We installed roof solar (10kW panels + 8kW hybrid inverter + 32kWh battery + planning/execution) last October for 11k euro. After all the math, our "investment" would pay off in approx 8-10 years (at current electricity prices). That's without an electric car, which we plan to buy sometime in the next two years.
All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteries for their equipment, so much so that one 14-hour grid blackout didn't affect us at all and we were able to use the internet since we're working from home (FTTH + ONT, GPON).
Usual disclaimer, sample size of one. We're in Romania.
Getting solar installed on our house, providing well over 100% of our energy needs overall (including car), has left me low-key kind of angry that we, as a society, are letting so much energy just uselessly fall onto structures and the ground when we could be harvesting and using it.
Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we burn fossil fuels to generate more energy to pump the heat outside. It’s absurd.
I agree. The momentum seems to be building up though, at least in (east) Europe, so there is a glimpse of hope.
Fun fact: we still don't have AC in our house (it's a new-ish building, built 4 years ago) because it's decently insulated (and we live near the mountains). As in your case, our solar produces way over 100% of what we need, so I'm considering just getting AC to use the sun to cool the house if needed :)
For most purposes, I would avoid the shunt and use a current transformer (for AC) or a DC current sensor (conceptually the same thing but with a Hall effect sensor or other mechanism that works for DC). This way you don’t need anything to touch the potentially rather large voltages on a solar array.
I have a similar project, I'm so overpaneled I bought an electric heater so I could actually see how many watts I brought in during a nice summer day. The victron UIs have an excellent graph history.
The next step for people like you and things like nations: what do we do with this extra electricity we have laying around so often?
What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace.
Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something similar to crude oil, blocks of metal, pure gasses, etc? Hydrocarbon fuel from air? Flying cars? You name it.
Generating hydrocarbons at home from their air with excess electricity is like the ultimate endgame in my opinion. It’d be so sick and enable a million new possibilities, essentially getting us into a net-zero emissions state without needing to use batteries for everything.
I doubt that it ends up being actually better due to efficiency losses but it’d be really cool!!
Really curious about the difficulty of doing a self install with Solar. I'm moderately handy (built a Sauna from no plans) and confident with electrical. Any gotchas?
I just did an install to add solar and batteries to my shed to power lights and an AC. It was pretty easy. Hardest part was flattening the ground since I did a ground mount system. 5kw panels and 5kwh of batteries. $1000 for the panels, and $1,400 for the battery and inverter. $250 for the ground mount. Plus a bunch of miscellaneous expenses (tools, wires, permits, etc). It would be cheaper if I did it again since batteries and inverters seem to get cheaper every 6 months.
It's fairly easy and there are a lot of forums around with knowledgeable people.
My main issue was ensuring wire gauges were correct. One's intuition about dealing with house wiring @15A changes when you're dealing with 50A circuits. Also you need to pay attention to things like equal cable lengths between battery banks so you don't overcharge one battery in a series.
However, I'm dealing with an off-grid cabin so I don't need to deal with any grid-tie circuitry, which would make it much more difficult and I'd definitely get an electrician for that.
I'm just getting into Solar myself and while it seems like a lot there are some things that you have to do math for. If you've got 10 panels you'll want to find out how to get all that energy to the inverter/mppt without going over the volt/amp limit on the device. This is probably the most difficult part and for everything else there's a huge solar community of people starting exactly where you are. I myself just bought an Anker solar battery and 2 panels that I bring out during the day to charge the battery and it runs my laptop and monitor for the evening after I get home from work. I want to do more but I'm renting so I'm just trying to find ways to do so. When my state legalizes balcony solar you bet I'm going to play with that too.
No, you also need to calculate the voltage drop over your distance to show to minimum wire sizing, and the voltage and power levels at the ASHRAE minimum temperature, the current level at 156.25% over the wiring at the ASHRAE max temperature to compute the temperature adjusted resistance and show that your wiring meets minimum spec, etc.
It’s not too hard to actually do the computations. But there is a ton to learn. I installed my own 14.85 kW system last year, with batteries, and I spent hundreds of hours just researching everything. I know I went overkill, but the hardest part of the project was just getting up to speed on all the requirements to meet code.
Someday I’ll write up my entire experience and share my site plan I used for permitting in the hopes it will help someone else. But doing solar right is a nontrivial investment for a newbie (like me).
Right now we're limited by the charging capacity of the inverter/charger. It can only do 50A in from an external solar controller. In hindsight I should have gone with a 48V inverter/charger to get twice the power going in. On a sunny day we're maxing it out at 1200W for several hours at a time.
Hi, from the other coast. I wish I had solar maybe someday. Do you ever watch Artisan Electric from the UK? He tried to run his shop on 100% solar+battery. He ran into a problem where sunny day batteries full shop using power but the panels themselves were throttling. They had no where to send the extra power. He bought a bitcoin floor heater (lol), charged EVs, and some other stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evkdqTcMbWM
Yeah that's the point. Most systems are over producing on peak hours of peak days so they can average out to enough power on lower light days. You can buy more batteries, but if you don't have batteries it's waste.
I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be dead if hydrofracturing hadn't propped up the cost of gas.
I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost. That's why the monetary payoff time for installing solar is non-zero. Versus a backup generator you're paying 2-3x the cost upfront. And yes we know the running cost is almost 0, the maintenance is almost nothing, etc etc, but I could see that argument not holding as much water as we need it to.
The adoption rate in places like Australia and even Texas is what demonstrates that the argument holds water.
People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.
How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
Are you talking backup generator vs solar for a home?
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
Typically power is priced by Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) where you amortize the total cost of ownership across the total power generated to get a per kwh cost which is what most grid operators care about. After all, large scale investors and governments don't care if a plant costs a billion dollars if it produces 20 billion in electricity.
What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.
Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.
I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.
For those who don't have the time to watch, the biggest point he hammers home: fossil fuels are a single use energy source; renewables keep producing energy.
So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.
Is this the version he reuploaded? I saw it the day he posted it, and I have never seen that man more passionate and awesome. He mentioned later that he toned it down, which is almost a bummer!
Correct - the version I linked is his more aggressive version, but he does give a soft out with 30 minutes remaining. He mentions that he has also uploaded the alternative version for those who want to share it with someone who wouldn't enjoy the ending of this version.
The argument I have generally heard is consistent power output and grid availability 24x7 with solar is harder. So they augment with gas turbines.
IMO augmenting it with nuclear is better.
>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
> I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
I'm not against solar, my primary issue is that in northern Europe there's not much sun at some times. Energy storage and "smart grid" are not there yet, in my view, but maybe should have come first. Hydrogen (electrolysis) sounds a bit wild and impractical to me.
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
They are buying electricity and storing it as heat and time-arbitrage it to when the heat is needed, they make no mention of the electric power source. In any case, during the depth of winter, when it's needed most, they're still burning carbon. Previous paragraph to your quote:
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
That's for 5000 people. And only covers heat. Happy if it can scale and move from prototype to long-term deployment at a reasonable cost, serving heavy industry in manufacturing.
Don't get me wrong, this is cool. We just have some stricter requirements on a country/state/union level that while this might help with parts, I don't see how it can easily scale up and generalize
That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.
Usually there's either sun or wind. Last year 57% of Finland's electricity generation was from renewables, the rest being largely nuclear, and the electricity costs were among lowest in Europe.
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
The main reason I could think of is when you consider the reality of our electric grid and how it remains stable.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
Inertia was an issue, now it's solved with grid-forming batteries that can provide the same inertia a rotating flywheel did. Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.
It doesn't quite make up for it, but balcony solar is a possibility for apartments (with balconies obviously), provided they're permitted in your jurisdiction.
There's a lot of selective concern. They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels. My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds. Cats kill a thousand times more birds but nobody cares about that.
> They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels.
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
> My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up.
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
Technology Connections did the math on this and found that if you ONLY replaced fields used for ethanol production with solar panels, the amount of space would be enough solar panels to power the entire power grid in the US.
I cry more when I think about the amount of farmland being used for bioethanol, something which is barely energy positive. If the US would switch the subsidies and regulations propping that up to propping up solar, it would easily free up a huge amount of land.
The standard alternative to a solar farm is a monoculture corn farm producing ethanol. That monoculture corn farm regularly gets sprayed, plowed and harvested, each time decimating its animal population. Your solar farm is probably filled with a diverse selection of grass and weeds, supporting a far higher animal population than that corn farm.
Sure but compare that to the amount of land used for oil and gas extraction. The difference is that mines and drills can only go where there's stuff to extract and solar panels can go anywhere. Including near residential areas. That's also due to the fact that they are so environmentally neutral.
We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
If people have strong opinions about renewable energy, just don't waste your breath. You can't reason someone out of an opinion they arrived at unreasonably.
Keep hammering the point that they are cheaper. If they are open to more advanced discussion point to the amazing structural changes that batteries are only starting to bring. Tell them something that sounds mildly like science fiction but is in fact happening already and will be HUGE. E.g. the battery you’ll have in your AC/stove/car will save you money or even make you money when part of a smart mesh of DERs.
Let me preface this that I am a huge advocate for renewables, and have been spending borderline unreasonable amounts on turning my home green.
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
Building it out and maintaining it isn't free. And per a friend who's been selling consumer solar installations for years in the North East and gotten disillusioned: the equipment maintenance, repairability, and replacement story isn't great at the company they last worked at and results in a lot of environmental waste. One of the reasons they left. Of course, this is just second-hand information - I don't personally have much intuition for how widespread the issue is.
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
Residential solar doesn't make that much sense from a system point of view - it's a lot more expensive than utility grade solar for the same amount of energy, but with the way the energy market works retail electricity prices are much higher than wholesale prices and that makes the upside of rooftop solar a lot bigger for consumers.
"It's cheaper" is a good route, but a lot of these people have decided they don't care about objective facts in favor of what their favorite media personality says.
It's a challenge, but remember that there is a lot of money in trying to convince people about the status quo. I'd keep in mind the kind of tactics that fossil fuel companies will be using to convince people otherwise:
- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap
- Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly, but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned
- But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables
- cheaper - much less upfront capex, lower operating costs
- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable
- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller
Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."
> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.
If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.
I think there are 2 good and important points that make me re-think things some:
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
Are you saying that they chose bad locations inside of Germany for wind and solar or that Germany doesn't have any viable locations and they shouldn't build wind and solar in Germany at all?
Without that solar / wind, Europe would be paying 100 million euros per day more for LNG. Electricity in Europe is expensive enough already, making it even more expensive by shunning the cheapest available form would be even harder on industry.
Axing the whole nuclear generation was a disaster.How many GW were not even planned, not to mention built in all those years? And don't try to slide out on "nuclear build-out takes too much time". It does not if there is a will.
You can't "sell" the opposite to someone who is expressing a loyalty belief. If their tribe believes in the opposite, then no amount of logic will change their minds - only a change of their or their group's allegiance will change their minds.
"I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind ..."
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Yeah the relatively recent paper that takes LCOE and adds back a bunch of cherry picked system costs is a PITA to refute because it's inherently complicated and actually has some good points.
The problem is every good argument for renewables will always inevitably have someone come up with some kind of counterpoint that on the surface may seem reasonable to those without the time or inclination to deeply research it all.
Energy is complicated.
FWIW I agree with a sibling poster who said to just say "its cheaper".
My understanding is the AI data centers use LNG just because it's the fastest way to spin up a lot of power without using much land/permits. Solar panels would be cheaper but it still requires a lot of land and permits, plus batteries for smoothing.
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
Nah, it definitely comes along for the ride. Maybe watch Folding Idea's (lengthy, sorry, he does that) documentary "In Search Of A Flat Earth".
That documentary is about QAnon (not about the "Flat Earth" per se) but it helps you understand that "But that's nonsense" is the point. I call this "Facts Aren't True" because that's the core of the idea. They don't like facts, the facts are uncomfortable, they can make up a better truth which does make them comfortable.
> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Increasing utility energy prices worked for me. I wasn't anti-solar, but it didn't seem worthwhile for me. When the utility price doubled over three years (or just about), the math makes sense now. I'm not looking for solar to acheive grid independence though, I already have a whole house generator for that, because utility power is two nines reliable around here.
I almost feel like it doesn't matter if Joe-public is on board or not at this stage. For as much as capitalism kinda got us into this mess, at this point the flywheel is going in the other direction and it's a natural market consequence that renewables will win. Lack of priced in externalities created the problem but the same economics will now save us.*
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.
First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.
Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.
And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.
Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.
The argument I've seen against it for prime farm land in the UK is "Well we could use it to farm things" but that maybe lands less well in the US because of the enormous scales involved. "¿Por qué no los dos?" is the obvious retort in a huge region like that.
I've never seen "heavy metals" conspiracies, though I'm sure if I just wait I'll run into some because people sure do like making up reasons good things are bad...
Fox News is funded by fossil. They literally ship a 24x7 feed of why fossil is good and renewables are bad. It is their business model: money for placed content to shape opinions.
So someone watching that has strong opinions about renewables that is hard to overcome.
it depends. some places it makes sense, some places it doesn't.
it will be adopted when the money speaks. the good news is that money is a reasonably close proxy to "environmental benefit" (balancing the environmental costs of green infra production versus dirtiness of gas generation)
I can see this for wind, but not solar. PV turns sunlight into electrical energy. The whole damp rock gets sunlight on the outside, why not build panels anywhere?
For wind yeah, if you live one of those boring flat places which gets tornadoes a wind turbine is definitely a bad idea, it won't make much energy and then a tornado turns it into scrap and possibly destroys nearby things with chunks of debris.
I'm confused. Those boring flat places that get tornadoes have massive wind farms, because that's where wind blows. Tornadoes are not a major economic threat to wind farms. Have you been to the midwest? There's at least 40GW of wind capacity out there, and the wind farms are really something.
Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.
So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.
But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.
Just to add some numbers here, in Sweden the amount of energy you get from solar during the worst months are a single digit percentage, while consumption of energy during the same period doubles from the average. Consumption during the best solar months drops to about half.
Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.
Solar doesn't have to be colocated with consumption. There is a massive amount of available solar in Europe and North Africa, even in the winter, and HVDC (including underwater HVDC lines) makes this available.
I spent a good chunk of my life in the Pacific Northwest. You get very long stretches of cloudy skies through most of the winter that are poor for solar. However, there are alternatives in that region like hydro that may be more suitable choices.
Tornadoes are not actually very common in terms of how often you'd expect a structure to be hit by one. You're looking at hundreds or thousands of years between tornado hits even in the most tornado-prone areas. They're numerous, but small.
So what I'm hearing is very sturdy, christmas tree shaped turbines (long blades at the bottom, getting shorter as you go up), on a very heavy central shaft ending in a spike that gets driven deep into the ground by dropping them from great height with planes (there probably needs to be a thruster stage on top that accelerates them beyond mere free fall) into the path of tornadoes. No clue what to do with the energy, but that seems like a minor detail.
I believe this is one of those having your cake & eating your cake scenarios.
Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.
> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.
> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.
if you require a stable energy source, neither wind nor solar (nor both) provide a complete strategy. they can be a part of a composite strategy, though.
for both wind and solar, they're also quite taxing on the environment during manufacturing. the "true cost" is rarely reported.
In Australia conservatives with solar on their own roof continue to complain about renewables generally. It's just a weird cultural thing for some people.
Why doing so? When there are so many people irrationally against something, there's always some upside in being closer to truth than the crowd. It's arbitrage.
You need to include batteries in the equation: solar, wind, water and batteries.
What California and others have shown is that you can replace natural gas peaker plants (literally - tear out natural gas turbines) with batteries and get both superior cost dynamics and "dispatchability" (aka turning them on and off). Batteries have millisecond level dispatch, peaker plants have hours level dispatch.
PV is getting on the range where it pays for itself in 3 or 4 years. If somebody is just "against it", well, I have to agree with the sibling that said you can't reason with that person.
Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
>> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
I'm guessing about those people. It's very clear that renewable energy is considered to be a liberal ideology by those that oppose renewable energy.
> Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
Both of your points are true but in effect are a contradiction to the original discussion. The moment somebody uses the word woke non-ironically as a reasoning point they are beyond reasoned discussion (at least from my experience). It's beyond vexing because there's no room for real dialog, just talking past each other.
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. [1]
> Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. [2]
Yes, the first one was the original meaning of the word.
The second one is... I don't know how to debate someone who quotes Wikipedia like this. It's not what I said. That article looks incredibly one-sided, and uses fallacies of the "You think snow is white? Did you know Adolph Hitler thought snow was white?" persuasion.
I find no arguments against solar. I can put it everywhere and has no moving parts. Once storing is solved, perfect.
But wind?? Huge nature areas are destroyed by beton fundaments, rotors break, and just in germany was a scandal lately about recycling, as the first structures need to be renewed.
It's not like other forms of power generation don't have similar problems. Solar PV cells lose efficiency and need to be replaced. Nuclear has very long term storage concerns. Coal and natural gas plants have finite expected lifetimes before the whole plant needs to shut down.
This is exciting news but the term power here should really be replaced with electricity which is clarified early on in the article.
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
This is true but also distorting because it's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison. Electricity is not only much more flexible it's also much more efficient when it's an option.
The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.
All true, but also remember that in a zero-fossil world the supply chain for solar/wind also needs to be decarbonized, which involves things like making green steel, which is not such a favorable efficiency story (the way to overcome it is simply to generate massive amounts of electricity cheap enough that you can eat the inefficiency).
I expect that a zero-fossil world does a lot more steel recycling. Today steel is insanely cheap. Not so very long ago steel was this wonder metal, too expensive to mass produce, and today the pennies most people don't want as change when buying things here have steel inside because no other metal would be cheap enough given the value of the coins. They're jacketed because people expect them to look like tarnished copper (they were once bronze coins), but copper is expensive compared to steel now so it's just a jacket around a steel core.
If steel went back to say, twice the price of bronze, I think recycling makes a lot more sense and that means far less need for new steel production.
Steel is cheap for two reasons: unaccounted externalities of the use of coal in the process, and massive scale. Coal-free steel is possible, but we don’t currently do it at scale, so there is work to do.
Recycling will make sense if steel becomes much more expensive, but a future with really expensive steel is not what we should be aiming for.
The externalities for burning coal to make steel aren't acceptable though, we would need the mythical high performance carbon capture solutions and those aren't materialising, everybody who promised more efficient solar did what they promised, bigger wind turbines, as promised, more compact storage, as promised - but the carbon capture is MIA.
We need steel for a million and one things that make modernity possible, but in the context of renewable energy, we particularly need it to build the towers that the largest and most efficient wind turbines sit on.
Important to consider that your stat is likely comparing primary energy, not secondary energy. E.g. an electric car or a heat pump use less primary energy than the fossil equivalent.
Global solar PV deployment is approaching 1TW/year. All energy will be clean energy in the next 1-2 decades. Vehicles will electrify, as will heating. Roughly half of marine traffic disappears if you're not shipping fossil fuels around.
> Investors have piled into climate-friendly assets this year despite policy and regulatory rollbacks in the US and Europe, as artificial intelligence drives a boom in energy infrastructure demand. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, with Asia-Pacific companies and government-linked issuers raising $261 billion from green debt. Green investments are increasingly becoming viewed as core infrastructure and industrial plays, with clearer policy signals and an expected increase in global electricity demand lifting investor optimism. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s as stock market gauges for renewables are set for their first annual gains since 2020, outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin, while shares of power-grid technology companies remain in favor.
> Annual energy transition investment surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in 2024, more than double the rate in 2020, according to research by BloombergNEF examining the deployment of net zero-aligned technologies and infrastructure.
And yet, people in my home state are passionate about coal, as is the current clown-in-chief.
I do not believe that economics will win in 10-20 years if the U.S. government continues its current path, at least not to the "100% clean energy" level.
No new coal plants will be built in the US, it is only how long the existing ones will run for. The longer they run, the more expensive it costs to maintain them, continually tilting the economics against them. As more coal generators go offline, coal demand declines, and as that happens, mines will go offline as the demand drops below thresholds that will support the economics of continued operations. This is a form of "death spiral."
"This too shall pass." Existing coal will retire eventually. Let them be passionate if they wish, as comfort, but the outcome will not change. This administration has an expiration date.
> In response, the Trump administration has recently invoked legislation designed for wartime emergencies to force a number of uneconomic coal plants to remain open.
> Despite Trump’s efforts, clean energy made up 96% of the new electricity generation capacity added to the US grid in 2025. None of the new capacity came from coal power.
no. if you work in the industry you'll know power/electricity are used interchangeably, and energy is treated as the superset. in the physics sense, you're right.
If you don't look at electricity generation, yes. If you look at grid generators, that fraction can get as low as 1/3. (But then, it can get higher than 3/4 on transportation.)
So it really depends on who is counting and how. I do think transportation and heating use more energy than the grid, but I was never able to get a definitive number. (My best guess is it's close to 2 times larger.)
Also, electricity to transportation conversion is usually only around 80% efficient. Making electricity portable has a cost.
On the graph, you can clearly see the seasonal demand for power during the summer months as air conditioning kicks in. The electricity production for gas mimics this as well each year. But the solar output does not seem to have a spike each summer. Why is that? You would think that solar output would be significantly higher when the summer months are here.
It's global data, "here" is not US, and it's solar+wind, not only solar. Summer months have a different definition depending on hemisphere and solar production maximums depend heavily on latitude.
Is it possible to increase the grid by add solar and wind and NOT adding an on-demand backup source (gas, etc.) WITHOUT ADDING RISK?
What I mean is say the grid demands 100. The grid is powered entirely by coal. You give it 120 for 20% redundancy. This is extremely reliable.
The grid demand is now 120. You now need 144 for 20% redundancy. You dont want to use coal. So you add solar and batteries.
Batteries are great because they normalize the volatility of solar generation over time, but they do not make solar truly on demand. So if you add 24 solar to the 120 coal you are increasing the risk on the grid. What often happens is you add 24 solar but you have 24 coal as a backup. Ideally the real-world use will be solar but in case of downtime your grid will not fail.
Just ask California. They've basically conducted the experiment you asked for by adding substantial solar & battery. They haven't had a blackout since 2020 and are the most stable grid in the entire US.
Your existing demand is not flat. Not flat over a single day, nor a single week nor a single year.
So you already have some spare capacity on the system.
If your demand peak was summer air con, then adding the solar makes the system more stable. This can be seen in a few grids that issue less grid warnings in summer now.
In the Indian state of Bihar in the current summer season, the grid met the extra demand purely due to smart grid installed on rooftops. That state used to have shortage of electricity during peak summer until 2yrs ago
Not to mention solar contributed to more than 15 % of Indian summer demand which is crazily high due to 40+ degree temperature during the heat wave
Solar that too decentralised is a massive boon
You add 100x1day worth of battery capacity. Which is fairly economical even today (though not economical enough to actually shut down coal). Wouldn't work everywhere (winter in New England needs more than 1 day of backup) but works in some places.
Trivially yes, for any locations with summer energy use peaks. The solar output will be the greatest when the demand for cooling is at its greatest.
Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.
Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.
Take a look at California. Their grid is routinely, daily, generating ~84% of its power from renewables [1] (with ~25GW of existing solar PV capacity, ~6GW of wind, and ~6GW of hydro). They are adding batteries rapidly [2] (with a goal of 52GW by 2045; they are 33% of the way there). They still have ~32GW of fossil gas generation capacity, but it is rarely used constantly at full capacity. They have plans for another ~21GW of solar PV on land that can no longer be farmed due to water shortages [3] [4] (enabling families to keep their land with long term lease payments).
Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5]. You simply keep building more solar collection, storage, transmission, etc. to orchestrate collecting this "fusion at a distance" and distributing it to loads. The sun rises every day, and will for our lifetimes. We continue to deploy batteries and solar at manufacturing capacity, while continuing to increase manufacturing capacity year over year. You fill any gaps with fossil generation until there are no longer any gaps to fill [6].
Tangentially, Australia is currently testing a battery with a 8 hour discharge capability [7] ("Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES)"), as they are rapidly preparing for a network/team of battery storage facilities to assume grid health responsibility from their retiring thermal coal generators [8]. Certainly there is much work ahead in understanding and developing longer duration energy storage systems.
> Take a look at California. Their grid is routinely, daily, generating ~84% of its power from renewables [1] (with ~25GW of existing solar PV capacity, ~6GW of wind, and ~6GW of hydro).
> ... Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5].
... Then why is electricity so expensive there compared to the US average?
It's not. California has the cheapest wholesale electricity prices in the country. It's the only place in the country with a wholesale rate below $100 / MWh, and California is way below $100.
Transmission and distribution costs: i.e. the grid.
California is a massive state, has very rugged terrain, and there's a ton of deferred maintenance on transmission lines that are more than 50 years old, that are at huge risk of causing massive wildfires that destroy entire towns.
This has been terribly mismanaged, because like most places with regulated monopoly utilities, the regulatory body is opaque and not very responsive to the needs of the public.
The utility doesn't make money on electricity generation costs, but it does get to take a fixed rate of profit from grid infrastructure costs. So the obvious game for a for-profit regulated monopoly utility is to jack up the grid costs as high as possible, try to snow the regulators to possible cheaper alternatives, and rake in more money.
I remember one case where PG&E got approval to charge for grid maintenance, spent hundreds of millions, had ~$100M leftover, then declared "oh we did it cheaper than we expected, executive bonuses all around the C-suite with the extra!" And then we had multi-billion dollar wildfires the following year.
Utilities are not normal businesses, they make more money by increasing their input costs. (See also the US healthcare system where incentives are similarly perverse... Insurance company profits are capped at a fixe percentage of health care expenditures, so the route to more profit is to increase health care expenditures.)
Of my decades in California, there's been a single gubernatorial candidate with deep knowledge of the grid and how to fix the regulatory structure, and it's the governor who actually appoints people to the regulatory board of the utilities, so the governor and their appointees have the power to fix this. That gubernatorial candidate was Tom Steyer, and he had/has fantastic plans, but I fear he just lost the primary:
politics. Supply is cheap, but California has a corrupt relationship with the monopoly provider, and lets them get away with bundling all kinds of costs into the distribution charge. fire rebuilding, social projects, decades of infrastructure neglect from previous corruption.
Go and compare the rates from a non-pg&e distributor (eg SMUD in sac) and you'll see, supply is cheap enough and it doesnt have to be this way.
A distribution grid for 40 million people in a high fire risk geography [1]. Renewables drive down supply costs, but not distribution costs (unless you can go off grid, etc). They could also improve costs by nationalizing PG&E (I argue, cutting out shareholder returns and excessive management comp), but that is an argument for another thread [2].
It's a good news but I didn't expect that coal is still on the 1st place and not really trending down. I though coal was largely replaced by gas years ago...
Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.
You need a lot of batteries to store the energy needed overnight and you have to plan for (lots of) days without sun. At my latitude (45N) the difference in solar production between summer and winter is 5x. Even with batteries, you still need a backup for a week of bad weather; so you have to choose between increasing the solar production 20x to have enough power generated in cloudy days or have a backup coal/gas/something else plant.
I don't get why people feel the need to just start lying when talking about renewables. It's probably a large reason why people are always skeptical of 'rewnewables are cheaper than x' claims.
In 2025, renewables generated more energy globally than coal (neck and neck tie, but renewables just edged out coal). This trend is likely to continue.
Is it cheaper per MW of generated power? I thought that the main reason use of gas has increased so much (for power generation) over the past 20-30 years is that gas became cheaper.
More good news from Ember, according to their Global Electricity
Review 2026 [1]:
Solar power increased by a record 636 TWh to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.
Wind saw the second-largest increase, growing 205 TWh (+8.2%)
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
For comparison, I have collated information from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System. The fastest that nuclear power generation ever grew was 213 TWh added in 1985. Since the year 2000, the fastest growth year was 2004, with 111 TWh added.
Solar and progress on better batteries is a more consequential and useful technological revolution than AI. Should be a huge story, but there's not enough money to be made via speculation so it's not.
> there's not enough money to be made via speculation
I mean, there is money to be made. CATL stock (the major producer of EV batteries with 50% market share, with billions of contracts for stationary batteries) rose 48.81% over the last 6 months, for example.
But I agree that news about renewables goes unnoticed. I only see news about renewables because I actively seek out channels and websites that cover it. I wonder if it is because most companies in the industry are Chinese and don't focus on PR in the West as AI companies do.
AI is enough of an issue. As fast as we are adding renewable capacity, demand is also growing extremely fast. We're chasing a rapidly moving target. And we're stuck in an adverse political climate for the time being as well.
Nailed it. Solar, wind, and batteries are going to be the predominant form of generation in a decade, but there is no speculative benefit, so it’ll happen silently.
To be fair (and, somewhat ironically, rationally detached libertarian) that's the way it's supposed to be. We don't develop and deploy technology to make a bunch of too-online nerds rich. We develop and deploy technology to make everyone's lives better by providing goods at lower expense and lower externalized cost.
The percentage increases here don't really tell the full picture. Look at it in terms of pure TWh [1]. China just dwarfs any other country in terms of wind and solar deployment. I guess that's the difference between putting engineers in charge instead of those who believe in the magical powers of red heifers [2].
One of the short-term issues in the US is going to be that a lot of utilities depend on natural gas and natural gas prices are going to keep rising beyond whatever happens in the Persian Gulf because of increased LNG exports (that directly raises domestic prices) and the increased use of gas turbines for AI data centers. Plus all the consumers are going to pay for the infrastructure buildout for electricity for those data centers.
So, despite a large Y/Y solar increase in the US, electricity prices are only going up.
I feel the energy conversation is dominated by people that don't realize how far Solar tech has come recently arguing with other people that don't realize short nuclear half lives have gotten recently.
*electricity . Gas is heavily used for heating , cooking & industrial uses (e.g. drying agriculture like hops, boilers etc).
I raise this point since policymakers get confused and try to ban gas, only to realize how critical gas is for food & industrial applications that consumers enjoy after the fact.
You're correct that this ought to say "electricity" and not "power".
But I think you're wrong to think that gas is "critical" to any of the things you've listed. "Currently used" ... yes. "Not replaceable by electricity" ... no (unlike, e.g. air travel).
Electrical heat using heat pumps is cheaper than in-situ heating with any fossil fuel because (a) the base price per unit of energy is (or certainly can be) lower (b) the coefficient of performance is higher.
There are obviously costs to changing heating systems. But that doesn't mean that a gas heating system cannot be replaced by an electrical one.
Most of it can be electrified. NYC has banned gas hookups in new residential buildings (I live in one and it's great). Industrial electrification will never be 100% but I've seen estimates as high as 90%. It will take time and money but it will happen.
If you're considering the total cost then you have to factor in the entire reason to electrify which is the environmental cost of continuing to burn dead organic matter. In that case, electrification is absolute bargain.
China having managed to position itself as the main driver of the green transition by investing into key industries illustrates the power of state planning. The markets simply can't operate on horizons of decades because there is no immediate profit to be had. You need long term planning and sustained investment that only a state is able to provide.
Even so, the article says it grew 8% YOY in the US. The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend so that even politicians won't be able to reverse it.
It’s already irreversible, but it’s just disappointing to see how the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it, while other countries like China are embracing reality.
It’s actually funny if you don’t think about it too hard. The U.S. president is trying to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, while starting a war in Iran that’s led to the global fossil fuel market to be negatively impacted, forcing most Americans to pay more for fossil fuels. Who could have seen that coming? We’re doing great!
> the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it
the biggest producer of renewables is Texas, by a longshot. and the state of california just created insane NEM laws that favor the pockets of pg&e (and are shit for the environment) and as a result solar home installations have cratered.
From the CalISO graphs, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of solar power for most of the day. It doesn't seem reasonable to incentivise production in the same way as it was when that wasn't the case.
I think NEM 3.0 incentivises storage now? Which seems to be what the (California) grid is looking for.
Both NEM 2.0 and 3.0 have serious issues, but for different reasons. NEM 2.0 was basically a early adopter's rich person's subsidy that heavily distorted the market, and NEM 3.0 does not have nearly enough subsidies to justify the cost unless you pay cash up front for a large system. (For the record, I am on NEM 3.0 and got such a system).
At the end of the day, the best case scenario is large scale renewable / battery storage to bring costs down as much as possible, and for those of us who want battery backup / solar can choose to invest in it, but it shouldn't be "the" solution.
Good China numbers, but I’d still keep two things in mind.
China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.
The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.
For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.
Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.
And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA
EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.
All of that combined is peanuts compared to what's happening in China. Not to mention that all the panels and most of the wind turbines are produced in China. It's not just a question of installing them, it's having the industry and technical know how to make them that really matters.
Does the USA really get it? I'd like to believe that, but honestly, I hear a lot of hatin' on anything related to renewable or 'green' energy, not just from Trump.
My earlier comment was too ambiguous. Those that spend money on generating capacity in the US get it.
> As of April 1, 2026, renewable energy’s share of total US utility-scale (>1 MW) generating capacity was 33.6%. EIA projects this to grow to 36.6% by March 31, 2027. Utility-scale solar will add 42,626.1 MW, expanding its share from 12.8% to 15.7%, while wind will grow by 14,157.4 MW (including 4,155.0 MW of offshore wind), increasing from 13.0% to 13.6%. The mix of other renewables (hydropower, biomass, and geothermal) will add 297.1 MW.
> The capacity of battery storage was 42 GW at the end of 2025 and is expected to double and reach 85 GW by the end of 2027.
In terms of the general population or politicians, some more than others. This is also with an administration that is irrationally hostile to renewables.
Smelters in Australia are leaning on the fossil-friendly politicians to stop getting in the way of renewables because they can't compete with global prices unless they use renewables.
Unlike in the USA --- they obviously look beyond the rhetoric to grasp the fact that renewables help lower energy costs even if their industry doesn't fully depend on them.
The world screwed itself by not investing in renewables earlier. Germany paid a high price for being early, but we all should be thankful for Germany creating an economy of scale and bringing cost down.
And while the extreme right wing propaganda claims that Germany is doomed because of the Energiewende for the last 20 years or so, it is somehow still the third largest economy.
Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.
Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.
Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.
It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!
All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteries for their equipment, so much so that one 14-hour grid blackout didn't affect us at all and we were able to use the internet since we're working from home (FTTH + ONT, GPON).
Usual disclaimer, sample size of one. We're in Romania.
Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we burn fossil fuels to generate more energy to pump the heat outside. It’s absurd.
Fun fact: we still don't have AC in our house (it's a new-ish building, built 4 years ago) because it's decently insulated (and we live near the mountains). As in your case, our solar produces way over 100% of what we need, so I'm considering just getting AC to use the sun to cool the house if needed :)
Everyone is getting tired of me checking the panel to see how many watts we're bringing in.
Next project, install a shunt and get a Raspberry Pi talking to it over USB. And then I'll be able to build a Grafana dashboard. :)
What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace.
Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something similar to crude oil, blocks of metal, pure gasses, etc? Hydrocarbon fuel from air? Flying cars? You name it.
To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
I doubt that it ends up being actually better due to efficiency losses but it’d be really cool!!
Check out https://m.youtube.com/c/WillProwse and https://diysolarforum.com/
My main issue was ensuring wire gauges were correct. One's intuition about dealing with house wiring @15A changes when you're dealing with 50A circuits. Also you need to pay attention to things like equal cable lengths between battery banks so you don't overcharge one battery in a series.
However, I'm dealing with an off-grid cabin so I don't need to deal with any grid-tie circuitry, which would make it much more difficult and I'd definitely get an electrician for that.
It’s not clear what device you’re referring to in this context.
MidNite has a sizing tool for this: https://www.midnitesolar.com/sizingTool/
It’s not too hard to actually do the computations. But there is a ton to learn. I installed my own 14.85 kW system last year, with batteries, and I spent hundreds of hours just researching everything. I know I went overkill, but the hardest part of the project was just getting up to speed on all the requirements to meet code.
Someday I’ll write up my entire experience and share my site plan I used for permitting in the hopes it will help someone else. But doing solar right is a nontrivial investment for a newbie (like me).
Right now we're limited by the charging capacity of the inverter/charger. It can only do 50A in from an external solar controller. In hindsight I should have gone with a 48V inverter/charger to get twice the power going in. On a sunny day we're maxing it out at 1200W for several hours at a time.
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
It's kinda an apples/oranges comparison
Why do you say this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.
Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.
Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.
What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.
The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.
EG: > Solar photovoltaic $1,327 $1,333–2,743 $31–146 12–30% > Solar PV with storage $1,748 $2,044 $53–81 20–31%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.
So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.
It's not just gone. It becomes a debt that everyone has to pay.
https://youtu.be/Zgxb8I1nk2I
Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.
They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/finland/energy-mix
And it's quite compact.
> And only covers heat.
Is that not useful?
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
Some people just want the world to burn…
a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
Maybe I’m too optimistic :)
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
And not buying something tends to be cheaper than buying :)
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap
- Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly, but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned
- But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables
1. Take statistics from any of these excellent solar power plants for, say, five years time span
2. Find the worst week in terms of energy production in these statistics
3. Explain to the renewable energy skeptic how this 20+ times drop in productivity will be compensated for users
4. The skeptic is successfully convinced and becomes a renewable energy proponent
- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable
- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller
Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."
Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.
If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
So can sun, but that's why we build both where that's unusual. We've got plenty of stats and data gathering on where it's reliably sunny/windy enough.
can you be more specific and give 10 examples of german solar plants that produce ~0W electricity in a year?
they might be a lot more productive than you think
They paid for that by selling most of their industry to China because energy costs became unbearable.
Was this the right tradeoff?
But we live in an imperfect world.
I'm curious how true this is anymore. It sure feels like as the globe heats up we're getting windier and windier.
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Just be patient.
The problem is every good argument for renewables will always inevitably have someone come up with some kind of counterpoint that on the surface may seem reasonable to those without the time or inclination to deeply research it all.
Energy is complicated.
FWIW I agree with a sibling poster who said to just say "its cheaper".
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
let me guess... they sell oil?
That documentary is about QAnon (not about the "Flat Earth" per se) but it helps you understand that "But that's nonsense" is the point. I call this "Facts Aren't True" because that's the core of the idea. They don't like facts, the facts are uncomfortable, they can make up a better truth which does make them comfortable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Its all electrons how did we get here jesus.
Increasing utility energy prices worked for me. I wasn't anti-solar, but it didn't seem worthwhile for me. When the utility price doubled over three years (or just about), the math makes sense now. I'm not looking for solar to acheive grid independence though, I already have a whole house generator for that, because utility power is two nines reliable around here.
Maybe not even then. Some still refuse to believe the Earth is round. They can die before they admit they were wrong.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity
https://www.volts.wtf/p/giving-clean-electricity-a-political
Yes, down with Big Sun
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.
Pretty easy sell for me.
Sounds like they have more serious issues going on there... :-)
First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.
Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.
And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.
Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.
They mainly argue against it on residential & farm land (Midwest USA) for this reason.
I've never seen "heavy metals" conspiracies, though I'm sure if I just wait I'll run into some because people sure do like making up reasons good things are bad...
So someone watching that has strong opinions about renewables that is hard to overcome.
it will be adopted when the money speaks. the good news is that money is a reasonably close proxy to "environmental benefit" (balancing the environmental costs of green infra production versus dirtiness of gas generation)
I can see this for wind, but not solar. PV turns sunlight into electrical energy. The whole damp rock gets sunlight on the outside, why not build panels anywhere?
For wind yeah, if you live one of those boring flat places which gets tornadoes a wind turbine is definitely a bad idea, it won't make much energy and then a tornado turns it into scrap and possibly destroys nearby things with chunks of debris.
Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.
So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.
But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.
Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.
Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/tarrant-county/the-t...
> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.
> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.
Compared to what? Are these people in the oil industry, by any chance?
for both wind and solar, they're also quite taxing on the environment during manufacturing. the "true cost" is rarely reported.
nuclear energy has a different set of problems (including social / political ones). here's that industry's take on the economics of wind energy: https://www.ans.org/news/article-638/the-economics-of-wind-p...
Wind power had dropped in price about 70% since then. Notably going from being more expensive than fossil fuels to substantially cheaper.
Do people people really hate sun and clouds and stuff?
Or are they against the physical capture of geographical processes? ...
I've heard "muh birds" a few times. Ironically, it seems only those who eat chicken who seem to be worried about it :/
What California and others have shown is that you can replace natural gas peaker plants (literally - tear out natural gas turbines) with batteries and get both superior cost dynamics and "dispatchability" (aka turning them on and off). Batteries have millisecond level dispatch, peaker plants have hours level dispatch.
PV is getting on the range where it pays for itself in 3 or 4 years. If somebody is just "against it", well, I have to agree with the sibling that said you can't reason with that person.
A question might be "why is it woke?"
And if it's because libtards like it, then you can point out that libtards like coffee, beer, sports, etc -- so when will they boycott those?
Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
I'm guessing about those people. It's very clear that renewable energy is considered to be a liberal ideology by those that oppose renewable energy.
> Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
Both of your points are true but in effect are a contradiction to the original discussion. The moment somebody uses the word woke non-ironically as a reasoning point they are beyond reasoned discussion (at least from my experience). It's beyond vexing because there's no room for real dialog, just talking past each other.
This isn't those things at all.
More so, could you hazard a guess why those friends would be categorically against renewables?
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. [1]
> Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. [2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
The second one is... I don't know how to debate someone who quotes Wikipedia like this. It's not what I said. That article looks incredibly one-sided, and uses fallacies of the "You think snow is white? Did you know Adolph Hitler thought snow was white?" persuasion.
But wind?? Huge nature areas are destroyed by beton fundaments, rotors break, and just in germany was a scandal lately about recycling, as the first structures need to be renewed.
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.
If steel went back to say, twice the price of bronze, I think recycling makes a lot more sense and that means far less need for new steel production.
Recycling will make sense if steel becomes much more expensive, but a future with really expensive steel is not what we should be aiming for.
Residential heating in particular would use anywhere between a third to half the energy, if we only transitioned to heat pumps.
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
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-export-data/
You're disregarding the culture wars for which science, and even economics, seem to offer no respite.
Green Debt Sales Hit Record Levels Despite Climate Backlash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-25/green-deb... | https://archive.today/BrLlK - December 25th, 2025
> Investors have piled into climate-friendly assets this year despite policy and regulatory rollbacks in the US and Europe, as artificial intelligence drives a boom in energy infrastructure demand. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, with Asia-Pacific companies and government-linked issuers raising $261 billion from green debt. Green investments are increasingly becoming viewed as core infrastructure and industrial plays, with clearer policy signals and an expected increase in global electricity demand lifting investor optimism. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s as stock market gauges for renewables are set for their first annual gains since 2020, outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin, while shares of power-grid technology companies remain in favor.
There’s a $10 Trillion Antidote to Trump’s Climate Backlash - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-climate-tech-investm... | https://archive.today/m0xg1 - November 4th, 2025
> Annual energy transition investment surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in 2024, more than double the rate in 2020, according to research by BloombergNEF examining the deployment of net zero-aligned technologies and infrastructure.
I do not believe that economics will win in 10-20 years if the U.S. government continues its current path, at least not to the "100% clean energy" level.
"This too shall pass." Existing coal will retire eventually. Let them be passionate if they wish, as comfort, but the outcome will not change. This administration has an expiration date.
https://www.sierraclub.org/coal/coal-plant-map
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67427
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/591b44aa8dd144719e059...
https://www.wsaz.com/2026/02/13/7-mines-idle-resulting-loss-...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-trump-has-overseen-more...
> In response, the Trump administration has recently invoked legislation designed for wartime emergencies to force a number of uneconomic coal plants to remain open.
> Despite Trump’s efforts, clean energy made up 96% of the new electricity generation capacity added to the US grid in 2025. None of the new capacity came from coal power.
So it really depends on who is counting and how. I do think transportation and heating use more energy than the grid, but I was never able to get a definitive number. (My best guess is it's close to 2 times larger.)
Also, electricity to transportation conversion is usually only around 80% efficient. Making electricity portable has a cost.
What I mean is say the grid demands 100. The grid is powered entirely by coal. You give it 120 for 20% redundancy. This is extremely reliable.
The grid demand is now 120. You now need 144 for 20% redundancy. You dont want to use coal. So you add solar and batteries.
Batteries are great because they normalize the volatility of solar generation over time, but they do not make solar truly on demand. So if you add 24 solar to the 120 coal you are increasing the risk on the grid. What often happens is you add 24 solar but you have 24 coal as a backup. Ideally the real-world use will be solar but in case of downtime your grid will not fail.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
So you already have some spare capacity on the system.
If your demand peak was summer air con, then adding the solar makes the system more stable. This can be seen in a few grids that issue less grid warnings in summer now.
Not to mention solar contributed to more than 15 % of Indian summer demand which is crazily high due to 40+ degree temperature during the heat wave Solar that too decentralised is a massive boon
Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.
Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.
Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5]. You simply keep building more solar collection, storage, transmission, etc. to orchestrate collecting this "fusion at a distance" and distributing it to loads. The sun rises every day, and will for our lifetimes. We continue to deploy batteries and solar at manufacturing capacity, while continuing to increase manufacturing capacity year over year. You fill any gaps with fossil generation until there are no longer any gaps to fill [6].
Tangentially, Australia is currently testing a battery with a 8 hour discharge capability [7] ("Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES)"), as they are rapidly preparing for a network/team of battery storage facilities to assume grid health responsibility from their retiring thermal coal generators [8]. Certainly there is much work ahead in understanding and developing longer duration energy storage systems.
[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi...
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
[3] 21GW of Solar for California Land That Can No Longer Be Used for Agriculture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488648 - January 2026
[4] https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/
[5] Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
[6] Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615756 - April 2026 (149 comments)
[7] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/australias-first...
[8] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineerin...
(think in systems)
> ... Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5].
... Then why is electricity so expensive there compared to the US average?
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
Retail prices are of course super high in California, but that has nothing to do with generation.
California is a massive state, has very rugged terrain, and there's a ton of deferred maintenance on transmission lines that are more than 50 years old, that are at huge risk of causing massive wildfires that destroy entire towns.
This has been terribly mismanaged, because like most places with regulated monopoly utilities, the regulatory body is opaque and not very responsive to the needs of the public.
The utility doesn't make money on electricity generation costs, but it does get to take a fixed rate of profit from grid infrastructure costs. So the obvious game for a for-profit regulated monopoly utility is to jack up the grid costs as high as possible, try to snow the regulators to possible cheaper alternatives, and rake in more money.
I remember one case where PG&E got approval to charge for grid maintenance, spent hundreds of millions, had ~$100M leftover, then declared "oh we did it cheaper than we expected, executive bonuses all around the C-suite with the extra!" And then we had multi-billion dollar wildfires the following year.
Utilities are not normal businesses, they make more money by increasing their input costs. (See also the US healthcare system where incentives are similarly perverse... Insurance company profits are capped at a fixe percentage of health care expenditures, so the route to more profit is to increase health care expenditures.)
Of my decades in California, there's been a single gubernatorial candidate with deep knowledge of the grid and how to fix the regulatory structure, and it's the governor who actually appoints people to the regulatory board of the utilities, so the governor and their appointees have the power to fix this. That gubernatorial candidate was Tom Steyer, and he had/has fantastic plans, but I fear he just lost the primary:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/tom-steyer-wants-to-be-californias
Go and compare the rates from a non-pg&e distributor (eg SMUD in sac) and you'll see, supply is cheap enough and it doesnt have to be this way.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] "Where’s all the f&$#ing money going?" The Waste and Costs of American Utilities - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/wheres-all-the-f-and-ing-... - May 22nd, 2026
Why wouldn't "existing solar is cheaper than existing coal, and existing coal is not required to meet demand" result in coal plants shutting down?
I don't get why people feel the need to just start lying when talking about renewables. It's probably a large reason why people are always skeptical of 'rewnewables are cheaper than x' claims.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
Solar power increased by a record 636 TWh to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.
Wind saw the second-largest increase, growing 205 TWh (+8.2%)
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
For comparison, I have collated information from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System. The fastest that nuclear power generation ever grew was 213 TWh added in 1985. Since the year 2000, the fastest growth year was 2004, with 111 TWh added.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
I mean, there is money to be made. CATL stock (the major producer of EV batteries with 50% market share, with billions of contracts for stationary batteries) rose 48.81% over the last 6 months, for example.
But I agree that news about renewables goes unnoticed. I only see news about renewables because I actively seek out channels and websites that cover it. I wonder if it is because most companies in the industry are Chinese and don't focus on PR in the West as AI companies do.
Ah well, we'll get there eventually.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-generation
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
https://electrek.co/2026/02/23/texas-is-about-to-overtake-ca...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/battery-storage-is-...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-installa...
One of the short-term issues in the US is going to be that a lot of utilities depend on natural gas and natural gas prices are going to keep rising beyond whatever happens in the Persian Gulf because of increased LNG exports (that directly raises domestic prices) and the increased use of gas turbines for AI data centers. Plus all the consumers are going to pay for the infrastructure buildout for electricity for those data centers.
So, despite a large Y/Y solar increase in the US, electricity prices are only going up.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/36117/electricity-generated-b...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393661
Incredible gobsmacking amount of stored energy on display here. Great to see. https://bsky.app/profile/neilgrant.bsky.social/post/3mneo3to...
I raise this point since policymakers get confused and try to ban gas, only to realize how critical gas is for food & industrial applications that consumers enjoy after the fact.
But I think you're wrong to think that gas is "critical" to any of the things you've listed. "Currently used" ... yes. "Not replaceable by electricity" ... no (unlike, e.g. air travel).
Electrical heat using heat pumps is cheaper than in-situ heating with any fossil fuel because (a) the base price per unit of energy is (or certainly can be) lower (b) the coefficient of performance is higher.
There are obviously costs to changing heating systems. But that doesn't mean that a gas heating system cannot be replaced by an electrical one.
China gets it, the USA doesn't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas...
or delaying standard approvals
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/climate/wind-solar-projec...
It’s actually funny if you don’t think about it too hard. The U.S. president is trying to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, while starting a war in Iran that’s led to the global fossil fuel market to be negatively impacted, forcing most Americans to pay more for fossil fuels. Who could have seen that coming? We’re doing great!
the biggest producer of renewables is Texas, by a longshot. and the state of california just created insane NEM laws that favor the pockets of pg&e (and are shit for the environment) and as a result solar home installations have cratered.
That doesn't refute the point at all.
Yes. But administration opposition can change that math, as they have with the tariffs.
I think NEM 3.0 incentivises storage now? Which seems to be what the (California) grid is looking for.
At the end of the day, the best case scenario is large scale renewable / battery storage to bring costs down as much as possible, and for those of us who want battery backup / solar can choose to invest in it, but it shouldn't be "the" solution.
Versus 35% YOY in China.
China gets it, the USA doesn't.
The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend
The trend is the USA choosing politics over reality as China becomes unstoppable.
https://carboncredits.com/china-adds-power-7x-more-than-the-...
China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.
The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.
For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.
Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.
And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.
Compare generation stats for yesterday between 2021 and 2026 on the Texas grid (ERCOT)
* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2021-06-03
* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2026-06-03
Also, the Californian grid (CAISO) shows where everyone is headed with a huge deployment of batteries:
* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2021-06-03
* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2026-06-03
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
> As of April 1, 2026, renewable energy’s share of total US utility-scale (>1 MW) generating capacity was 33.6%. EIA projects this to grow to 36.6% by March 31, 2027. Utility-scale solar will add 42,626.1 MW, expanding its share from 12.8% to 15.7%, while wind will grow by 14,157.4 MW (including 4,155.0 MW of offshore wind), increasing from 13.0% to 13.6%. The mix of other renewables (hydropower, biomass, and geothermal) will add 297.1 MW.
> The capacity of battery storage was 42 GW at the end of 2025 and is expected to double and reach 85 GW by the end of 2027.
In terms of the general population or politicians, some more than others. This is also with an administration that is irrationally hostile to renewables.
1. https://electrek.co/2026/05/26/renewables-installed-capacity...
And while the extreme right wing propaganda claims that Germany is doomed because of the Energiewende for the last 20 years or so, it is somehow still the third largest economy.
US manufacturers and consumers just love the added cost --- aka, inflation.
https://www.steel.org/2026/03/steel-imports-up-4-6-in-januar...
I want to feed the balcony solar o/p back to the grid and not have a off grid system
Meanwhile I bought a 25W solar panel and a controller and am going to make a solar charger to charge my powerbanks
the spite is the point
(do we survive past 2029? are you sure? I'm not)
https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/trump-to-invoke-...
Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.
Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.
It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!
Folks operating businesses that depend on oil prices would know these tricks?
when energy is scarce, you drop the rock on your head