It takes time for statistical agencies to compile reports. I haven't yet found reports covering the growth in renewable generation (actual terawatt hours) for all of 2025. But this covers 3 quarters of the year:
In the first three quarters of 2025, solar generation rose by 498 TWh (+31%) and already surpassed the total solar output in all of 2024. Wind generation grew by 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they added 635 TWh, outpacing the rise in global electricity demand of 603 TWh (+2.7%).
I'm too lazy to double check the numbers, but as far as I remember, Germany in order to increase it's average generation by 10% had to expand capacity by 70% in solar plus wind. With stats like this, there's a thin line between progress and waste. And all this while we have nuclear.
(How the world really works, Vaclav smil if anybody is less lazy than me)
We can also time shift many of the things we do. Does your fridge need to run between 3-5pm in the heat of summer? or can it make sure its a little cooler to avoid running then? (trivial example, probably not a good one)
Makes sense - solar especially. It's just more financially smart to buy something that will generate electricity for 20-30 years with little to no maintenance than a plant that requires constant fuel, and is fairly complex mechanically with fluids and heat exchangers and turbines and so on. Panel efficiency keeps going up and prices keep going down, it's a snowball at this point.
That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.
Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.
> The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring
A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone.
China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.
Wait this is actually amazing, I had no idea it was that high. I can’t even believe what the US admin is doing, this is clearly the winning technology.
Installed capacity is a misleading number. If you assessed the trucking industry by simply sum-ing the rated capacity of all the hardware you'd be rightfully laughed and and called a liar on the basis of all the times the trucks are empty and all the trucks that run out of volume before weight. Renewables is a similar situation.
Some panel in a solar farm in Canada is not gonna see the conditions that let it produce rated capacity nearly as often as one in Arizona. So the guy in Canada installs more capacity to get the same power. Meanwhile the guy in Arizona doesn't have enough copper leading out of his site to handle the power he could produce at peak on the best days, because he over-provisioned too, in order to be able to produce a given amount earlier/later in the day. The actual generation hardware is so cheap that this is just the sensible way to deploy renewables, but it makes for stupid misleading numbers.
Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install. Current geopolitical events spiking LNG costs make the math even more favorable towards renewables.
> Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
Legacy power is ridiculously expensive in comparison. Who will invest in fossil gas generation when ~20% of LNG exports have been taken offline for the next 3-5 years?
Fossil fuels are over, it's just how fast we get to "done." Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30-60 minutes to power humanity for a year. Solar PV and battery manufacturing continues to spool up, and year by year, more fossil generation is pushed out.
California is routinely operating at 80% renewables, 90% low carbon generation during daylight hours as they work towards installing battery storage to replace their fossil generation (~52GW target by 2045), for example, while having plans for 10s of GWs of additional solar to come online over the next decade.
> This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install.
I looked it up because I was curious, according to Wikipedia average PV capacity factor is 25 % in USA, 10 % in the UK or Germany.
Nuclear has 88 % capacity factor worldwide. Meaning to replace 1 GW of nuclear installed capacity you need 8.8 GW of PV installed capacity in Germany or 3.5 GW of PV installed capacity in US.
Which might still be economically worth it, I don't know. But it is a number that surprised it.
It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar, the US ~4-5GW/month. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment.
Yes, the biggest advantage of solar and wind is that they can be built as many small projects, instead of few gigaprojects we seem to have lost the ability to execute in the West.
France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet, and they cannot get a reactor built within reasonable capital costs. Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons. California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE data product I've cited in my other comment in this thread).
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 15.45% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
I didn't say they weren't cheap. I said you were being misleading. I'm not rebutting your thesis. I'm rebutting your defense of it.
They're so cheap they get over-provisioned on purpose. Can you imagine some guy speci'ng switchgear and transmission lines for a coal or gas plant that can't handle the plant running full tilt? Yeah me either. But that's exactly how it's done for renewables because that's where the sweet spot of cost-benifit is.
A dozen 10mw turbines might be fed through 100mw of transmission hardware. They can never produce their rated 120mw because liquid copper would happen if they did. But they were intentionally provisioned that way so that based on weather patterns and whatnot they'd be able to expect say 80mw a certain number of days per year.
There are untold numbers of renewable installations out there that cannot supply their nameplate capacity to the grid in such a manner.
There is nothing wrong with over provisioning cheap renewable power generation when it is economically superior to building fossil assets that will end up stranded. As long as grid demand is met and it is cheaper to build renewables and batteries to do it, it will be done, and that is the path we're on.
If gas plants cannot economically compete, they will not be built or fired. And the evidence shows they cannot compete, regardless of their competing capacity factor and dispatchability.
Do you have some links to how someone scaled up storage? I know that scaling up solar is easy, but I don't know of any nation that build significant storage.
You are still arguing against a strawman. Cucumber3732842 is just saying that nameplate capacity is a systematically flawed metric when comparing renewable generation, because their capacity factor is consistently lower than for conventional plants.
A better metric would simply be annual production, where we're in the ~30% range globally (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...). Even that comparison portraits renewables very favorably, because dispatchable power is easier to handle than the same output from intermittent sources.
If you look beyond electricity (heating/total primary energy use) the picture gets even worse.
This is not an argument against renewables, this is against premature cheering and misleading use of numbers.
I think you misunderstand. We are cheering trajectories, not the point in time. Renewables and storage will continue to be deployed, fossil fuels will remain expensive, and build outs will continue over the next decade or two. If these trajectories hold, and growth rates continue to grow for clean energy deployments, what happens? The outcome is obvious, is it not?
Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.
The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. You are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.
Solar capacity is always misleading because it’s intermittent. Capacity of a gas power plant can’t be compared to capacity of a solar power plant, even though it sounds like you are comparing the same thing. Would love to know total kWh generated.
Yep. The key difference is that a gas power plant can be cut off completely at any time. For example if a trigger happy leader decided to cause military mayhem in an unpredictable region supplying a large proportion of the world’s gas.
The sun, however, keeps on shining.
I understand why people are downvoting you, but we still have a bit to go before renewables make up 50% of yearly electricity generation.
Not as far as you’d think though. According to [0] in 2024 it was 6.9% solar, 8.1% wind, and 14.3% hydro, I.e. 29% renewables. Given the trajectory I wouldn’t be surprised if that total was ~33% in 2025.
Yes, but thats a bad extrapolation because per-capita electricity consumption was still rising then but is mostly flat/decreasing in western countries since 2000 or so, and the significant rise in reneably fraction mostly started after 2000.
The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
> The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
As a ‘clean green New Zealander’, your comment is perfect.
We trash our country in such appalling ways. The fact they there aren’t many of us and that the easy way of getting power is hydro is coincidence, not a national conscience.
IEA had been predicting 2030 as peak fossil fuel usage up until recently. They revised it back upon Trump's election and shifting policy, but it's possible the Iran War has moved it forward again. Either way, it's within reach.
That being said, peak fossil fuels is the future date at which we are burning more than ever followed by the slow decrease. Meaning we are still accelerating CO2 emissions and even if we emit less, every emission is still cumulative so the march towards actually fixing the climate will only start at peak fossil fuels. We still need to remove all that GHG.
A lot of people who are cheering right now are going to be screaming bloody murder in 10-20yr when the "below this population density generation and storage makes more sense than grid" threshold creeps up into the lower end of suburban population densities and some industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.
Energy independence is a two way street. This is essentially a soft power lever that is going to go away.
First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).
Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
Why is it bad if some industrial users of electricity buy fields around their factories and set up their own power generation there instead of hooking up to the power grid?
It takes time for statistical agencies to compile reports. I haven't yet found reports covering the growth in renewable generation (actual terawatt hours) for all of 2025. But this covers 3 quarters of the year:
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...
In the first three quarters of 2025, solar generation rose by 498 TWh (+31%) and already surpassed the total solar output in all of 2024. Wind generation grew by 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they added 635 TWh, outpacing the rise in global electricity demand of 603 TWh (+2.7%).
Capacity doesn’t matter, generation does.
True but having capacity allows for generation - doesn't work the other way around.
AKA the forward march of progress.
I'm too lazy to double check the numbers, but as far as I remember, Germany in order to increase it's average generation by 10% had to expand capacity by 70% in solar plus wind. With stats like this, there's a thin line between progress and waste. And all this while we have nuclear. (How the world really works, Vaclav smil if anybody is less lazy than me)
We can also time shift many of the things we do. Does your fridge need to run between 3-5pm in the heat of summer? or can it make sure its a little cooler to avoid running then? (trivial example, probably not a good one)
Demand response for things like hotel air conditioning is a thing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23343211
Batteries are also getting cheaper and cheaper
Makes sense - solar especially. It's just more financially smart to buy something that will generate electricity for 20-30 years with little to no maintenance than a plant that requires constant fuel, and is fairly complex mechanically with fluids and heat exchangers and turbines and so on. Panel efficiency keeps going up and prices keep going down, it's a snowball at this point.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3226/
>it's a snowball at this point.
That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.
Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.
> The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring
A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone.
China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.
Wait this is actually amazing, I had no idea it was that high. I can’t even believe what the US admin is doing, this is clearly the winning technology.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
(global solar PV deployment is just a bit below ~1TW/year at current deployment rates)
Installed capacity is a misleading number. If you assessed the trucking industry by simply sum-ing the rated capacity of all the hardware you'd be rightfully laughed and and called a liar on the basis of all the times the trucks are empty and all the trucks that run out of volume before weight. Renewables is a similar situation.
Some panel in a solar farm in Canada is not gonna see the conditions that let it produce rated capacity nearly as often as one in Arizona. So the guy in Canada installs more capacity to get the same power. Meanwhile the guy in Arizona doesn't have enough copper leading out of his site to handle the power he could produce at peak on the best days, because he over-provisioned too, in order to be able to produce a given amount earlier/later in the day. The actual generation hardware is so cheap that this is just the sensible way to deploy renewables, but it makes for stupid misleading numbers.
Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
Refer to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
The largest electricity consumers all have good places to put solar farms.
This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install. Current geopolitical events spiking LNG costs make the math even more favorable towards renewables.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/24-hour-solar-now-ec...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... ("104$/MWh: Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier.")
> Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
Legacy power is ridiculously expensive in comparison. Who will invest in fossil gas generation when ~20% of LNG exports have been taken offline for the next 3-5 years?
https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-... (page 8)
Strikes on Qatar's LNG Ras Laffan plant Will Reshape the Future of Fossil Gas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484246 - March 2026
Fossil fuels are over, it's just how fast we get to "done." Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30-60 minutes to power humanity for a year. Solar PV and battery manufacturing continues to spool up, and year by year, more fossil generation is pushed out.
California is routinely operating at 80% renewables, 90% low carbon generation during daylight hours as they work towards installing battery storage to replace their fossil generation (~52GW target by 2045), for example, while having plans for 10s of GWs of additional solar to come online over the next decade.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/were-harvesting-t...
> This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install.
I looked it up because I was curious, according to Wikipedia average PV capacity factor is 25 % in USA, 10 % in the UK or Germany.
Nuclear has 88 % capacity factor worldwide. Meaning to replace 1 GW of nuclear installed capacity you need 8.8 GW of PV installed capacity in Germany or 3.5 GW of PV installed capacity in US.
Which might still be economically worth it, I don't know. But it is a number that surprised it.
It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar, the US ~4-5GW/month. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment.
Yes, the biggest advantage of solar and wind is that they can be built as many small projects, instead of few gigaprojects we seem to have lost the ability to execute in the West.
I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land.
> I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land
Money will eventually win the war. Depressing way to get there but this crisis will accelerate the change.
Nuclear fills a base load role better than solar+battery though, imo.
A healthy power network will have a variety of generations sources available.
Compare the price and carbon density of the French electricity grid with that of California to understand why that rebuttal is justified.
France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet, and they cannot get a reactor built within reasonable capital costs. Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons. California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE data product I've cited in my other comment in this thread).
EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-fleet-upkeep-wil... - November 17th, 2025
French utility EDF lifts cost estimate for new reactors to 67 billion euros - Les Echos - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l... - March 4th, 2024
Explainer-Why a French plan to take full control of EDF is no cure-all - https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/07/edf-nationalistion - July 7th, 2022
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 15.45% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
I didn't say they weren't cheap. I said you were being misleading. I'm not rebutting your thesis. I'm rebutting your defense of it.
They're so cheap they get over-provisioned on purpose. Can you imagine some guy speci'ng switchgear and transmission lines for a coal or gas plant that can't handle the plant running full tilt? Yeah me either. But that's exactly how it's done for renewables because that's where the sweet spot of cost-benifit is.
A dozen 10mw turbines might be fed through 100mw of transmission hardware. They can never produce their rated 120mw because liquid copper would happen if they did. But they were intentionally provisioned that way so that based on weather patterns and whatnot they'd be able to expect say 80mw a certain number of days per year.
There are untold numbers of renewable installations out there that cannot supply their nameplate capacity to the grid in such a manner.
There is nothing wrong with over provisioning cheap renewable power generation when it is economically superior to building fossil assets that will end up stranded. As long as grid demand is met and it is cheaper to build renewables and batteries to do it, it will be done, and that is the path we're on.
If gas plants cannot economically compete, they will not be built or fired. And the evidence shows they cannot compete, regardless of their competing capacity factor and dispatchability.
Do you have some links to how someone scaled up storage? I know that scaling up solar is easy, but I don't know of any nation that build significant storage.
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/global-energy-s...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
You are still arguing against a strawman. Cucumber3732842 is just saying that nameplate capacity is a systematically flawed metric when comparing renewable generation, because their capacity factor is consistently lower than for conventional plants.
A better metric would simply be annual production, where we're in the ~30% range globally (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...). Even that comparison portraits renewables very favorably, because dispatchable power is easier to handle than the same output from intermittent sources.
If you look beyond electricity (heating/total primary energy use) the picture gets even worse.
This is not an argument against renewables, this is against premature cheering and misleading use of numbers.
I think you misunderstand. We are cheering trajectories, not the point in time. Renewables and storage will continue to be deployed, fossil fuels will remain expensive, and build outs will continue over the next decade or two. If these trajectories hold, and growth rates continue to grow for clean energy deployments, what happens? The outcome is obvious, is it not?
The thesis is simply this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.
The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:
The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. You are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.
The Trump administration is secretly the head of a renewable energy accelerationist front, or at least that's the effect in practice.
> The Trump administration is secretly the head of a renewable energy accelerationist front
"accelerationist" yes, not sure about the other parts.
Well see, we're sick of winning.
Solar capacity is always misleading because it’s intermittent. Capacity of a gas power plant can’t be compared to capacity of a solar power plant, even though it sounds like you are comparing the same thing. Would love to know total kWh generated.
Yep. The key difference is that a gas power plant can be cut off completely at any time. For example if a trigger happy leader decided to cause military mayhem in an unpredictable region supplying a large proportion of the world’s gas. The sun, however, keeps on shining.
I understand why people are downvoting you, but we still have a bit to go before renewables make up 50% of yearly electricity generation.
Not as far as you’d think though. According to [0] in 2024 it was 6.9% solar, 8.1% wind, and 14.3% hydro, I.e. 29% renewables. Given the trajectory I wouldn’t be surprised if that total was ~33% in 2025.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
By your definition/chart, we were 0% solar, 0% wind, and 20% hydro in 1985 for 20% total renewables. So, 20% -> 29% in 4 decades
Yes, but thats a bad extrapolation because per-capita electricity consumption was still rising then but is mostly flat/decreasing in western countries since 2000 or so, and the significant rise in reneably fraction mostly started after 2000.
The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
> The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
As a ‘clean green New Zealander’, your comment is perfect.
We trash our country in such appalling ways. The fact they there aren’t many of us and that the easy way of getting power is hydro is coincidence, not a national conscience.
IEA had been predicting 2030 as peak fossil fuel usage up until recently. They revised it back upon Trump's election and shifting policy, but it's possible the Iran War has moved it forward again. Either way, it's within reach.
That being said, peak fossil fuels is the future date at which we are burning more than ever followed by the slow decrease. Meaning we are still accelerating CO2 emissions and even if we emit less, every emission is still cumulative so the march towards actually fixing the climate will only start at peak fossil fuels. We still need to remove all that GHG.
This is far higher than I expected: a much needed, remarkably good reason to be cheerful about the future after all !
A lot of people who are cheering right now are going to be screaming bloody murder in 10-20yr when the "below this population density generation and storage makes more sense than grid" threshold creeps up into the lower end of suburban population densities and some industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.
Energy independence is a two way street. This is essentially a soft power lever that is going to go away.
I honestly don't see a big problem with that.
First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).
Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
Why is it bad if some industrial users of electricity buy fields around their factories and set up their own power generation there instead of hooking up to the power grid?
curious how this scales with larger datasets. anyone tried it in production?
Report: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...