Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.
For people who are interested in this space should very much read EMBER. They make digestable, data rich reporting.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
- 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 since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%)
- 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...
This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.
For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.
> For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything.
Because renewable energy is Communism, or something.
But seriously: $$$$. The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful. The owners of these companies and their media co-conspirators should be tried in the Hague for what they have done to our planet just to keep making fucking money.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
I think that's part of what's notable about this. The administration hasn't been able to reverse the trend despite putting a massive thumb on the scale against projects like offshore wind and tariffs on solar panel imports.
There's probably a delay in the effects though since projects started before they took office are probably starting to thin out and finish up. We'd have to look into the permitting of new projects or wait for to see how big the decline in new capacity turns out to be in a couple years.
A lot of comes from state initiatives too. Texas being conservative also happens to be very pro solar. I’m in the business and we have some great projects there. The US military is also pushing solar at their facilities. Then you have many private-state partnerships like tolls investing a lot in solar. The outlook in general is pretty positive in the US, a lot more than what people would think.
I also recall a New York times article from many moons ago suggesting that a lot of Texas oil wealth got repurposed into a large-scale wind energy infrastructure, but my info might be out of date.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
I suspect sodium is better than lithium today. The win is that sodium is much more forgiving of high temperatures so they can be run without cooling fans/pumps. Lithium battery installations are actually loud owing to all of their cooling infrastructure.
No cooling means the sodium batteries are easier/cheaper to maintain (no mechanical failures). Maybe not as energy dense, but you could still come out ahead long term when accounting for Capex+Opex.
I read some interesting things about crazy sounding technologies like vanadium flow and iron batteries. I think we're at most 10 years away from storage being not fully solved, but becoming an enabler more than a bottleneck.
I think it's your last point that's actually the strongest.
There's always gaps between theoretical and practical, but to see China investing so hard in the future while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
The price of energy sets a floor on the price of all manufactured goods. By kneecapping the cheapest sources of energy, the regime kneecaps all domestic manufacturers.
China's aggressive buildout of cost effective energy production isn't because they're 'woke,' it's because it makes them more competitive. Every product they export at low prices is in part due to the their extremely cheap energy.
It's like the regime looked at the UK's collapsing manufacturing industry due to their high energy costs and said "I want that for us!"
The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
Contrary to popular belief, solar panels don't generate zero power on cloudy days.
They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.
So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...
There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...
> They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
If you're at higher latitudes, this is notably less of a drop-off than you see between high/low season.
My friends with residential solar see <10% overall output in January vs July. (~60% drop from fewer sunshine hours, ~80% drop from decreased solar irradiance.)
And people use less energy at night. Yes, they do need heating/cooling and a few other things at night, but the peak is during the day and in the evening.
This argument is almost closed at this point, with PV + batteries being quite price competitive. We're no longer in 2018.
Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
The whole point about modern gas/coal plants is that it's relatively cheap to shut them down and start them up again. They are backup power, not for providing inflexible base load. Batteries + renewables are taking a lot of market share and flexible backup power is much more important than baseload (inflexible power like nuclear)
Starting up a coal-fired power station depends heavily on the plant's current temperature, taking anywhere from 2 to 48 hours to reach full operational capacity. Because of massive metal boilers and turbines, the heating process must be slow to prevent severe thermal fatigue and equipment damage. [1, 2]
The startup time is broken down by the plant's previous state:
• Hot Start (less than 8 hours offline): 2 to 4 hours. The boiler and equipment are still warm, allowing for a relatively quick resumption of steam production.
• Warm Start (8 to 120 hours offline): 4 to 8 hours.
• Cold Start (More than 120 hours offline): 12 to 48 hours. The plant must be heated from room temperature, which involves initially burning expensive natural gas or diesel just to safely warm the furnace and metal pipes before coal can be introduced. [1, 3, 5]
To explore how these heavy thermal operations impact the broader electricity supply, you can review the U.S. Energy Information Administration's grid reliability data or dive deeper into the technical challenges via the Environmental Protection Agency's Coal Startup Report. [6]
If you are interested in the broader power market, let me know:
It's not, grid-scale batteries are being deployed all over the world, and newer batteries keep getting better and cheaper. Storage hasn't been the issue for years.
To be fair, it depends if you were looking at "price/unit" or "sum of factory output".
The former, even a few years ago, I agree. The latter, people were arguing about a year or two ago. (Though your point remains as the trend was clear).
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.
The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.
US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.
Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:
Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.
> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China
This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.
China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.
Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.
that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.
any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.
we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US
That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I'm sure there's some happy medium where they'd be happy, as you say, but at some number I'm guessing they'd fight back against too much adoption.
> my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
This alone would be incredible from wider adoption of balcony (incredible for the consumer I mean). If you knock a few cents per kWh off, which I think you can do with daytime/early evening usage (when the panels are still producing some energy so no storage required) that would be fantastic. Baby steps to a full system that you can DIY without anyone objecting.
i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid.
the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs.
they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especially where the marginal cost of the energy is very low.
the more users who disconnect, the more the fixed costs must be recouped from a shrinking customer base, triggering more incentive to leave the network. this is called the death spiral.
In addition, things like balcony solar don't save them cost: it introduces complexity because they need to safely manage that load, they need to be able to predict and measure it; in my experience working with utilities and network operators for many years, they flat out don't want these distributed generation sources unless they have a lot of say in how they are added to the grid, and how users can be charged for the privilege of generating their own power. that is often a very significant barrier to regulatory change.
that’s true, i was considering only the perspective of the major city i live in rather than networks with lower ratepayer densities where the economics are probably totally different
i do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding
There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no.
Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets.
That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’s PowerAssist.
(Which limits the rate at which power draw can change. Very useful when you use a house-sized generator; it amounts to synthetic inertia. I have a 7kW generator, but a 7kW step load would stall it.)
Ah, this is why I come here. I had no idea that was the case. I feel like there was a story going around recently about how hard it is to restart some power generator if it gets knocked offline. Maybe it was about Hoover Dam now that I think about it (i.e., how bad it would be if the Colorado gets too low).
You would need supercapacitors, but you can make an inverter emulate inertial almost as well as flywheels, and more than well enough to not make a difference once you push the energy into a few kilometers of non-zero impedance grid.
Regulation aside, a significant issue is physical area. Most people won’t have access to enough area in the right direction to make it a primary source.
>how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source?
We don't need a more plug and play system. A zero agreement interconnection for whatever UL certified 300W-ish scale is fine and should be widely deployed.
There needing to be interconnection agreements with your utility and an inspection is not a blocker that needs to be removed. Most places require a licensed electrician for complex work, having the electrician fill out a form and having a utility inspection is how things should be.
Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the cost of installation today is... epic (so epic in fact that the overall cost of install has actually gone up even though material costs have come down). Admittedly off-grid installs are a tiny fraction of places on the planet, but it's the trigger that led me to ask about this.
Perhaps you're just responding because I brought up grid tie (fair!), but I'm wondering why not aspire to remove the blocker, which would mean de-risking the installation so that laypeople could do it without having to get an electrician involved (which is what's so amazing about balcony).
If you want grid tie-in, a certified professional needs to be in the loop to verify all of the rules are being followed because incorrect setups are dangerous to other people. Also insurance probably doesn't want to insure your home if someone with questionable knowledge is setting up wiring and energy production.
Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any external intervention. You have to know things to do it though, I don't think it is a desirable state of things for just blind plug and play.
Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
Hah - I was going to mention all the other types of things the fire people seem to be blocking, but decided to stay focused. But yeah, it seemed like 'aversion to change'. "Firefighters might trip over solar panels on balconies" or something kind of far-fetched sounding.
> Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy
People at this point should realise that Trump is lying.
He also does the same with regards to Iran.
It is time to not only look at the Epstein connection, but also the corruption in that whole family dynasty. There has never been as much theft, I claim, as with that dynasty. (And Epstein plays a role because superrich partied with underage girls, and they told Trump to shut down all investigations. This is corruption in its final stage. Same here - Trump babbles about old energy but his superrich friends expand on renewables. And profit. As always.)
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.
No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.
I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.
It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org
There was an article recently about how the West Asia war is quickly decarbonising South Asia. Lot of solar and wind projects in the pipeline for SA countries. Especially because now renewables are a national security issue
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
The growth of solar is astounding. I dug into data a while back and tried to do some visualizations of it, mainly for my own understanding:
https://torkeldanielsson.se/solar-energy-forecasts/
Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.
+1 to the Guardian for mentioning their data source, but -1 for not linking to it.
+2 for EMBER for having a data source AND being able to link to the parameters that show solar overtaking coal for the month in the US.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
For people who are interested in this space should very much read EMBER. They make digestable, data rich reporting.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.
For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.
> For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything.
Because renewable energy is Communism, or something.
But seriously: $$$$. The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful. The owners of these companies and their media co-conspirators should be tried in the Hague for what they have done to our planet just to keep making fucking money.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
I think that's part of what's notable about this. The administration hasn't been able to reverse the trend despite putting a massive thumb on the scale against projects like offshore wind and tariffs on solar panel imports.
There's probably a delay in the effects though since projects started before they took office are probably starting to thin out and finish up. We'd have to look into the permitting of new projects or wait for to see how big the decline in new capacity turns out to be in a couple years.
A lot of comes from state initiatives too. Texas being conservative also happens to be very pro solar. I’m in the business and we have some great projects there. The US military is also pushing solar at their facilities. Then you have many private-state partnerships like tolls investing a lot in solar. The outlook in general is pretty positive in the US, a lot more than what people would think.
I also recall a New York times article from many moons ago suggesting that a lot of Texas oil wealth got repurposed into a large-scale wind energy infrastructure, but my info might be out of date.
True though one of the major things they have been able to do because it's mostly in the federal purview is killing offshore wind.
The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Storage is the issue. You still need to supply base load (well, all load) at night.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
I suspect sodium is better than lithium today. The win is that sodium is much more forgiving of high temperatures so they can be run without cooling fans/pumps. Lithium battery installations are actually loud owing to all of their cooling infrastructure.
No cooling means the sodium batteries are easier/cheaper to maintain (no mechanical failures). Maybe not as energy dense, but you could still come out ahead long term when accounting for Capex+Opex.
I read some interesting things about crazy sounding technologies like vanadium flow and iron batteries. I think we're at most 10 years away from storage being not fully solved, but becoming an enabler more than a bottleneck.
I think it's your last point that's actually the strongest.
There's always gaps between theoretical and practical, but to see China investing so hard in the future while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
China exported 68GW of solar PV in March 2026, double the prior month and 14GW more than total solar PV capacity installed in Spain.
Chinese solar exports double in a month to hit record high amid energy crisis - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/chinese-solar-export... - April 23rd, 2026
https://ember-energy.org/data/chinas-solar-pv-export-explore...
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
>...while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
And we shouldn't imply that this policy represents any sort of national consensus -- it's pure corruption plain and simple.
Corruption that concentrates on one party whether that party is in or out of power, too.
It's also sabotage of all domestic manufacturing.
The price of energy sets a floor on the price of all manufactured goods. By kneecapping the cheapest sources of energy, the regime kneecaps all domestic manufacturers.
China's aggressive buildout of cost effective energy production isn't because they're 'woke,' it's because it makes them more competitive. Every product they export at low prices is in part due to the their extremely cheap energy.
It's like the regime looked at the UK's collapsing manufacturing industry due to their high energy costs and said "I want that for us!"
The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
Contrary to popular belief, solar panels don't generate zero power on cloudy days.
They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.
So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...
There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...
> They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
If you're at higher latitudes, this is notably less of a drop-off than you see between high/low season.
My friends with residential solar see <10% overall output in January vs July. (~60% drop from fewer sunshine hours, ~80% drop from decreased solar irradiance.)
But they do generate zero power at night.
And people use less energy at night. Yes, they do need heating/cooling and a few other things at night, but the peak is during the day and in the evening.
This argument is almost closed at this point, with PV + batteries being quite price competitive. We're no longer in 2018.
Solution? Send large mirrors into space so it never stops shining.
https://www.reflectorbital.com/
Day and night cycles are predictable, so that is not a provisioning problem at all with short-term storage...
Power consumption also predictably follows a favorable day/night cycle for solar generation...
Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
These days I think "at night" is mostly covered or at least could be mostly covered both by wind and batteries.
The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.
The whole point about modern gas/coal plants is that it's relatively cheap to shut them down and start them up again. They are backup power, not for providing inflexible base load. Batteries + renewables are taking a lot of market share and flexible backup power is much more important than baseload (inflexible power like nuclear)
Gas is faster to respond, coal, not so much.
From the Goog:
Starting up a coal-fired power station depends heavily on the plant's current temperature, taking anywhere from 2 to 48 hours to reach full operational capacity. Because of massive metal boilers and turbines, the heating process must be slow to prevent severe thermal fatigue and equipment damage. [1, 2] The startup time is broken down by the plant's previous state:
To explore how these heavy thermal operations impact the broader electricity supply, you can review the U.S. Energy Information Administration's grid reliability data or dive deeper into the technical challenges via the Environmental Protection Agency's Coal Startup Report. [6] If you are interested in the broader power market, let me know:[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-its-not-that-easy-to-start-operati...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-a-thermal-po...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-11/documents/ma...
[4] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-minimum-time-required-by-s...
[5] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/inflexible-fossil-fuels/
[6] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
It's not, grid-scale batteries are being deployed all over the world, and newer batteries keep getting better and cheaper. Storage hasn't been the issue for years.
To be fair, it depends if you were looking at "price/unit" or "sum of factory output".
The former, even a few years ago, I agree. The latter, people were arguing about a year or two ago. (Though your point remains as the trend was clear).
Grid batteries are being deployed everywhere every day and the cost including storage is now lower than fossil fuels.
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.
The US currently is at per capita GHG emissions approximately at the the same level as it was in 1910.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
Despite not being in the paris treaty, the us needs only a 10-12% reduction to meet the paris accord requirements on schedule (43% decrease by 2030).
The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.
US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.
Yes, but it was most recently at the same level between 1939 and 1940, according to that graph.
And total US GHG emissions are currently at about the same level as they were in 1988.
US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China. China's massive footprint of Coal should be added to US emissions.
Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:
https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/china-has-quickly-and-sha...
Still, that is a good point, a lot of the emissions from manufacturing have been shifted to other countries.
>China is also greatly reducing their emissions
Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...
Aye, but that data is up to 2024, here's an update: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
"flat or falling" let's be honest. The amount of "fall" in that graph is basically in the noise. It's been flat.
> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China
This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.
China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.
China is a semi-planned economy. The coal plants are more a form of insurance than a practical and economical source of power.
The trend has China installing as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined every single year within a reasonably small margin.
Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.
that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.
any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.
we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US
That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I'm sure there's some happy medium where they'd be happy, as you say, but at some number I'm guessing they'd fight back against too much adoption.
> my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
This alone would be incredible from wider adoption of balcony (incredible for the consumer I mean). If you knock a few cents per kWh off, which I think you can do with daytime/early evening usage (when the panels are still producing some energy so no storage required) that would be fantastic. Baby steps to a full system that you can DIY without anyone objecting.
Yes. The utilities want every household to pay them every month.
Here in California, PG&E has a "base service fee" of $24/month. That you owe even if they sell you no (as in ZERO) electricity:
https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/base-s...
Have you seen this? Free battery in NYC if you charge it with off-peak power
https://everyelectric.com/
i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid.
the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs.
they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especially where the marginal cost of the energy is very low.
the more users who disconnect, the more the fixed costs must be recouped from a shrinking customer base, triggering more incentive to leave the network. this is called the death spiral.
In addition, things like balcony solar don't save them cost: it introduces complexity because they need to safely manage that load, they need to be able to predict and measure it; in my experience working with utilities and network operators for many years, they flat out don't want these distributed generation sources unless they have a lot of say in how they are added to the grid, and how users can be charged for the privilege of generating their own power. that is often a very significant barrier to regulatory change.
that’s true, i was considering only the perspective of the major city i live in rather than networks with lower ratepayer densities where the economics are probably totally different
i do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding
There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no.
Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets.
That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’s PowerAssist.
(Which limits the rate at which power draw can change. Very useful when you use a house-sized generator; it amounts to synthetic inertia. I have a 7kW generator, but a 7kW step load would stall it.)
Ah, this is why I come here. I had no idea that was the case. I feel like there was a story going around recently about how hard it is to restart some power generator if it gets knocked offline. Maybe it was about Hoover Dam now that I think about it (i.e., how bad it would be if the Colorado gets too low).
Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...
You would need supercapacitors, but you can make an inverter emulate inertial almost as well as flywheels, and more than well enough to not make a difference once you push the energy into a few kilometers of non-zero impedance grid.
Regulation aside, a significant issue is physical area. Most people won’t have access to enough area in the right direction to make it a primary source.
It’s primarily a regulatory issue, and more states in the US will approve it over the coming years.
>how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source?
We don't need a more plug and play system. A zero agreement interconnection for whatever UL certified 300W-ish scale is fine and should be widely deployed.
There needing to be interconnection agreements with your utility and an inspection is not a blocker that needs to be removed. Most places require a licensed electrician for complex work, having the electrician fill out a form and having a utility inspection is how things should be.
Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the cost of installation today is... epic (so epic in fact that the overall cost of install has actually gone up even though material costs have come down). Admittedly off-grid installs are a tiny fraction of places on the planet, but it's the trigger that led me to ask about this.
Perhaps you're just responding because I brought up grid tie (fair!), but I'm wondering why not aspire to remove the blocker, which would mean de-risking the installation so that laypeople could do it without having to get an electrician involved (which is what's so amazing about balcony).
If you want grid tie-in, a certified professional needs to be in the loop to verify all of the rules are being followed because incorrect setups are dangerous to other people. Also insurance probably doesn't want to insure your home if someone with questionable knowledge is setting up wiring and energy production.
Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any external intervention. You have to know things to do it though, I don't think it is a desirable state of things for just blind plug and play.
Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
Hah - I was going to mention all the other types of things the fire people seem to be blocking, but decided to stay focused. But yeah, it seemed like 'aversion to change'. "Firefighters might trip over solar panels on balconies" or something kind of far-fetched sounding.
> Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy
People at this point should realise that Trump is lying.
He also does the same with regards to Iran.
It is time to not only look at the Epstein connection, but also the corruption in that whole family dynasty. There has never been as much theft, I claim, as with that dynasty. (And Epstein plays a role because superrich partied with underage girls, and they told Trump to shut down all investigations. This is corruption in its final stage. Same here - Trump babbles about old energy but his superrich friends expand on renewables. And profit. As always.)
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.
Quickly being in the next decade or two.
This administration is hitting milestones without even trying!
No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.
Funny, I initially read the OP title as
> Solar generates more energy in US than coal for the last time
Then the actual title is what confused me for a second.
I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.
It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org
Oil next.
USA became top 1 oil exporter, so we'll see how that goes
There was an article recently about how the West Asia war is quickly decarbonising South Asia. Lot of solar and wind projects in the pipeline for SA countries. Especially because now renewables are a national security issue
You mean the "US-Israel war of aggression against Iran"?
Let's not avoid assigning responsibility when it is so clear.
> West Asia war
Oh, snap, did Turkey attack Cyprus again? :-p
What West Asian war? Isn't Iran firmly in the Middle East by any reasonable definition?
The middle east is in Asia, no?
In other news:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
In 2025 US produced from solar 388.82 TWh, from gas 1,807.34 TWh.
So solar has long way to grow to replace gas in US electricity production.
That shift is going to happen a lot quicker than people expect, here's the expected 2026 US grid additions:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
- Solar: +87 TWh/year (assuming 23% capacity factor, lower end of US range)
- Gas: +9TWh/year (6.3GW new, 4.6GW retirements, higher end of US capacity factor of 60%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67206
This is in the face of massive growth for grid demand for the first time in decades, so the trend will accelerate.
New gas turbine manufacturing capacity is tapped out, causing new gas CapEx to get more expensive:
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/gas-turbine-prices-so...
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
On the other hand.
Here we are reading about solar overtaking coal. Coal was producing more grid electricity than gas relatively recently, in 2015.
The rate of growth of solar-produced electricity is accelerating. Given another decade, there's every chance it can supplant gas as well.
don't worry this administration is giving nearly a billion dollar bailout to coal using war powers so congress can't block
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/04/trump-coal-d...
They could have used it to retrain coal workers or help them transition to some other job instead of a handout to plant and mine owners.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477729
See that's why the cool kids are moving to clean coal /s