anything else is better. I’m a big fan of renewables, especially solar, but just wanted to bring this aspect up. It’s confusing to me because I get excited when I see these numbers only to later deflate when I figure out the total generated kWh quantity. It would be great if there would be a “synthetic” calculation which takes into account the estimated generation and smoothing out using batteries, which would also take into account the extra cost of batteries. That would be a more apples to apples comparison both in terms of net generation and cost.
I understand why people are downvoting you, but we still have a bit to go before renewables make up 50% of yearly electricity generation.
Not as far as you’d think though. According to [0] in 2024 it was 6.9% solar, 8.1% wind, and 14.3% hydro, I.e. 29% renewables. Given the trajectory I wouldn’t be surprised if that total was ~33% in 2025.
Yes, but thats a bad extrapolation because per-capita electricity consumption was still rising then but is mostly flat/decreasing in western countries since 2000 or so, and the significant rise in reneably fraction mostly started after 2000.
The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
> The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
As a ‘clean green New Zealander’, your comment is perfect.
We trash our country in such appalling ways. The fact they there aren’t many of us and that the easy way of getting power is hydro is coincidence, not a national conscience.
IEA had been predicting 2030 as peak fossil fuel usage up until recently. They revised it back upon Trump's election and shifting policy, but it's possible the Iran War has moved it forward again. Either way, it's within reach.
That being said, peak fossil fuels is the future date at which we are burning more than ever followed by the slow decrease. Meaning we are still accelerating CO2 emissions and even if we emit less, every emission is still cumulative so the march towards actually fixing the climate will only start at peak fossil fuels. We still need to remove all that GHG.
What’s the point of saying one stat is better than another, when all of them are meaningful in a different way? When renewables reach big numbers of TWh, someone will say “total generation is misleading if doesn’t line up with demand; what matters is capacity for power when we actually need it”.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...
In the first three quarters of 2025, solar generation rose by 498 TWh (+31%) and already surpassed the total solar output in all of 2024. Wind generation grew by 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they added 635 TWh, outpacing the rise in global electricity demand of 603 TWh (+2.7%).
Their electricity data explorer is to my knowledge the most complete on the open internet.
Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.
Is it just the need for power when the sun is not shining? Or is it something else?
We are (or were) doing something similar in the US, just using natural gas as the fuel rather than coal.
- They need some backup in case the Sun is dimmed for a few days, while they install enough solar to not need this anymore.
- They need some backup in case they grow too fast and the solar installations don't keep up.
- They need some backup in case there's some natural catastrophe, or some stupid dictator somewhere decides to start a war or something and destroy some vital energy infrastructure.
Their government has explained this a few times, but not on those words. It probably helps that those are government projects, and failing to deliver government projects is a very rude attitude that can end people's careers. But the rationale is sound too.
Whats the average time it takes to build a solar plant versus a coal one? I would assume solar is a lot faster to first production?
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
(global solar PV deployment is just a bit below ~1TW/year at current deployment rates)
Some panel in a solar farm in Canada is not gonna see the conditions that let it produce rated capacity nearly as often as one in Arizona. So the guy in Canada installs more capacity to get the same power. Meanwhile the guy in Arizona doesn't have enough copper leading out of his site to handle the power he could produce at peak on the best days, because he over-provisioned too, in order to be able to produce a given amount earlier/later in the day. The actual generation hardware is so cheap that this is just the sensible way to deploy renewables, but it makes for stupid misleading numbers.
Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
The largest electricity consumers all have good places to put solar farms.
OK, but what if someone looked at the rated capacity of all trucks and noted that in the last 5 years it went up by 24%, 22%, 28%, 54%, and 45%? That would strongly suggest that the amount trucks actually being used is growing rapidly because people aren't going to be buying new trucks unless they have to.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/24-hour-solar-now-ec...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... ("104$/MWh: Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier.")
> Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
Legacy power is ridiculously expensive in comparison. Who will invest in fossil gas generation when ~20% of LNG exports have been taken offline for the next 3-5 years?
https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-... (page 8)
Strikes on Qatar's LNG Ras Laffan plant Will Reshape the Future of Fossil Gas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484246 - March 2026
Fossil fuels are over, it's just how fast we get to "done." Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30-60 minutes to power humanity for a year. Solar PV and battery manufacturing continues to spool up, and year by year, more fossil generation is pushed out.
California is routinely operating at 80% renewables, 90% low carbon generation during daylight hours as they work towards installing battery storage to replace their fossil generation (~52GW target by 2045), for example, while having plans for 10s of GWs of additional solar to come online over the next decade.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/were-harvesting-t...
I looked it up because I was curious, according to Wikipedia average PV capacity factor is 25 % in USA, 10 % in the UK or Germany.
Nuclear has 88 % capacity factor worldwide. Meaning to replace 1 GW of nuclear installed capacity you need 8.8 GW of PV installed capacity in Germany or 3.5 GW of PV installed capacity in US.
Which might still be economically worth it, I don't know. But it is a number that surprised it.
I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land.
Money will eventually win the war. Depressing way to get there but this crisis will accelerate the change.
A healthy power network will have a variety of generations sources available.
France's EDF Warns Solar, Wind Surge Straining Nuclear Fleet Costs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839 - February 2026
EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-fleet-upkeep-wil... - November 17th, 2025
French utility EDF lifts cost estimate for new reactors to 67 billion euros - Les Echos - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l... - March 4th, 2024
Explainer-Why a French plan to take full control of EDF is no cure-all - https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/07/edf-nationalistion - July 7th, 2022
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 15.45% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
That's just wrong.
EDF nuclear fleet is highly profitable with around 92TWh exported in 2025 and more than 5 Billions of benefits for the country and the company.
https://www.sfen.org/rgn/le-nucleaire-en-chiffres-923-twh-de...
The reason EDF had to be nationalized is because the government used the company as a "price shield" to protect consumer against energy price rise on the European market in 2022 with a mechanism named TRV (Tarif Régulé vente). That digged up EDF dept tremendously.
> Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons
Span deprecated their nuclear government because their current Socialist government is aligned with Ecologists that are, like everywhere in Europe, antinuclear.
Additionally, the lack of spinning generator in Spain is currently partially what caused the Blackout in Spain in 2025 due to a lack of inertia in the system.
> EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says
This is over 25 years and will prolong-ate the lifetime of the 56 reactors by 20 more years. These produce 70% of the country need in electricity.
In comparison, the German energiewende cost 400 billions for 37% of electricity of 2025 produced by solar and wind. With production medium that will need to be entirely renewed in 20 years.
> California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE
That is also wrong.
Because LCOE calculation does not take into consideration the price of the grid consolidating necessary for renewable nor the necessity of backup generation in case of dunkleflaute.
The cost of the energy transition in Germany is sometimes cited as €300 billion, €500 billion, or even €1.5 trillion.
These figures are worthless because no reputable source publishes a specific figure along with the scope of the project (some aspects of the investments needed for the electricity grid are independent of the energy source) and at least a timeframe.
These figures are actually projections published by various sources, covering distant deadlines (2050, etc.) and the entire electricity system, including non-renewable energy sources (whose additional costs are often overestimated).
No, it's correct, the total costs of the 2022 bailout was almost 10bn, and that was to get control over a company that had over 50bn in debt.
Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.
Of course, the TRV didn't help, it caused a loss of 18bn in 2022 on top of everything else, but things were bad already.
So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't - it would take 15-20 years to cover the bailout that has already taken place. The 100 billion of investments until 2035 is in addition to that.
And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?
Unfortunately nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea. Which is likely the main reason it's still around.
Bailout of 2022 alone was around 22bn€, which was added on top of it the historical debt.
Revenue of EDF in 2025 is over 100bn€ to put things into perspective.
> Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.
That is also wrong. The immediate maintenance in 2022 was related to "corrosion sous contrainte" which has nothing to do with carelessness. It was mainly the French nuclear regulator (ASN) over-reacting to some non-critical cracks find in some pipes. They have themselves said afterward that the immediate actions were not necessary. The actions were overreactive (from EDF side) and the calendar was very unfortunate.
> So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't -
Indeed. Profits in 2025 were currently over 8bn€, so well over 5bn€.
5bn€ just concern the profit made by the exports.
This is not hard to understand: Making a profit by selling valuable nuclear energy during evening peak consumption while buying cheap intermittent solar during low consumption time is an easy game.
People generally do not understand that Nuclear is a CAPEX game, not an OPEX one.
> And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?
By selling nuclear electricity at 180€/MWh every night when the sun do not shine.
(This is the average price, every evening peak this month)
Meaning-while, the profitability of solar operators will sink to the ground due to the overcapacity causing negative price during the day as soon as the sun shine. Many of them will die if not state subsidized with public money.
> nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea
It is currently the best low-carbon energy around. And will continue to be for the next 2 decades.
The current Co2/kwh emission of France is 27g/kwh.
The comparison with country like Germany (397g/kwh) or state like California (190g/kwh) that spend >100Bn$ on renewable speak for itself.
I can safely bet that in 15y from now, the French grid will still be greener than the German one.
EDF adjusted economic debt at the beginning of 2026: €81.7 billion After decades of massive help (nationalisations building it, monopoly, gift-loans, debt cancellation...
> the profitability of solar operators will sink to the ground due to the overcapacity causing negative price
Wait for storage (V2G...) and hydrogen to kick in.
> France > Germany
France's transition to nuclear power began in 1963 and is now complete.
In other countries (Germany...), transitions to renewables began with the advent of their industrial versions, around 2005. The current context makes these transitions more challenging, and they are still underway.
Therefore, any comparison of their results, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, must be based not on snapshots (which currently favor France since its transition is complete), but on their progress: speed, costs, impacts, etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation-fr...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-based-carbon-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
EDF's accounts show that the government compensated for the effect on its revenues of this price shield ( https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2024-03/20240315... , page 184).
Nope. Electricity exports are officially exported at a loss, since the average price per MWh exported is generally slightly lower than the average French spot price ( https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2025-04/2025-04-09... , page 87). According to the sound approach established by Mr. Boiteux, this price must compensate for production costs as well as investments.
The average market price is decreasing because the renewable energy sector is expanding across the continent, thus supplying more and more electricity at a production cost that is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power.
According to RTE, France will export 92.3 TWh in 2025 (page 75), paid €5.4 billion (page 15), meaning that the average price per MWh will be €58.7. However, this renewable energy sector (considered fully amortized) will produce electricity at a cost of €60.3 according to the CRE (which considers it fully amortized and therefore neglects the bulk of the investment), and at around €78 according to EDF ( https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/epresspack/6300/CP_Con... ), which wants to build EPR2 reactors and therefore needs to have the necessary funds.
In short, France is exporting at €58.70 a year when it needs to sell for at least €78 to finance its future reactors, thus "using up" its current fleet without setting aside enough money to replace it.
Worse still: if the costs of the EPR2 reactors exceed forecasts, as all EPR construction projects (Finland, France, China, and the UK) have done, the deficit will increase even further.
Fixed costs (investments, maintenance, depreciation of the EPR alone, etc.) are by definition paid whether the fleet produces or not. Therefore, exporting at a price higher than the variable costs (paid only if the plant produces) is a lesser evil because the difference covers a portion of the fixed costs: it is less expensive to export at a slight loss than not to produce and lose more (in technical terms: the gross margin helps cover fixed costs).
However, claiming that nuclear power is profitable simply because of electricity exports is misleading, and the ideal solution would be to produce electricity at the lowest possible cost, therefore using renewable energy sources.
Furthermore, a portion of France's electricity is generated from renewables, so attributing exports solely to nuclear power is misleading.
They're so cheap they get over-provisioned on purpose. Can you imagine some guy speci'ng switchgear and transmission lines for a coal or gas plant that can't handle the plant running full tilt? Yeah me either. But that's exactly how it's done for renewables because that's where the sweet spot of cost-benifit is.
A dozen 10mw turbines might be fed through 100mw of transmission hardware. They can never produce their rated 120mw because liquid copper would happen if they did. But they were intentionally provisioned that way so that based on weather patterns and whatnot they'd be able to expect say 80mw a certain number of days per year.
There are untold numbers of renewable installations out there that cannot supply their nameplate capacity to the grid in such a manner.
If gas plants cannot economically compete, they will not be built or fired. And the evidence shows they cannot compete, regardless of their competing capacity factor and dispatchability.
Solar cannibalises solar, so the price when the sun shines may tend to zero, but that does not ensure the price to the consumer of the electricity they need tends to zero, or even lower than it was.
They only have 22GW of coal generation remaining to replace, which should take no longer than 5-10 years. These generators are already at the end of their life, so they have no other choice but to go forward with renewables and storage.
A glimpse into the future, as is Spain, as is California. Some are further on their journey than others. Those at the frontier will teach the rest of us how to solve for the hardest parts.
https://www.pv-tech.org/australia-mandates-three-hour-free-s...
https://openelectricity.org.au/analysis/40-renewable-and-ris...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
A better metric would simply be annual production, where we're in the ~30% range globally (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...). Even that comparison portraits renewables very favorably, because dispatchable power is easier to handle than the same output from intermittent sources.
If you look beyond electricity (heating/total primary energy use) the picture gets even worse.
This is not an argument against renewables, this is against premature cheering and misleading use of numbers.
The thesis is simply this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.
The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:
The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. We are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-export-data/
> As the world’s largest manufacturer of clean technologies, data on China’s cleantech exports provide an important early insight into the pace and scale of the energy transition. In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.
Clean tech printer goes brrr.
"accelerationist" yes, not sure about the other parts.
That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.
Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone.
China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.
AKA the forward march of progress.
The issue is that comparing "capacity" as a percentage is misleading. A baseload generation source can have average generation above 90% of its rated capacity, solar at something like 25%, wind something like 25-40%. Which means that saying "nearly 50%" of capacity can imply something closer to 15% of generation, and potentially even less if the amount of local capacity is high, because then you get periods when renewable generation exceeds demand and the additional generation has nowhere to go, which effectively reduces the capacity factor even more.
And on the other side, natural gas peaker plants can have a capacity factor even lower than solar and wind because their explicit purpose is to only be used when demand exceeds supply from other sources, so that "nearly 50%" in a grid which is entirely renewables and peaker plants could actually imply more than 50% of total generation. This is much less common in existing grids but it makes looking at the nameplate capacity even more worthless because you can't just multiply it by a fixed factor to get the real number.
Whereas if they would just publish the percentage of actual generation, that's what people actually want to know. But then you'd have to say "13%" or "24%" or whatever the real number is, instead of "nearly 50%".
The graph at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-energy-consumpti... seems to indicate the real world outcome is something more like 12.9%. That is, pick a dot on the graph and look at the capacity (watts) versus how much was generated in 2024 (watt-hours), and the number ends up vaguely looking like 1000 watt-hours generated for every watt of capacity. Given that there's 8760 hours in a year, that's vaguely in the 12% range.
The number for "World" is 2,110,000 GWh consumed for 1,866 GW of capacity, which means 2110000÷(1866×8760) = 12.9% of "capacity". Running the numbers for every country (there's a csv!) shows expected cloudy/northerly countries down near 8-9% (UK, germany, norway) and the sunnier ones near 20%... The USA is 19.8% which tracks given how popular solar is in the sunnier regions in particular.
Nobody in their right mind should be surprised by this, since the sun doesn't always shine, it gets dark at night, etc... it's unrealistic to assume this number will ever meaningfully change for solar. It's just the baseline expectation.
So yeah, "capacity" is misleading indeed. It means that for solar, "50% of global capacity" would mean something more like "6% of energy consumed".
But it's still super exciting to see the clear exponential growth here. (Speaking as someone who installed a 14KW array on his roof last year, solar makes me super excited.)
Humanity does far more wasteful things than build some extra solar panels.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/25/solar-and-storage-to-...
But in much of the world, setting up PV is economically sound simply because it displaces a certain amount of kWh generated over the course of a year from other sources that are more polluting and more expensive.
In this regime, the dynamics of production over time don't matter yet.
At some point, when renewable generation has very high penetration, you'll reach a point where building more is uneconomical, and to then displace the remaining other power sources you'll need to overpay (ignoring externalities).
However, that's assuming no technological change on the way there, which is a whole separate topic.
I'm in favour of having it but the reason why you need to over provision is because of the intermittency. This can also push out proper base load (e.g. nuclear) although it's not simple.
You have to think about the portfolio.
In Britain at least there is also a bit of a sleight of hand where the marginal costs are reported but not the CFD strike prices used to incentivise the buildout.
The solar component is usually with caveats: the majority of growth. Because growth is slow otherwise. Solar is what part of renewables now? I couldn't easily see that stat in the noise.
Energy independence is a two way street. This is essentially a domestic internal soft power lever that is going to go away or be nerf'd.
Domestic users can just do the same. Some of us already have.
Yes, it’s not alway possible but a huge portion of domestic usage can be covered with a small install. Payback 5-10 years.
First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).
Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
> you can just regulate against it, problem solved
I think that is exactly what you'll lose the ability to do. If Marvin Heemeyer didn't need the town's septic connection we wouldn't know his name.
A huge fraction of regulatory enforcement exists in the gray area of "the government is wrong, or their enforcement of it is wrong but it's cheaper to bend over and take it than to fight it through a courtroom". If farmer Johnson can slap up a building kit on his property and power it with stuff he bought online and doesn't need the power company, Joe Schmo can do the same with an ADU. Yeah, they'll both get dragged through court but $50-100k of court costs to be proven right is a much smaller threat when the project can be done and generating income for the duration of the court case (it also renders the typical tactic of dragging out such cases much less effective).
And at a slightly larger scale, if some business interest can negotiate purely with a municipality to take over some disused factory and bring it back into use and get their power via bunch of panels and not get bogged down with state permitting to get a transmission line and substation the state loses a huge number of levers over the business interest and also they lose levers to control poorer municipalities (who'd happily take the business). Once again, they'll get dragged through court by the state, but spending 5yr and $200k just to be right isn't a dealbreaker when your widget factory has been operating the whole time.
Yes, of course governments can do worse things if they feel like it, but they run into problems of political optics and will more or less instantly.
You already see this kind of thing in some of the highest cost areas. Certain demographics in the greater NYC area often do building and land development things this way. It costs the same at the end, but by doing it without asking you get to use it while the whole process runs.
I see nothing wrong with power users committing to clean energy and storage to accelerate their development plans, or to allow them at all. I am unsure who is going to complain about this model. Lease or buy as much land as you need to deploy clean energy.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-clo...
Regulatory filing: https://mi-psc.my.site.com/s/case/500cs00001amKTrAAM/in-the-...
> Google’s data center operations will be served by 2.7 gigawatts (GW) of new resources for the grid, including solar power, advanced storage technologies and demand flexibility. This Clean Capacity Acceleration Agreement with DTE (the same structure as the Clean Transition Tariff) will bring new, clean resources online, while supporting the state’s transition away from coal-fired power. As part of our standard approach to building new data centers, Google will fully cover its electricity costs and infrastructure needs, helping to ensure that its growth protects local ratepayers and actively bolsters the long-term resilience of the state’s electricity grid.
Right now plug in solar is starting to appear. It is big in Germany. Utah has passed a law to cut the red tapes to allow home owners to install plug in solar themselves. More states should follow.
In many US municipalities the cost of infrastructure is rolled into the per unit fee meaning high consumers pay more. This works fine until folks adopt solar and their consumption goes negative.
The right answer is a connection fee based on the cost to maintain your hookup to the grid.
And we are already in the process to replace non-electricity energy.
Not as far as you’d think though. According to [0] in 2024 it was 6.9% solar, 8.1% wind, and 14.3% hydro, I.e. 29% renewables. Given the trajectory I wouldn’t be surprised if that total was ~33% in 2025.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
As a ‘clean green New Zealander’, your comment is perfect.
We trash our country in such appalling ways. The fact they there aren’t many of us and that the easy way of getting power is hydro is coincidence, not a national conscience.
That being said, peak fossil fuels is the future date at which we are burning more than ever followed by the slow decrease. Meaning we are still accelerating CO2 emissions and even if we emit less, every emission is still cumulative so the march towards actually fixing the climate will only start at peak fossil fuels. We still need to remove all that GHG.
uh,...yea?
Both on daily cycles and seasonally for anywhere that uses airconditioning. It's a good fit for 2/3rds of the global population.
Some people live nearer the poles and wind lines up better with their heating needs. And of course you can combine them because they anti-correlate.
Still a worthwhile investment in most case.