'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity

For OTR trucks, you have to factor in the battery degradation. A OTR truck easily gets to 1 million miles on an engine. Often times significantly more, and then its only a rebuild, not a replacement. While electricity is much cheaper than diesel, battery replacement cost amortization is a real thing to include in the accounting. I haven't done an OTR, but I did do amortization for a Ford Lightning. While a "battery fill up" is $2-3. The replacement battery is $30k iirc. That's $3000/yr in costs assuming 10 year lifetime. At that rate, its $62/wk in battery amortization. So, you're really spending $62+3/wk in "energy". That's still less than a tank ($90-100 at current prices), but the savings is significantly less than originally anticipated.

Can we get the Dept of Energy to build plants themselves on Federal land?

It was Germany’s gift to the world. They stopped it just in time to kill their industry too, giving another gift to china

Solar is nowhere near hitting limits that will require storage to continue growth. Like it could double several more times globally and not require storage to still make sense to roll out more.

But, storage is already growing at a pace similar to solar because it's cheaper than the alternatives.

It is increasing. At the moment it is slowed because for the longest time we were fine with just hydro, pumped hydro, gas peaker plants and the natural inertia of the power plants' turbines and generators. Now demand is big enough that even lithium-ion is deployed for grid storage, despite lithium-ion being optimized for the opposite use case (light portable power storage). Lots of options that are more optimized for grid storage are in various stages of development, but it takes time for them to be brought to maturity and for operators to gain experience and confidence with them.

It will. And define massively. People overestimate and under-specify these numbers. Mostly this is just economics. The cost of 1kwh of battery is trending towards 50$ for manufacturers and trending down over time. So, installing a few kwh/mwh/gwh of battery is not the end of the world depending on your needs.

Can’t we just leave our EVs plugged in and use those?

> Storage capacity on the grid will need to massively increase as well for solar to go much further.

Probably not, if your definition of "much further" is an increase from 30% or something.

As a data point, one Australia State uses 70% renewables, average, over a year: https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/hydrogen-and-ren... It's a mixture of wind and solar. Unlike other places that have a high percentage of renewable generation they do not have hydro of any sort.

The renewables have replaced coal and gas generation. They are at 70% because renewables were cheaper than fossil 20 years ago, because they have no coal or gas - it's all imported. The transition was purely driven by cost. The costs were higher than any other state in Australia, so they started earlier.

The most costly part right now is the remaining 30%, which is supplied by gas peakers. You can guess what might happen in the future from this: https://reneweconomy.com.au/i-could-never-find-a-business-ca... Some quotes to save you reading that link:

- “The reality is that you can’t buy a gas turbine for the next four to five years,” David Scaysbrook, the founder and co-head of Quinbrook Infrastructure Investors, one of the world’s biggest energy investors ... “They’re all sold out,” he says. And the price has also soared. “They are nearly four times the cost of what it was two years ago.”

- the rising cost of gas – it is about three times higher than it was a decade ago – has made the business case even more complicated (FYI: Australia is the worlds largest gas exporter - the problem isn't availability).

That graph looks like willful ignorance.

some history

Kurzweil 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpoKYY1uy4

researchgate 2018 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Exponential-growth-in-so...

some 2024 data https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulfbrowning_exponential-pv-...

and on it goes at about 25% per year. That would have it covering all our needs in about 15 years.

For comparison with Hinkley C the UKs new nuclear reactor the site was selected in 2010 and the latest is "£41.6–47.9 billion in 2024 prices, with Unit 1 planned to become operational in 2029 to 2031."

That's driven by a combination of cost/pricing and innovation. We're nowhere close to the limits of either battery or solar technology. We're looking at decades of further innovation, learning effects, etc. Assuming anything else would probably be a mistake. Many respectable reporting on energy falls into the trap of being too conservative. E.g. the IEA is a repeat offender on this. Many of their estimates for decades ahead get overtaken within years of being issued.

The real question is at what relative cost level it turns into an S-curve. Right now renewables are mostly cheaper than non renewables and transitioning to a lot cheaper. A lot might turn into one or more orders of magnitude. Where does it stop? Two? Three?

What's the ultimate cost of a mwh of power? It's probably a lot lower than what people currently pay. Renewables have a bit of upfront cost but the marginal cost of using the equipment is close to zero.

Lower cost of energy opens up new use cases and drives the market up. Basically it causes people to electrify more things. Even things that we currently think of as too costly. As those things get electrified, they get cheaper. And there are people that make the investment and benefit and people that don't and get pushed out of the market.

Since there will be so much solar installed it's quite inevitable that energy storage will be also growing on a lagging but similar exponential curve. Solar is becoming big, and if a major impediment is storage which is not a hard problem like fusion to solve, there will be tons done to bring it into reality.

Even if the current solutions are inadequate, the same was true for PV 20 years ago, it just needed investment in R&D. Investment in R&D of grid storage is at the highest in history, and growing.

It's like I've always said about self driving cars. Self driving cars always seem around 5 years away, until suddenly they're 6 months away. There's no in between. We're seeing that with Waymo.

200% of today's electricity consumption seems highly likely. Jevons paradox says that cheap electricity will increase consumption substantially.

Almost exactly as you were making this comment he signed a bunch of stuff to "Reinvigorates America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

>Indeed, it's becoming very obvious that the US is slowly turning into a resource curse nation. Sad.

Not that, but a "first adopter curse" AKA path dependence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

Yeah, there aren't enough bits of entropy in imports/(exports-imports) or whatever it was to encode fossil fuel protectionism.

> The move builds on tariff hikes finalized by the Biden administration in September that target strategic product categories from China

You can argue about whether tariffs are good or bad, but in any case there's a vast difference between "target[ing] strategic product categories" and bluntly hitting entire ccTLDs.

Targeted tariffs to protect or foster certain industries are acceptable. Blanket ones are not.

And they should be set just high enough that the industry remains competitive while not allowing for price gouging. We know companies will seek to maximize their prices. So if a foreign competitor is selling for 8% cheaper, then tariffs should be no more than 9%. We know from experience that manufactures will sell at the same price as foreign competition and will pocket the difference.

They should also be gradually reduced over time. The goal is to have domestic industries become globally competitive. And that necessarily means that companies need to strive to improve efficiency so they can match or beat the prices of global competitors. If that can't happen, then maybe those companies need to go away.

The reason tariffs are bad in the long term is A) it incentivize global competition to become even more efficient; B) it encourages domestic industries to be non-competitive. So the industry being favored by tariffs will never grow into a global power.

So tariffs on solar panels are fine, so long as they come with other incentives to spur domestic consumption (to drive efficiency gains) and a plan to lower those tariffs over time.

Blanket tariffs are pretty much never good, the only good reason to institute blanket tariffs on a country is as a prelude to direct conflict. As it will provide a market incentive for consumers to replace goods from that country with a more expensive alternative.

After all, a blanket tariff on all the goods coming from a country is a type of economic sanction. So a country who puts tariffs on the goods of every other country in the world is effectively feeling the impact of the first phase of conflict, when allies come together and enact trade barriers with a country. And why to countries band together to push economic sanctions on an adversary? To hurt their economy.

So TL;DR: Biden solar tariffs - well thought out and likely productive. Trump tariffs - pushing yourself in the face.

Must have been a long time since you looked then.

https://www.firstsolar.com/

Still if the US does keep 100% tariffs then probably people will switch.

Also, they are steadily reducing the capacity factor of their coal plants. All of their recent coal plants are dispatchable plants, designed to run only when the sun isn't shining. So even though they are increasing capacity quickly, their actual usage of coal is relatively flat in comparison.

And they've started building massive battery storage plants, which will likely substantially replace their coal plants over the next decade.

Sure, but there's something to be said for continuing to add non-green energy alongside it.

From an ecological perspective, it's like going on a diet and smoking an extra cigarette for every 100 calories you cut out.

In context of climate change, absolute values of CO2 are still more relevant than proportion in generated energy.

That's a cool story you can tell your kids before bed but the reality is that when you include imports the US/EU emissions are stagnating or going up. It's easy not to pollute when you import most of your things from abroad.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...

This graph might be more relevant: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

The countries most talking about net-zero are indeed reducing their emissions. China is meanwhile trying to catch up to the standard of living of their Western counterparts, driving up emissions massively (while still having great per-capita values, there are just a lot of Chinese that previously lived on basically nothing)

Or geographic interconnection. There hasn't been an hour in the past 30 years where there was no wind or sun somewhere in Europe.

Maybe look at some data before FUDding.

This model posits 97% carbon free generation in Australia with 5 hours of storage using actual real world weather data:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

>You can have many days or weeks

Maybe cite actual data.

>alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.

Nuclear isnt a peaker. Or rather, it can theoretically be used as a peaker but burning literal $100 notes may be more cost effective in the long run than using it as a peaker.

Batteries and pumped storage are cost effective peakers. I find it's better when modeling renewable energy generation scenarios to try not to pretend they dont exist.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

Thats the question this guy asked, using actual weather data to power his models instead of carbon industry fluff.

Unfortunately the instinctive skeptical reaction to this is not "here's an alternative model and alternative data" but "here's even more FUD".