Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
Sure, but their energy budget includes everything. They don’t have the luxury of importing energy others invested into decades ago when convenient and having it be off balance sheet like Denmark does.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
> Except turning off when prices are too low for too long
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
> Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
>
The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Electric generation is a business and existing sites will be prime locations for new panels (likely straightforward to permit, connection to the grid, etc.).
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).
Fortunately the grid storage rollout is happening at a blistering pace too. Reported payback of investment for 2 years for many of the early rollouts (due to arbitrage between peak/off peak prices) and while that won't last it's still amazing economics.
The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime.
>The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction.
That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
Firstly, the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years, I assume the situation is similar in the EU. New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. Similarly the cost of managing Fukushima is way higher than the cost of constructing all the nuclear plants in Japan. These costs are of course never added to the cost of nuclear power, since nobody operating nuclear plants has any chance of paying such sums. But they are in fact a larger factor than the construction costs were.
These experiences did have some effect, thankfully, in that made new power plants more expensive, because we know that we must take any conceivable measure to prevent more Chernobyls and Fukushimas from happening.
And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost, despite them being paid off a long time ago. Meaning there is significant cost even after the construction is paid.
So it seems that the claim that "construction is the main cost" comes from the operator's point of view. Basically "the construction is the largest part WE have to pay, because taxpayers cover the rest".
That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game. And all of that is made even worse because of the whole "nuclear" part, with plenty of critical parts becoming irradiated and essentially impossible to touch unless you let it rest for a couple of decades. On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.
Hopefully, small modular reactors (SMRs) bring down construction costs and build times significantly. The economics would be better than 2010s fossil fuel prices if companies like NuScale and TerraPower deliver on their ambitious, but attainable promises.
Suburban America is dying because it is operating like a Ponzi scheme: the property taxes aren't high enough to pay for the long-term maintenance and replacement of infra, and for the past handful of decades it has compensated by filling the budget holes with one-off windfalls due to taxes on new development.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
So, as a rule of thumb, the solar panel loses approximately 1% per year. So after 30 years it's generating around 70% of rated capacity.
At that (or any earlier or later) point one could replace the panels. That's really cheap to do, and can be done with more-or-less unskilled labor.
If you are space-constrained (like your residential roof) then you'll likely do it earlier.
If you are a commercial producer, sitting in a desert somewhere, it'll likely be better to just "plant another field" next door. Keep the 70% (it's free), and bolster capacity by adding more panels, not replacing old ones.
And this is before we take into account places where the ecology under the panels has changed and become more valuable in its own right.
So 25 years from now, or maybe 10 years from now, it might pay to replace panels. Which may in turn lead to very cheap 75% 2nd hand panels becoming widely available.
None of the generation options have tightly controlled lifetimes. So that means you can always "put off" work to some extent and that hasn't changed between a Coal power plant and Solar farms. Similar to transport infrastructure, if you're a democracy your voters will be very angry if you "waste" money on maintenance and they'll also be very angry if you don't do the work and then bad things happen.
Thanks to recent events though.. nuclear got its subsidies back. Every border empire ever- at least 3 nuclear power plants per country in the next decade.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
Which is quite surprising, because on an irradiance map[0] The Netherlands and Germany have some of the worst per-year solar output in the world - an installation in the Mojave Desert would produce literally twice the amount of power with the same panels! And especially The Netherlands doesn't exactly have a lot of empty land either.
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
Netherlands is mostly rooftop solar, which is easy and cheap to install there. No permitting required, previous net metering policies gave a very predictable ROI and cost is very reasonable: say 3k eur for 8 panels including installation, that would get you like 3000kwh/year. Panels would be just over 2k, the crew to get it done like 600-800 euros. Electricity ain't electricity cheap there to the point the ROI would be just a couple years with the net metering. You'd be stupid not to get it at that point and a few thousand bucks is a very feasible investment for most people without having to resort to financing.
I live in Texas now where there's a lot more sun and a lot more electricity usage (though it's cheaper per kwh). Panels and inverters are a significant percentage more expensive due to tariffs and stuff, but that's not even the biggest cost driver. It's the permitting and installation costs that make it so so so much more expensive. If I could get a bunch of panels on my roof for $5k, they'd be there already. But typical costs I'm seeing is low five figures which is well beyond my appetite or electricity costs.
A big part of it is that The Netherlands has quite generous subsidies for roof solar panels on your home: you may subtract total power delivered to the grid from total power consumed when calculating your yearly electricity bill. This effectively means you can use excess solar generated during summer months to reduce your winter electricity bill, nullifying one of the biggest downsides of PV (intermittent generation).
The subsidy is set to expire next year, however. Although it was extremely successful in getting People to install roof solar, it is a severe adverse incentive for home battery systems (why store your generated power in a battery when you can give it to the grid and get it 100% back for free whenever), and it is making electricity more expensive for those who cannot install solar.
Looking at yearly solar irradiation actually underplays the disadvantage we have in northern Europe in terms of PV. If all we had to do is built twice the capacity that would be one thing but our winters are quite dark, making PV energy generation almost negible around the winter solstice. Whatever generation capacity we can displace in the summer we still have to keep around to make up the shortfall in December. I love when I see solar panels here but rationally speaking Germany and the Netherlands should be among the late adopters.
> In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
If global solar capacity was 1873 GW in 2025, global wind capacity was 1132 GW, and global nuclear capacity was 398 GW, how could solar and wind have surpassed nuclear in March of 2026 for the first time?
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Idea, which unfortunately won't be feasible until MAGA dies:
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
At least in the case of wind the federal government has attacked via the permitting process. That limits what states can do, cutting taxes doesn't help if you can't build at all.
There have often been private deals between renewables and big energy customers but the finances don't always work out how you might expect. Renewable projects are built using debt with interest rates largely based on the likelihood of generating revenue by selling electricity. And because of the long time scale interest can snowball to form a substantial part of the cost. Having a guaranteed customer in the form of a data centre is balanced by the risk that they might go out of business. You are basically coupling the risk of the generator to the risk of the consumer. That is why CfD style schemes are often favoured because it is just a safer source of revenue. Obviously hyper scalers have access to very cheap credit, but they may end up paying more for the electricity.
It is a shame that nuclear power has stagnated - we could have been moving towards fossil fuel free grid half a century ago. We've lost decades of progress there. But it's a good thing that solar power is coming into its own more and more.
Where we lost decades of progress was governments pouring enormous amounts of R&D money into nuclear instead of renewables. We got a nuclear a head start that turned out to be a dead end. We could have gotten solar, wind and storage cost competitive with fossils decades earlier. And as a side effect kept the west competitive in energy tech.
Nuclear isn't uncompetitive due to some inherent technological reason. It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
Solar used to be completely uncompetitive, but improvements in technology and increases in scale made the economics work. Nuclear got kneecapped before that could have a chance of happening.
> It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
This is a bedtime story nuclear fans tell themselves, but it’s not true. There are many regulatory regimes all over the world, and new nuclear is competitive in effectively none of them. Even in single party state china with few regulations , nukes are a declining share of total power every year.
They’re just giant big complex pieces of machinery. With huge ongoing security, insurance and deferred decommissioning costs.
Yeah, nuclear is fine. It just at this point it can’t really compete with solar+battery for how quickly you can bring things online. The 10 or 15 years required to build a nuclear plant is pretty devastating for it when you can build up solar in 1-2 years instead.
It also can't compete on cost. Nuclear is crazy expensive and prone to cost overruns, so no market party is willing to build it without the government taking on all of the financial risks. And with the rapidly evolving power landscape the long payback time only makes things worse.
It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.
Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
You know what I call solar--fusion power. There's a giant fusion reactor running for free. We simply need to extract the useful energy. Want to build a terrestrial fusion reactor? A conventional nuclear reactor? You still need to extract useful energy and deal with excess heat. The way I see it, from an economic perspective, long-term, solar wins. Of course, this is just my long-view
I installed solar panels in my backyard, and then texted my dad that my basement is now powered by fusion with a roughly eight minute delay.
He then asked "isn't pretty much all power on earth outside of nuclear fission technically done by fusion if we give enough of a delay?". I didn't really have a rebuttal to that.
Geothermal is not nuclear fission. It's some combination of primordial heat from the formation of the Earth (which was gravitational energy) and radioactive decay (which is distinct from fission).
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
This is not very surprising given that nuclear technology was choked for the past 30 years, until recently.
That does not negate the celebration of solar generation growth, but we should consider that nuclear did not have as much enthusiasm and investment as solar did in the recent decades.
Each nuclear plant is practically a new adventure, and recursively so. It’s specialized work and the people who learn to build one properly don’t travel the world consulting on them, except perhaps at the management and design levels. Welders aren’t.
Meanwhile once you’ve installed 10% of a solar project, the rest of the project is almost exactly the same, and you can ramp up or ramp down the size of the final build as you go and capital either becomes constrained or part of the build goes online and starts subsidizing the rest. Your experts have journeymen under them that can start taking on more work allowing the throughput to increase.
How Big Projects Get Done talks about how roads, solar and wind all have this property, and most special projects don’t, which leads to either massive cost overruns or dead projects.
Solar install is also easier and requires less exactitude, so training is faster and easier. Lose 1% of the modules in a PV field and your output is down slightly and temporarily. Screw up 1% of the welds in a nuclear plant and you're in massive trouble.
There could still be a great future in that from stored thermal energy from renewables. I harp on this a lot here; the estimated cost for 600 C heat available with 100% capacity factor is $3-5/GJ, just from resistive PV heat.
A cup of water with salt added doesn't get noticeably warm since there's just not much entropy difference in salt water vs fresh water. These days you can reverse the process at very low electricity cost with reverse osmosis.
That's not fire. We might colloquially call it fire, but that's not what it is.
Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.
Yes. They argue Helion screwed up computing the rate of energy flow from fast ions to cool electrons. I have not seen a good rejoinder from Helion, which is a very bad sign.
Given this, and given the apparent failure of Zap's scheme to scale, I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.
China just finished building some but it's a dead end technology.
It first lost to PV for daylight generation, then it fell back on storing the heat for use generating after sunset but cheap batteries made that obsolete too.
In order for renewables like solar and wind energy to truly take the burden off a grid, we have to have large capacity energy storage solutions that balance the grid over a 8+ hour period. That way we can handle peak demand of the grid during high load which often happens when there's little light and on hot days when the wind doesn't generate nearly as much electricity.
Yes. Batteries are coming. I think many people truly misunderstand the full power with which solar/wind + batteries will transform our societies (and by the way also giving more resilient and insular power networks than centralized power plants can ever give)
This can be done in a distributed way using home batteries. This would increase demand for peak solar production for use outside this peak. At the moment solar production creates a large price disparity that can be corrected with home batteries.
Transmission lines can act like storage when there is PV to the east or west of you. This doesn’t remove the need for storage, but can dramatically reduce it.
The old model of cheap peaking power plants and cheaper base-load power is equivalent to cheap peaking power + cheap but inconsistent green energy. It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
Chile still wants transmission north south because in the winter solar closer to the equator has longer days and in the winter solar near the poles does.
Oh boy, you are very naive, ain't you? No country will put their energy stability in hands of their neighbors. Or do you see China, Korea, India and Russia interconnect their grids? What other supranational grids you know of?
Which perfectly proves that 90% of the comments in this thread have no clue about energy and think that running a grid on solar and wind only plus some batteries is a solved problem.
A lot of energy is used for heating, heating water is more efficient with fossil fuel than with electricity - because for electricity you have transmission loss.
That used to be the case, but with the efficient heat pumps that have come out in the last few years, that is no longer true. Since you’re using electricity to move heat rather than produce it, it’s two to three times more efficient than burning fossil fuels for heating.
Does it, though? Assuming 80% of energy use is fossil and fossil has a 50% loss, if all that fossil were to transition to ~100% efficient electricity[0] we'd already be at 33% of our renewable electricity needs. That's quite a bit more than the 20% the "80% fossil" seems to suggest!
"One-third done" sounds an awful lot like we're going to start seeing optimistic "we'll be halfway there at the end of the decade" headlines soon...
[0]: Things like the grid and car batteries don't operate at 100% but closer to 95%, but things like heat pumps operate at 300% efficiency, so I reckon that'll more-or-less cancel out for back-of-the-napkin math.
Yes we're not done yet, but renewable only started gaining share again around 2010, and how quickly solar/battery is being deployed is really impressive.
I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.
Wind power has been undergoing a very similar rapid fall in cost, and rapid rise in installations, and is a fantastic natural resource (and also one that complements solar almost perfectly!), but it always feels like solar gets 10x the attention and conversation that wind gets.
My interest is mostly getting solar installed at home, something I can feasibly do. I don't think my city allows for residential wind turbine installs.
Dumb question: is there a limit to how much energy we can capture? I'm imagining a wind gust blowing east to west across a city filled wind turbines. By the time the gust reaches the west end of the city, has most of its energy been captured or otherwise dissipated?
Contrasting that with solar, where any surface area receiving direct sunlight doesn't prevent other adjacent areas from also capturing solar.
Wind power scales with the turbine area squared, and the wind velocity cubed. That means there's massive incentive to make bigger and taller turbines (windspeeds are higher the further away from the ground you are).
For that reason, there is very little reason to build small wind turbines, even if there wasn't a down-stream loss of power from putting too many close together.
So there's the hobbyist side of it, but I guess it's not totally clear why that matters to the people talking about the world's power mix.
But as I write that, I guess it becomes more clear to me that a personal interest in installing the technology makes one pay more attention to it elsewhere, and promote more conversations about it that get others involved.
Just study learning rates of different technologies and it quickly becomes very evident, how future energy mixes will roughly look like.
(That's also why fossil fuels have no future in the energy mix. They don't have any significant learning rate - just like minerals.)
See e.g. this seminal paper: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
There needs to be more general understanding of energy density and scalability, which is why I don't think we'll get away from fossil fuels without nuclear or fusion.
Of course, the officially titled World Nuclear Industry Status Report is actually produced by anti nuclear activist Mycle Schneider (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycle_Schneider).
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
Contrary to their name, "rare earth metals" aren't actually rare, and for a lot of the renewables stack they aren't strictly necessary.
Take lithium batteries, for example. They were attractive for early BEVs because the consumer electronics market already developed an industry for them, and they were attractive for early grid storage because the BEVs scaled that industry up. But that doesn't mean you have to use lithium for grid storage, and when push comes to shove we could also use sodium-ion batteries, or iron redox flow batteries.
If your country no longer has access to iron and salt, I reckon you have bigger things to worry about.
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
Your four year old paper shows wind+solar costs as on par with nuclear in the final (LFSCOE95) model in the ERCOT market before factoring in dropping battery farm costs.
Other papers exist with a different opinion (eg: Australia's more recent CSIRO energy report finds nuclear not providing bang for the buck in the Australian market)
Further, despite claiming Level Full System Costs, there's no factoring in for externalities - eg: climate costs of dragging out fossil fuels while waiting for nuclear to come online, political costs of being steadily reliant on outside countries for fuel and supply (cost of gas to non gas nations, etc).
There are other issues - it's a paper with an opinion - not the foundational rock you want to base strong assertions on, as you did.
Your data is way out of date. Renewables, particularly solar+battery, are incredibly attractive from an economic perspective. That’s why the build-out has accelerated so much. It’s not government hippies (I wish—have you seen the state of world politics lately?), it’s cold hard capitalism.
Give me balcony solar (in the U.S.) or give me death![1]
[1] Really, climate change risks already a massive liability in so many places (forst fire-caused particulate air pollution, etc.). We need far more solar and battery capacity to bend the curve.
I've been forced to use Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 at my job for the past 4 years, and the longer I use it, the more it makes me wish I was using OpenBSD w/ xfce.
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
> Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
I saw numbers in GW where I was expecting numbers in GWh ? How does the amount of energy produced compare ? "In 2025, nuclear plants generated 2,703 TWh", how about solar and wind ?
What kind of civilization is possible on intermittent power ? All western civilization is built on 24/24 7/7 available energy (from direct use of petroleum or electricity). I think we should give two numbers: the raw TWh output and the stable TW output and see where they are coming from. Africa and Asia are rapidly being electrified, but if it does not create an industrial boom outside China by guaranteed available energy it's just more people having intermittent AC and not real development.
A civilization that uses storage to level that intermittency. It's perfectly possible to power industrial world civilization using only renewables, and it would be cheaper than trying to do it with fission (which would require breeder reactors, btw.)
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
This oft quoted idea that nukes are only expensive because of incompetent regulations, and if they just got out of poor nuclear a way it would be affordable, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.
This can't be true. It must be fake news, because my telescreen told me that nuclear is the only viable future. Coincidentally most of the world's uranium comes from Russia.
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
> I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments
Idk, when you because of that implementation, for 20 years pay for the energy 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy, that seems pretty fanatical by me.
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
I am mostly pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
Well, what would you expect a solar rollout to look like?
Assuming we'd instantly switch from zero solar demand to unlimited solar demand, we'd need some kind of scaleup of PV manufacturing first, and with a fixed construction capacity of PV factories we'd see a linear rise in PV factory capacity - which would result in an exponential growth in yearly PV factory output.
But the same applies to the factories as well: the construction capacity is going to scale up as well, so as more PV factory part manufacturing becomes available we'll start to see an exponential growth in new PV factories, which would result in even larger PV factory output.
Scaling from "lab experiment and niche application" to "significant chunk of the grid" is a lot harder than scaling from "significant chunk of the grid" to "the entire grid" - especially with solar being embarrassingly parallel rather than requiring mega-scale deployments.
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
The Sun is #1 die nukes die!
very happy now.
had some issues with my off grid solar powered house and shop last week, but bounced back quickly and ran a small welder
as part of the system verification test,
still running massivly outdated gear, holding out till I can integrate car charging in a bigger upgrade.
saw a smaller farm last week that paved a small padock out by the road with 30~50 kw grid tie array , ground mount to concrete blocks, drop it and run, zero out the powerbill.
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
Brainwashed fission bros double-count reactor builds every year they are under construction. In terms of completed stations, China is opening 1 new reactor (~2GW) and hundreds of new PV stations (~300GW) per year. Over 99% of it is solar and nuclear is a sideshow.
Wow that's bananas. I suspected the answer would skew towards solar but not by that much. To me that also substantially discredits the "bureaucracy makes nuclear expensive" argument, my impression is the Chinese at doing this kind of engineering efficiently.
We absolutely have solved cheap battery storage. 100% solved. It is crazy to make this statement when we are discussing nuclear thermal power, which requires multiple 20-million-dollar steam turbines for every station. You should have said "We still haven't solved cheap superalloy fan blades".
Are we burning the battery materials into gases and sending the results into the atmosphere? No, then we are unlikely to run out of materials on a primary or secondary, recycled, basis. Not to mention the diversity of choices available for chemistries and storage
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
Only during the day... Nuclear power still FAR outperforms solar at night.
I'm sick of everyone saying that solar is this great solution that will solve all our energy woes. There are times and places for it for sure, but we don't have the battery capacity to actually go all-in on it. (And nobody will ever approve the large-scale hydro-batteries we need, and manufacturing conventional batteries is terrible for the environment, negating the gains that solar gives us.)
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
After its commercial span is over, over 90% solar and battery materials can be recycled to make new panels and batteries. Compare that with nuclear where we need to stow away basically-forever-radioactive spent material.
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Nuclear power is generated on demand and allows a full decarbonization of the power grid as can be seen France.
Solar just produces when the sun is shining meaning you can’t build a power grid on it.
Just comparing total generation over a year is comparing apples and oranges.
A kWh is a kWh. A kWh of either solar or nuke means a kWh of coal or gas was not burnt. Seems like apples to apples to me.
An interesting fact is that China has passed "peak coal" in 2024 while still growing with about 5% in a year.
Denmark had peak coal early (2003) due to early investments in wind power. Coal is now practically gone.
We might see China get the same shift in electricity source as Denmark had over the past 20 years, just much faster.
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
Sure, but their energy budget includes everything. They don’t have the luxury of importing energy others invested into decades ago when convenient and having it be off balance sheet like Denmark does.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
The Chinese strategy right now is to just massively overbuild renewables so that even fallow periods generate a substantial amount of energy.
If Sweden can build nuclear, why can't China?
China has 38 reactors under construction and are leaders in advanced designs.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
> Except turning off when prices are too low for too long
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
Denmark highly depends on imports.
> Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
> The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Electric generation is a business and existing sites will be prime locations for new panels (likely straightforward to permit, connection to the grid, etc.).
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).
Fortunately the grid storage rollout is happening at a blistering pace too. Reported payback of investment for 2 years for many of the early rollouts (due to arbitrage between peak/off peak prices) and while that won't last it's still amazing economics.
Well, that will certainly be an issue for nuclear power capacity in the future.
The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime.
>The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction.
That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
Firstly, the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years, I assume the situation is similar in the EU. New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. Similarly the cost of managing Fukushima is way higher than the cost of constructing all the nuclear plants in Japan. These costs are of course never added to the cost of nuclear power, since nobody operating nuclear plants has any chance of paying such sums. But they are in fact a larger factor than the construction costs were.
These experiences did have some effect, thankfully, in that made new power plants more expensive, because we know that we must take any conceivable measure to prevent more Chernobyls and Fukushimas from happening.
And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost, despite them being paid off a long time ago. Meaning there is significant cost even after the construction is paid.
So it seems that the claim that "construction is the main cost" comes from the operator's point of view. Basically "the construction is the largest part WE have to pay, because taxpayers cover the rest".
That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game. And all of that is made even worse because of the whole "nuclear" part, with plenty of critical parts becoming irradiated and essentially impossible to touch unless you let it rest for a couple of decades. On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.
Hopefully, small modular reactors (SMRs) bring down construction costs and build times significantly. The economics would be better than 2010s fossil fuel prices if companies like NuScale and TerraPower deliver on their ambitious, but attainable promises.
Much easier to do upgrades piecemeal though with solar and wind.
Suburban America is dying because it is operating like a Ponzi scheme: the property taxes aren't high enough to pay for the long-term maintenance and replacement of infra, and for the past handful of decades it has compensated by filling the budget holes with one-off windfalls due to taxes on new development.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
Everything fails given a long enough time span.
For solar PV it is ~30 years.
While the cell may continue to generate power, it may have diminished so greatly as to no longer justify its physical footprint
Yes, and no.
So, as a rule of thumb, the solar panel loses approximately 1% per year. So after 30 years it's generating around 70% of rated capacity.
At that (or any earlier or later) point one could replace the panels. That's really cheap to do, and can be done with more-or-less unskilled labor.
If you are space-constrained (like your residential roof) then you'll likely do it earlier.
If you are a commercial producer, sitting in a desert somewhere, it'll likely be better to just "plant another field" next door. Keep the 70% (it's free), and bolster capacity by adding more panels, not replacing old ones.
And this is before we take into account places where the ecology under the panels has changed and become more valuable in its own right.
So 25 years from now, or maybe 10 years from now, it might pay to replace panels. Which may in turn lead to very cheap 75% 2nd hand panels becoming widely available.
None of the generation options have tightly controlled lifetimes. So that means you can always "put off" work to some extent and that hasn't changed between a Coal power plant and Solar farms. Similar to transport infrastructure, if you're a democracy your voters will be very angry if you "waste" money on maintenance and they'll also be very angry if you don't do the work and then bad things happen.
You just replace it with more solar panels like what is so complicated about this? Also, this stuff is growing every year. It’s all staggered.
And the replacements will cost less and produce more power than the originals.
> Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent.
Yep, that’s what exponential growth looks like.
Wow almost a tripling of solar output in less than 4 years. That’s incredible!
Thanks to recent events though.. nuclear got its subsidies back. Every border empire ever- at least 3 nuclear power plants per country in the next decade.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
China is around half that capacity. Asia represents 3/4 of new capacity.
With this being said, Australia, Netherlands and Germany are leading in solar capacity per capita according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
Which is quite surprising, because on an irradiance map[0] The Netherlands and Germany have some of the worst per-year solar output in the world - an installation in the Mojave Desert would produce literally twice the amount of power with the same panels! And especially The Netherlands doesn't exactly have a lot of empty land either.
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
[0]: https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Netherlands is mostly rooftop solar, which is easy and cheap to install there. No permitting required, previous net metering policies gave a very predictable ROI and cost is very reasonable: say 3k eur for 8 panels including installation, that would get you like 3000kwh/year. Panels would be just over 2k, the crew to get it done like 600-800 euros. Electricity ain't electricity cheap there to the point the ROI would be just a couple years with the net metering. You'd be stupid not to get it at that point and a few thousand bucks is a very feasible investment for most people without having to resort to financing.
I live in Texas now where there's a lot more sun and a lot more electricity usage (though it's cheaper per kwh). Panels and inverters are a significant percentage more expensive due to tariffs and stuff, but that's not even the biggest cost driver. It's the permitting and installation costs that make it so so so much more expensive. If I could get a bunch of panels on my roof for $5k, they'd be there already. But typical costs I'm seeing is low five figures which is well beyond my appetite or electricity costs.
A big part of it is that The Netherlands has quite generous subsidies for roof solar panels on your home: you may subtract total power delivered to the grid from total power consumed when calculating your yearly electricity bill. This effectively means you can use excess solar generated during summer months to reduce your winter electricity bill, nullifying one of the biggest downsides of PV (intermittent generation).
The subsidy is set to expire next year, however. Although it was extremely successful in getting People to install roof solar, it is a severe adverse incentive for home battery systems (why store your generated power in a battery when you can give it to the grid and get it 100% back for free whenever), and it is making electricity more expensive for those who cannot install solar.
Looking at yearly solar irradiation actually underplays the disadvantage we have in northern Europe in terms of PV. If all we had to do is built twice the capacity that would be one thing but our winters are quite dark, making PV energy generation almost negible around the winter solstice. Whatever generation capacity we can displace in the summer we still have to keep around to make up the shortfall in December. I love when I see solar panels here but rationally speaking Germany and the Netherlands should be among the late adopters.
That’s why they need above average per capita instal.
Yes, this is honestly a huge problem. The US isn't even trying.
They also produce a lot of electric vehicles.
They will probably end up less dependent on oil which is a good thing for them, considering the conflicts this causes
> In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
If global solar capacity was 1873 GW in 2025, global wind capacity was 1132 GW, and global nuclear capacity was 398 GW, how could solar and wind have surpassed nuclear in March of 2026 for the first time?
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Idea, which unfortunately won't be feasible until MAGA dies:
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
At least in the case of wind the federal government has attacked via the permitting process. That limits what states can do, cutting taxes doesn't help if you can't build at all.
There have often been private deals between renewables and big energy customers but the finances don't always work out how you might expect. Renewable projects are built using debt with interest rates largely based on the likelihood of generating revenue by selling electricity. And because of the long time scale interest can snowball to form a substantial part of the cost. Having a guaranteed customer in the form of a data centre is balanced by the risk that they might go out of business. You are basically coupling the risk of the generator to the risk of the consumer. That is why CfD style schemes are often favoured because it is just a safer source of revenue. Obviously hyper scalers have access to very cheap credit, but they may end up paying more for the electricity.
It is a shame that nuclear power has stagnated - we could have been moving towards fossil fuel free grid half a century ago. We've lost decades of progress there. But it's a good thing that solar power is coming into its own more and more.
Late is better than never.
Where we lost decades of progress was governments pouring enormous amounts of R&D money into nuclear instead of renewables. We got a nuclear a head start that turned out to be a dead end. We could have gotten solar, wind and storage cost competitive with fossils decades earlier. And as a side effect kept the west competitive in energy tech.
It's not a shame it stagnated. It's good that it stagnated, since it wasn't competitive.
It's a shame it wasn't competitive.
What do you think I mean by "stagnated"?
Nuclear isn't uncompetitive due to some inherent technological reason. It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
Solar used to be completely uncompetitive, but improvements in technology and increases in scale made the economics work. Nuclear got kneecapped before that could have a chance of happening.
> It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
This is a bedtime story nuclear fans tell themselves, but it’s not true. There are many regulatory regimes all over the world, and new nuclear is competitive in effectively none of them. Even in single party state china with few regulations , nukes are a declining share of total power every year.
They’re just giant big complex pieces of machinery. With huge ongoing security, insurance and deferred decommissioning costs.
Compare the average specific carbon emissions and price per kWh between Germany and France and tell me nuclear is not competitive.
Nuclear is so competitive that they had to ban it in Germany to get rid of it.
Yeah, nuclear is fine. It just at this point it can’t really compete with solar+battery for how quickly you can bring things online. The 10 or 15 years required to build a nuclear plant is pretty devastating for it when you can build up solar in 1-2 years instead.
It also can't compete on cost. Nuclear is crazy expensive and prone to cost overruns, so no market party is willing to build it without the government taking on all of the financial risks. And with the rapidly evolving power landscape the long payback time only makes things worse.
That's the most depressing thing. Nuclear has been successfuly overregulated.
It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.
Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
If you deregulated it and made it pay for its own disaster insurance it would stop existing.
Without price anderson act dumping the liability on to taxpayers nobody would build nuclear reactors even at the cost they are.
A completely predictable outcome of being under regulated and having several disastrous outcomes.
Unfortunate, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
You know what I call solar--fusion power. There's a giant fusion reactor running for free. We simply need to extract the useful energy. Want to build a terrestrial fusion reactor? A conventional nuclear reactor? You still need to extract useful energy and deal with excess heat. The way I see it, from an economic perspective, long-term, solar wins. Of course, this is just my long-view
I installed solar panels in my backyard, and then texted my dad that my basement is now powered by fusion with a roughly eight minute delay.
He then asked "isn't pretty much all power on earth outside of nuclear fission technically done by fusion if we give enough of a delay?". I didn't really have a rebuttal to that.
Not geothermal I would think?
Actually thinking back I think he might have said "nuclear fission and geothermal". This was months ago.
Arguably nuclear fission in this case.
Geothermal is not nuclear fission. It's some combination of primordial heat from the formation of the Earth (which was gravitational energy) and radioactive decay (which is distinct from fission).
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
So, you are telling me that you can survive by eating seven times the daily ration of an average human and then it nothing the rest of the week?
This is not very surprising given that nuclear technology was choked for the past 30 years, until recently.
That does not negate the celebration of solar generation growth, but we should consider that nuclear did not have as much enthusiasm and investment as solar did in the recent decades.
Each nuclear plant is practically a new adventure, and recursively so. It’s specialized work and the people who learn to build one properly don’t travel the world consulting on them, except perhaps at the management and design levels. Welders aren’t.
Meanwhile once you’ve installed 10% of a solar project, the rest of the project is almost exactly the same, and you can ramp up or ramp down the size of the final build as you go and capital either becomes constrained or part of the build goes online and starts subsidizing the rest. Your experts have journeymen under them that can start taking on more work allowing the throughput to increase.
How Big Projects Get Done talks about how roads, solar and wind all have this property, and most special projects don’t, which leads to either massive cost overruns or dead projects.
Solar install is also easier and requires less exactitude, so training is faster and easier. Lose 1% of the modules in a PV field and your output is down slightly and temporarily. Screw up 1% of the welds in a nuclear plant and you're in massive trouble.
We're getting to a point where we can stop boiling water for electricity.
What a time to be alive.
There could still be a great future in that from stored thermal energy from renewables. I harp on this a lot here; the estimated cost for 600 C heat available with 100% capacity factor is $3-5/GJ, just from resistive PV heat.
Not going to happen.
Well, if we want more drinking water we might start boiling salt water with electricity.
That's a very obsolete desalination technique.
A cup of water with salt added doesn't get noticeably warm since there's just not much entropy difference in salt water vs fresh water. These days you can reverse the process at very low electricity cost with reverse osmosis.
99+ missed calls from millimeter wave bored geothermal
That's many years from even attempting to make power. They've done what, a couple inches wide hole to 100 feet?
First power hit the grid a few weeks ago
https://spectrum.ieee.org/fervo-cape-station-geothermal
It's still small scale but it's up and running and the site has plenty more capacity that can be added on bit by bit.
That has nothing to do with millimeter wave boring.
Or as Bill Mckibben observed "for 10's of thousands of years, humanity has burned things to produce energy. The period of fire is coming to an end".
I think fire is still involved in the creation of solar energy though... Just not man-made fire.
That's not fire. We might colloquially call it fire, but that's not what it is.
Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.
When I really think about that it’s incredible that such a phenomenon is actually very common in the universe.
That's why I hope Helion Fusion does well. The system they are developing sends power to a device that captures power directly no boiling water.
wasn't there recently papers claiming helion fusion's design is literally incapable of producing energy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB4hB9QJX8
Yes. They argue Helion screwed up computing the rate of energy flow from fast ions to cool electrons. I have not seen a good rejoinder from Helion, which is a very bad sign.
Given this, and given the apparent failure of Zap's scheme to scale, I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.
“How did humanity solve climate change? We taught sand to move electrons with photons.”
Except for solar collection that boils water to generate power.
It's not even competitive to use mirrors to get sunlight to heat water. PV is cheaper for that.
China just finished building some but it's a dead end technology.
It first lost to PV for daylight generation, then it fell back on storing the heat for use generating after sunset but cheap batteries made that obsolete too.
In order for renewables like solar and wind energy to truly take the burden off a grid, we have to have large capacity energy storage solutions that balance the grid over a 8+ hour period. That way we can handle peak demand of the grid during high load which often happens when there's little light and on hot days when the wind doesn't generate nearly as much electricity.
Yes, “just” need to build some TWh capacity batteries. No problem at all.
Yes. Batteries are coming. I think many people truly misunderstand the full power with which solar/wind + batteries will transform our societies (and by the way also giving more resilient and insular power networks than centralized power plants can ever give)
This can be done in a distributed way using home batteries. This would increase demand for peak solar production for use outside this peak. At the moment solar production creates a large price disparity that can be corrected with home batteries.
Transmission lines can act like storage when there is PV to the east or west of you. This doesn’t remove the need for storage, but can dramatically reduce it.
The old model of cheap peaking power plants and cheaper base-load power is equivalent to cheap peaking power + cheap but inconsistent green energy. It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
That only work on large continuos mass of land that expand east-west. Small countries or Chile have problems
National borders don’t limit power transmission.
Chile still wants transmission north south because in the winter solar closer to the equator has longer days and in the winter solar near the poles does.
> National borders don’t limit power transmission
Oh boy, you are very naive, ain't you? No country will put their energy stability in hands of their neighbors. Or do you see China, Korea, India and Russia interconnect their grids? What other supranational grids you know of?
80% of global energy consumption is still fossil fuels (oil/coal/gas), however.
Which perfectly proves that 90% of the comments in this thread have no clue about energy and think that running a grid on solar and wind only plus some batteries is a solved problem.
Yes but primary energy isn't a good metric. There's 40-60% loss when converting fossil fuel to final energy being consumed.
A lot of energy is used for heating, heating water is more efficient with fossil fuel than with electricity - because for electricity you have transmission loss.
That used to be the case, but with the efficient heat pumps that have come out in the last few years, that is no longer true. Since you’re using electricity to move heat rather than produce it, it’s two to three times more efficient than burning fossil fuels for heating.
That’s fair, but factoring the energy loss in, it still remains the clearly larger share.
Does it, though? Assuming 80% of energy use is fossil and fossil has a 50% loss, if all that fossil were to transition to ~100% efficient electricity[0] we'd already be at 33% of our renewable electricity needs. That's quite a bit more than the 20% the "80% fossil" seems to suggest!
"One-third done" sounds an awful lot like we're going to start seeing optimistic "we'll be halfway there at the end of the decade" headlines soon...
[0]: Things like the grid and car batteries don't operate at 100% but closer to 95%, but things like heat pumps operate at 300% efficiency, so I reckon that'll more-or-less cancel out for back-of-the-napkin math.
Yes we're not done yet, but renewable only started gaining share again around 2010, and how quickly solar/battery is being deployed is really impressive.
That's primary energy, of which about half is wasted as heat. Electrification will bring this down by a lot.
Not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Fossil fuels did not change there relative share the past 30 years.
And big usage of energy is actually heating home so heating water
I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.
Wind power has been undergoing a very similar rapid fall in cost, and rapid rise in installations, and is a fantastic natural resource (and also one that complements solar almost perfectly!), but it always feels like solar gets 10x the attention and conversation that wind gets.
> I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.
It's because solar gets cheaper faster than wind does. The experience rate is higher.
My interest is mostly getting solar installed at home, something I can feasibly do. I don't think my city allows for residential wind turbine installs.
Dumb question: is there a limit to how much energy we can capture? I'm imagining a wind gust blowing east to west across a city filled wind turbines. By the time the gust reaches the west end of the city, has most of its energy been captured or otherwise dissipated?
Contrasting that with solar, where any surface area receiving direct sunlight doesn't prevent other adjacent areas from also capturing solar.
Wind power scales with the turbine area squared, and the wind velocity cubed. That means there's massive incentive to make bigger and taller turbines (windspeeds are higher the further away from the ground you are).
For that reason, there is very little reason to build small wind turbines, even if there wasn't a down-stream loss of power from putting too many close together.
So there's the hobbyist side of it, but I guess it's not totally clear why that matters to the people talking about the world's power mix.
But as I write that, I guess it becomes more clear to me that a personal interest in installing the technology makes one pay more attention to it elsewhere, and promote more conversations about it that get others involved.
Just study learning rates of different technologies and it quickly becomes very evident, how future energy mixes will roughly look like. (That's also why fossil fuels have no future in the energy mix. They don't have any significant learning rate - just like minerals.) See e.g. this seminal paper: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
There needs to be more general understanding of energy density and scalability, which is why I don't think we'll get away from fossil fuels without nuclear or fusion.
Of course, the officially titled World Nuclear Industry Status Report is actually produced by anti nuclear activist Mycle Schneider (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycle_Schneider).
What are you implying?
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
The answer is batteries (why it hasn’t seen the adoption and also what is about to enable it)
The geopolitics don't go away because the resources needed to switch to renewables aren't evenly distributed geographically:
https://www.statista.com/chart/33754/countries-with-the-larg...
https://www.techpolicy.press/us-critical-mineral-aggression-...
Battery storage is only a solution if you can actually generate a surplus of energy that can be stored, which is not a given.
We absolutely need to move off of fossil fuels but thinking that renewables are the only solution seems very short-sighted to me.
Contrary to their name, "rare earth metals" aren't actually rare, and for a lot of the renewables stack they aren't strictly necessary.
Take lithium batteries, for example. They were attractive for early BEVs because the consumer electronics market already developed an industry for them, and they were attractive for early grid storage because the BEVs scaled that industry up. But that doesn't mean you have to use lithium for grid storage, and when push comes to shove we could also use sodium-ion batteries, or iron redox flow batteries.
If your country no longer has access to iron and salt, I reckon you have bigger things to worry about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y94yV7WUwGY is a short lecture by someone from BloombergNEF that speaks to some of your questions.
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
Your four year old paper shows wind+solar costs as on par with nuclear in the final (LFSCOE95) model in the ERCOT market before factoring in dropping battery farm costs.
Other papers exist with a different opinion (eg: Australia's more recent CSIRO energy report finds nuclear not providing bang for the buck in the Australian market)
Further, despite claiming Level Full System Costs, there's no factoring in for externalities - eg: climate costs of dragging out fossil fuels while waiting for nuclear to come online, political costs of being steadily reliant on outside countries for fuel and supply (cost of gas to non gas nations, etc).
There are other issues - it's a paper with an opinion - not the foundational rock you want to base strong assertions on, as you did.
Your data is way out of date. Renewables, particularly solar+battery, are incredibly attractive from an economic perspective. That’s why the build-out has accelerated so much. It’s not government hippies (I wish—have you seen the state of world politics lately?), it’s cold hard capitalism.
Give me balcony solar (in the U.S.) or give me death![1]
[1] Really, climate change risks already a massive liability in so many places (forst fire-caused particulate air pollution, etc.). We need far more solar and battery capacity to bend the curve.
Is this the year of the Linux desktop ?
I've been forced to use Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 at my job for the past 4 years, and the longer I use it, the more it makes me wish I was using OpenBSD w/ xfce.
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
> Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
I saw numbers in GW where I was expecting numbers in GWh ? How does the amount of energy produced compare ? "In 2025, nuclear plants generated 2,703 TWh", how about solar and wind ?
What kind of civilization is possible on intermittent power ? All western civilization is built on 24/24 7/7 available energy (from direct use of petroleum or electricity). I think we should give two numbers: the raw TWh output and the stable TW output and see where they are coming from. Africa and Asia are rapidly being electrified, but if it does not create an industrial boom outside China by guaranteed available energy it's just more people having intermittent AC and not real development.
A civilization that uses storage to level that intermittency. It's perfectly possible to power industrial world civilization using only renewables, and it would be cheaper than trying to do it with fission (which would require breeder reactors, btw.)
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
> one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry
That minimum amount is none.
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
The grid tends to be somewhat grid-shaped, and even industrial-scale solar doesn't usually have a large centralized grid hookup.
It's like trying to starve a country by bombing its supermarkets: you could try, but in reality you're mostly wasting bombs.
> more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel.
supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.
It’s not very hard to make solar panels. Almost any country could spin up a plant if they had to. Or buy from a diverse set of other countries.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
This oft quoted idea that nukes are only expensive because of incompetent regulations, and if they just got out of poor nuclear a way it would be affordable, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.
We probably need a lot more nuclear then.
Now that PV panels are less expensive than cabinet grade plywood, it makes a lot of sense to get some independence through local generation.
This can't be true. It must be fake news, because my telescreen told me that nuclear is the only viable future. Coincidentally most of the world's uranium comes from Russia.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
Another milestone in our journey to become a Kardashev I civilization.
Pedantic fyi: Solar is nuclear…
I’ll see myself out
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Whenever there is a discussion about nuclear I always remember this XKCD https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
> I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments
Idk, when you because of that implementation, for 20 years pay for the energy 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy, that seems pretty fanatical by me.
> 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy
Only when you completely ignore the cost of its externalities, of course.
> fanatical implementation
Not supported by the stats in TFA:
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
Most of it has been installed in the last 4-5 years, and we are still accelerating.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
That’s awesome, and more evidence this hasn’t been “20 years” in the making.
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
I am mostly pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
Good luck getting fission to work on any of the other materials.
Well, what would you expect a solar rollout to look like?
Assuming we'd instantly switch from zero solar demand to unlimited solar demand, we'd need some kind of scaleup of PV manufacturing first, and with a fixed construction capacity of PV factories we'd see a linear rise in PV factory capacity - which would result in an exponential growth in yearly PV factory output.
But the same applies to the factories as well: the construction capacity is going to scale up as well, so as more PV factory part manufacturing becomes available we'll start to see an exponential growth in new PV factories, which would result in even larger PV factory output.
Scaling from "lab experiment and niche application" to "significant chunk of the grid" is a lot harder than scaling from "significant chunk of the grid" to "the entire grid" - especially with solar being embarrassingly parallel rather than requiring mega-scale deployments.
The first TW of solar capacity took 60 years to reach. The 2nd TW took 2 years. We've reached the inflection point.
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Two different tools for different things.
It really is sad how ugly solar is. Miles and miles of beautiful, peaceful open desert are ruined. It's a bit of an environmental travesty.
You're aren't looking at all factors here. I look at solar and think its beautiful for what its displacing.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
The Great Solar Wall: China doubles down on its ambitious effort to tame deserts - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3363108/grea...
Triple win: solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00516-8
Swathes of Earth are turning into desert — but the degradation can be stopped - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03621-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
Well technically it is nuclear power, just a free fusion reactor we don't have to maintain. :)
The Sun is #1 die nukes die! very happy now. had some issues with my off grid solar powered house and shop last week, but bounced back quickly and ran a small welder as part of the system verification test, still running massivly outdated gear, holding out till I can integrate car charging in a bigger upgrade. saw a smaller farm last week that paved a small padock out by the road with 30~50 kw grid tie array , ground mount to concrete blocks, drop it and run, zero out the powerbill.
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
> China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying.
Would be interesting to know how much nuclear vs solar they are building per year domestically.
Brainwashed fission bros double-count reactor builds every year they are under construction. In terms of completed stations, China is opening 1 new reactor (~2GW) and hundreds of new PV stations (~300GW) per year. Over 99% of it is solar and nuclear is a sideshow.
Wow that's bananas. I suspected the answer would skew towards solar but not by that much. To me that also substantially discredits the "bureaucracy makes nuclear expensive" argument, my impression is the Chinese at doing this kind of engineering efficiently.
We absolutely have solved cheap battery storage. 100% solved. It is crazy to make this statement when we are discussing nuclear thermal power, which requires multiple 20-million-dollar steam turbines for every station. You should have said "We still haven't solved cheap superalloy fan blades".
I don't think nuclear steam turbines use superalloy. Why should they? The temperature is not that high.
"We still haven't solved cheap battery storage."
we literally already have salt battery
I wonder if we will run out of battery materials in a hundred years, then what?
Are we burning the battery materials into gases and sending the results into the atmosphere? No, then we are unlikely to run out of materials on a primary or secondary, recycled, basis. Not to mention the diversity of choices available for chemistries and storage
Impossible as there are so many chemistries, but hopefully we don't run out of water for pumped hydro.
we might end up switching to sodium batteries for the grid, they’re heavier so not great for cars, but otherwise they’re fine
Global scale HVDC networks could eliminate a significant part of the storage requirement.
If we run out of Saltwater then we have very different problems at our hand.
1. Sodium batteries 2. Kinetic Batteries
It is far more likely to run out of practical fissile materials than it would be to run out of electrochemical materials.
green gas or flow batteries
Publication says that specialty of the publication is booming. Noted.
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
These are easily verified hard numbers that could be looked up anywhere. It's not an "opinion" or a subjective piece.
What is your note, precisely?
Only during the day... Nuclear power still FAR outperforms solar at night.
I'm sick of everyone saying that solar is this great solution that will solve all our energy woes. There are times and places for it for sure, but we don't have the battery capacity to actually go all-in on it. (And nobody will ever approve the large-scale hydro-batteries we need, and manufacturing conventional batteries is terrible for the environment, negating the gains that solar gives us.)
I'm sick of people who make your completely bad faith argument, pretending storage doesn't exist.
Maybe read the article.
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Are you trying to claim solar has nastier end-of-life cleanup than nuclear? That is certainly one way to get people to discount everything you say.
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
After its commercial span is over, over 90% solar and battery materials can be recycled to make new panels and batteries. Compare that with nuclear where we need to stow away basically-forever-radioactive spent material.
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
Please share the recycling supply chain for solar panels