Is it possible to increase the grid by add solar and wind and NOT adding an on-demand backup source (gas, etc.) WITHOUT ADDING RISK?

What I mean is say the grid demands 100. The grid is powered entirely by coal. You give it 120 for 20% redundancy. This is extremely reliable.

The grid demand is now 120. You now need 144 for 20% redundancy. You dont want to use coal. So you add solar and batteries.

Batteries are great because they normalize the volatility of solar generation over time, but they do not make solar truly on demand. So if you add 24 solar to the 120 coal you are increasing the risk on the grid. What often happens is you add 24 solar but you have 24 coal as a backup. Ideally the real-world use will be solar but in case of downtime your grid will not fail.

I just upgraded the solar system at my family's off-grid cabin. It's incredible how much battery technology has improved over the last 10 years.

Everyone is getting tired of me checking the panel to see how many watts we're bringing in.

Next project, install a shunt and get a Raspberry Pi talking to it over USB. And then I'll be able to build a Grafana dashboard. :)

Where is the cabin? Roughly speaking of course

I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind

(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)

So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?

Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?

Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be dead if hydrofracturing hadn't propped up the cost of gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.

Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.

The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.

I recommend this video from YouTuber Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.

Is this the version he reuploaded? I saw it the day he posted it, and I have never seen that man more passionate and awesome. He mentioned later that he toned it down, which is almost a bummer!

I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.

Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.

> Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions?

They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.

>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.

One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.

I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.

solar heating isnt as passive, and requires that the fluid keeps flowing, and all thr plumbing maintenance that goes with that.

a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs

You can be when you are living in an apartment building and you hear how people who have a house get 0 electric bill or get negative electric bill.

Some people just want the world to burn…

I'm not against solar, my primary issue is that in northern Europe there's not much sun at some times. Energy storage and "smart grid" are not there yet, in my view, but maybe should have come first. Hydrogen (electrolysis) sounds a bit wild and impractical to me.

Finland:

> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...

That's for 5000 people. And only covers heat. Happy if it can scale and move from prototype to long-term deployment at a reasonable cost, serving heavy industry in manufacturing.

> That's for 5000 people.

And it's quite compact.

> And only covers heat.

Is that not useful?

That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.

I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up.

I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.

on that easy fix - the land under solar panels can still be used for farming or ranching

Sure but compare that to the amount of land used for oil and gas extraction. The difference is that mines and drills can only go where there's stuff to extract and solar panels can go anywhere. Including near residential areas. That's also due to the fact that they are so environmentally neutral.

There's a lot of selective concern. They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels. My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds. Cats kill a thousand times more birds but nobody cares about that.

> They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels.

I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.

It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.

If people have strong opinions about renewable energy, just don't waste your breath. You can't reason someone out of an opinion they arrived at unreasonably.

It's a challenge, but remember that there is a lot of money in trying to convince people about the status quo. I'd keep in mind the kind of tactics that fossil fuel companies will be using to convince people otherwise:

- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap - Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly - but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned - But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables

Keep hammering the point that they are cheaper. If they are open to more advanced discussion point to the amazing structural changes that batteries are only starting to bring. Tell them something that sounds mildly like science fiction but is in fact happening already and will be HUGE. E.g. the battery you’ll have in your AC/stove/car will save you money or even make you money when part of a smart mesh of DERs.

Maybe I’m too optimistic :)

Let me preface this that I am a huge advocate for renewables, and have been spending borderline unreasonable amounts on turning my home green.

The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.

Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.

In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).

So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.

Every kWh your panels make from sunlight that you use immediately (or store "behind the meter"), you don't have to buy from the grid.

And not buying something tends to be cheaper than buying :)

Building it out and maintaining it isn't free. And per a friend who's been selling consumer solar installations for years in the North East and gotten disillusioned: the equipment maintenance, repairability, and replacement story isn't great at the company they last worked at and results in a lot of environmental waste. One of the reasons they left. Of course, this is just second-hand information - I don't personally have much intuition for how widespread the issue is.

"It's cheaper" is a good route, but a lot of these people have decided they don't care about objective facts in favor of what their favorite media personality says.

In fact, it's very easy to reason them to change their minds:

1. Take statistics from any of these excellent solar power plants for, say, five years time span

2. Find the worst week in terms of energy production in these statistics

3. Explain to the renewable energy skeptic how this 20+ times drop in productivity will be compensated for users

4. The skeptic is successfully convinced and becomes a renewable energy proponent

- cheaper - much less upfront capex, lower operating costs

- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable

- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller

Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."

I almost feel like it doesn't matter if Joe-public is on board or not at this stage. For as much as capitalism kinda got us into this mess, at this point the flywheel is going in the other direction and it's a natural market consequence that renewables will win. Lack of priced in externalities created the problem but the same economics will now save us.*

The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.

* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.

>> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind

Sounds like they have more serious issues going on there... :-)

> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?

Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.

If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.

I do not think the two should be lumped together. They do both need storage but solar is more predictable. Winds can be low for extended periods.

> Winds can be low for extended periods.

So can sun, but that's why we build both where that's unusual. We've got plenty of stats and data gathering on where it's reliably sunny/windy enough.

Can you point to large scale solar or wind projects that were shoved into places that have extended periods of low sunlight or wind?

The entire Energiewende for example.

You can't "sell" the opposite to someone who is expressing a loyalty belief. If their tribe believes in the opposite, then no amount of logic will change their minds - only a change of their or their group's allegiance will change their minds.

if you require a stable energy source, neither wind nor solar (nor both) provide a complete strategy. they can be a part of a composite strategy, though.

for both wind and solar, they're also quite taxing on the environment during manufacturing. the "true cost" is rarely reported.

nuclear energy has a different set of problems (including social / political ones). here's that industry's take on the economics of wind energy: https://www.ans.org/news/article-638/the-economics-of-wind-p...

LCOE is the talking point that should shut down all others along with LCOS of LFP batteries

Yeah the relatively recent paper that takes LCOE and adds back a bunch of cherry picked system costs is a PITA to refute because it's inherently complicated and actually has some good points.

The problem is every good argument for renewables will always inevitably have someone come up with some kind of counterpoint that on the surface may seem reasonable to those without the time or inclination to deeply research it all.

Energy is complicated.

FWIW I agree with a sibling poster who said to just say "its cheaper".

> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind

let me guess... they sell oil?

> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?

Increasing utility energy prices worked for me. I wasn't anti-solar, but it didn't seem worthwhile for me. When the utility price doubled over three years (or just about), the math makes sense now. I'm not looking for solar to acheive grid independence though, I already have a whole house generator for that, because utility power is two nines reliable around here.

check volts.wtf and notably these recent podcast episodes:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity

https://www.volts.wtf/p/giving-clean-electricity-a-political

In Australia conservatives with solar on their own roof continue to complain about renewables generally. It's just a weird cultural thing for some people.

The sun will last forever (at least from our point of view).

A few different things would help.

First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.

Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.

Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.

And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.

Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.

Why doing so? When there are so many people irrationally against something, there's always some upside in being closer to truth than the crowd. It's arbitrage.

Why would you be adamantly against solar? That sounds like someone who is of the opinion that solar is NEVER a good idea. Nonsense.

I’ve talked to some local people who are convinced that panels slowly leach heavy metals into the surrounding ground.

They mainly argue against it on residential & farm land (Midwest USA) for this reason.

Fox News is funded by fossil. They literally ship a 24x7 feed of why fossil is good and renewables are bad. It is their business model: money for placed content to shape opinions.

So someone watching that has strong opinions about renewables that is hard to overcome.

You need to include batteries in the equation: solar, wind, water and batteries.

What California and others have shown is that you can replace natural gas peaker plants (literally - tear out natural gas turbines) with batteries and get both superior cost dynamics and "dispatchability" (aka turning them on and off). Batteries have millisecond level dispatch, peaker plants have hours level dispatch.

it depends. some places it makes sense, some places it doesn't.

it will be adopted when the money speaks. the good news is that money is a reasonably close proxy to "environmental benefit" (balancing the environmental costs of green infra production versus dirtiness of gas generation)

> some places it doesn't

I can see this for wind, but not solar. PV turns sunlight into electrical energy. The whole damp rock gets sunlight on the outside, why not build panels anywhere?

For wind yeah, if you live one of those boring flat places which gets tornadoes a wind turbine is definitely a bad idea, it won't make much energy and then a tornado turns it into scrap and possibly destroys nearby things with chunks of debris.

Just to add some numbers here, in Sweden the amount of energy you get from solar during the worst months are a single digit percentage, while consumption of energy during the same period doubles from the average. Consumption during the best solar months drops to about half.

Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.

> why not build panels anywhere?

Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.

So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.

But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.

I spent a good chunk of my life in the Pacific Northwest. You get very long stretches of cloudy skies through most of the winter that are poor for solar. However, there are alternatives in that region like hydro that may be more suitable choices.

If we can build skyscrapers that can survive tornadoes, can wind turbines be made tornado proof?

I believe this is one of those having your cake & eating your cake scenarios.

Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.

Can we?

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/tarrant-county/the-t...

> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.

> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.

Tornadoes are not actually very common in terms of how often you'd expect a structure to be hit by one. You're looking at hundreds or thousands of years between tornado hits even in the most tornado-prone areas. They're numerous, but small.

Plenty of people call renewable energy woke

> Woke is cultural Marxism

> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. [1]

> Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. [2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

Yes, the first one was the original meaning of the word.

The second one is... I don't know how to debate someone who quotes Wikipedia like this. It's not what I said.

What is "cultural Marxism"? I genuinely do not understand.

I find no arguments against solar. I can put it everywhere and has no moving parts. Once storing is solved, perfect.

But wind?? Huge nature areas are destroyed by beton fundaments, rotors break, and just in germany was a scandal lately about recycling, as the first structures need to be renewed.

It's not like other forms of power generation don't have similar problems. Solar PV cells lose efficiency and need to be replaced. Nuclear has very long term storage concerns. Coal and natural gas plants have finite expected lifetimes before the whole plant needs to shut down.

This is exciting news but the term power here should really be replaced with electricity which is clarified early on in the article.

Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)

This is true but also distorting because it's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison. Electricity is not only much more flexible it's also much more efficient when it's an option.

The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.

All true, but also remember that in a zero-fossil world the supply chain for solar/wind also needs to be decarbonized, which involves things like making green steel, which is not such a favorable efficiency story (the way to overcome it is simply to generate massive amounts of electricity cheap enough that you can eat the inefficiency).

That is true, but a lot of that, if replaced by electricity, would use considerably less energy overall, so it's not a 1:1 comparison.

Residential heating in particular would use anywhere between a third to half the energy, if we only transitioned to heat pumps.

Important to consider that your stat is likely comparing primary energy, not secondary energy. E.g. an electric car or a heat pump use less primary energy than the fossil equivalent.

Global solar PV deployment is approaching 1TW/year. All energy will be clean energy in the next 1-2 decades. Vehicles will electrify, as will heating. Roughly half of marine traffic disappears if you're not shipping fossil fuels around.

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-export-data/

And roughly 2/3rds of that is lost as waste heat, so really only another 25% is actually useful.

It's a good news but I didn't expect that coal is still on the 1st place and not really trending down. I though coal was largely replaced by gas years ago...

And gas is not going down either.

Coal is much cheaper than gas.

Is it cheaper per MW of generated power? I thought that the main reason use of gas has increased so much (for power generation) over the past 20-30 years is that gas became cheaper.

in large parts of the west! still good news

The percentage increases here don't really tell the full picture. Look at it in terms of pure TWh [1]. China just dwarfs any other country in terms of wind and solar deployment. I guess that's the difference between putting engineers in charge instead of those who believe in the magical powers of red heifers [2].

One of the short-term issues in the US is going to be that a lot of utilities depend on natural gas and natural gas prices are going to keep rising beyond whatever happens in the Persian Gulf because of increased LNG exports (that directly raises domestic prices) and the increased use of gas turbines for AI data centers. Plus all the consumers are going to pay for the infrastructure buildout for electricity for those data centers.

So, despite a large Y/Y solar increase in the US, electricity prices are only going up.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/36117/electricity-generated-b...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393661

More good news from Ember, according to their Global Electricity Review 2026 [1]:

Solar power increased by a record 636 TWh to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.

Wind saw the second-largest increase, growing 205 TWh (+8.2%)

Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.

For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.

For comparison, I have collated information from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System. The fastest that nuclear power generation ever grew was 213 TWh added in 1985. Since the year 2000, the fastest growth year was 2004, with 111 TWh added.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...

I feel the energy conversation is dominated by people that don't realize how far Solar tech has come recently argiung with other people that don't realize short low nuclear half lives have gotten recently.

Also worth looking at recent Australia events, where evening peaking is incredibly severe. But batteries have been carrying the entire load!

Incredible gobsmacking amount of stored energy on display here. Great to see. https://bsky.app/profile/neilgrant.bsky.social/post/3mneo3to...

Renewable energy offers a competitive advantage for any energy intensive activity --- like manufacturing or AI.

China gets it, the USA doesn't.

Even so, the article says it grew 8% YOY in the US. The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend so that even politicians won't be able to reverse it.

It’s already irreversible, but it’s just disappointing to see how the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it, while other countries like China are embracing reality.

It’s actually funny if you don’t think about it too hard. The U.S. president is trying to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, while starting a war in Iran that’s led to the global fossil fuel market to be negatively impacted, forcing most Americans to pay more for fossil fuels. Who could have seen that coming? We’re doing great!

> the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it

the biggest producer of renewables is Texas, by a longshot. and the state of california just created insane NEM laws that favor the pockets of pg&e (and are shit for the environment) and as a result solar home installations have cratered.

Texas barely scrapes into the top ten red states by percentage of wind and solar, despite its ideal geography.

From the CalISO graphs, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of solar power for most of the day. It doesn't seem reasonable to incentivise production in the same way as it was when that wasn't the case.

I think NEM 3.0 incentivises storage now? Which seems to be what the (California) grid is looking for.

> the biggest producer of renewables is Texas

That doesn't refute the point at all.

no, but renewables do speak for themselves in dollars and cents, even if they dont have subsidy. now should petrochem subsidies end too? probably yes.

> renewables do speak for themselves in dollars and cents

Yes. But administration opposition can change that math, as they have with the tariffs.

Both NEM 2.0 and 3.0 have serious issues, but for different reasons. NEM 2.0 was basically a early adopter's rich person's subsidy that heavily distorted the market, and NEM 3.0 does not have nearly enough subsidies to justify the cost unless you pay cash up front for a large system. (For the record, I am on NEM 3.0 and got such a system).

At the end of the day, the best case scenario is large scale renewable / battery storage to bring costs down as much as possible, and for those of us who want battery backup / solar can choose to invest in it, but it shouldn't be "the" solution.

"No One Could Have Predicted This!" - Nation where this happens all the time

Imagine how much faster it would be growing if the U.S. government wasn’t paying companies billions to not produce wind energy

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas...

or delaying standard approvals

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/climate/wind-solar-projec...

Or forcing unprofitable coal power plants to remain operating against their owners' wishes. https://www.energy.gov/documents/doe-order-no-202-26-19-scha...

The USA get's it. Trump doesn't. Texas is a the leader in wind and solar in the US.

Compare generation stats for yesterday between 2021 and 2026 on the Texas grid (ERCOT)

* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2021-06-03

* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2026-06-03

Also, the Californian grid (CAISO) shows where everyone is headed with a huge deployment of batteries:

* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2021-06-03

* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2026-06-03

All of that combined is peanuts compared to what's happening in China. Not to mention that all the panels and most of the wind turbines are produced in China. It's not just a question of installing them, it's having the industry and technical know how to make them that really matters.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...

Spoken with such authority!

Smelters in Australia are leaning on the fossil-friendly politicians to stop getting in the way of renewables because they can't compete with global prices unless they use renewables.

Unlike in the USA --- they obviously grasp the fact that renewables help lower energy costs even if they aren't used all the time.

Yes, that probably explains why US imports of steel and aluminum continue to grow, even with a 25% tariff.

US manufacturers and consumers just love the added cost --- aka, inflation.

https://www.steel.org/2026/03/steel-imports-up-4-6-in-januar...

Germany screwed themselves.

Solar and progress on better batteries is a more consequential and useful technological revolution than AI. Should be a huge story, but there's not enough money to be made via speculation so it's not.

> there's not enough money to be made via speculation

I mean, there is money to be made. CATL stock (the major producer of EV batteries with 50% market share, with billions of contracts for stationary batteries) rose 48.81% over the last 6 months, for example.

But I agree that news about renewables goes unnoticed. I only see news about renewables because I actively seek out channels and websites that cover it. I wonder if it is because most companies in the industry are Chinese and don't focus on PR in the West as AI companies do.

why is it? of course now this is true. But people investing money in the future of AI, a future where AI can produce an enormous amount of goods.

When will AI start producing goods?

Claude, Gemini and Grok are all doing shifts at Little Debbie’s making Swiss Rolls

Finally, AI has become useful!

To be fair (and, somewhat ironically, rationally detached libertarian) that's the way it's supposed to be. We don't develop and deploy technology to make a bunch of too-online nerds rich. We develop and deploy technology to make everyone's lives better by providing goods at lower expense and lower externalized cost.

Indeed, but wouldn't it be great if all of this capital pouring into the AI bubble went into global electrification and clean energy instead?

Ah well, we'll get there eventually.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-generation

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

https://electrek.co/2026/02/23/texas-is-about-to-overtake-ca...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/battery-storage-is-...

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-installa...

*electricity . Gas is heavily used for heating , cooking & industrial uses (e.g. drying agriculture like hops, boilers etc).

I raise this point since policymakers get confused and try to ban gas, only to realize how critical gas is for food & industrial applications that consumers enjoy after the fact.

You're correct that this ought to say "electricity" and not "power".

But I think you're wrong to think that gas is "critical" to any of the things you've listed. "Currently used" ... yes. "Not replaceable by electricity" ... no (unlike, e.g. air travel).

Finally some good news!

China having managed to position itself as the main driver of the green transition by investing into key industries illustrates the power of state planning. The markets simply can't operate on horizons of decades because there is no immediate profit to be had. You need long term planning and sustained investment that only a state is able to provide.

Great news. Now let's surpass coal, the far more insidious and prevalent source!

How is that working for German industry where you need dense energy if you are going to continue build anything big..

Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.

Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.

Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.

It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!

Believe it or not, a large solar field (or several!) can readily densify its energy into a nice small power transmission line.

You turn the machines on when electricity is cheap, and turn em off when it's not?

Folks operating businesses that depend on oil prices would know these tricks?

when energy is abundant, you use it to hoist a large rock very high up above your head

when energy is scarce, you drop the rock on your head

pretty well? and it can only get better if we continue rolling out renewables?