Good China numbers, but I’d still keep two things in mind.
China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.
The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.
For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.
Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.
And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA
EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.
Solar and progress on better batteries is a more consequential and useful technological revolution than AI. Should be a huge story, but there's not enough money to be made via speculation so it's not.
AI is enough of an issue. As fast as we are adding renewable capacity, demand is also growing extremely fast. We're chasing a rapidly moving target. And we're stuck in an adverse political climate for the time being as well.
I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
My understanding is the AI data centers use LNG just because it's the fastest way to spin up a lot of power without using much land/permits. Solar panels would be cheaper but it still requires a lot of land and permits, plus batteries for smoothing.
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
I think there are 2 good and important points that make me re-think things some:
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
"I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind ..."
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Germany IS suffering from high energy prices, but renewables are only a small part of the problem.
It was a mistake to shut down the working nuclear power plants, and that also coincided with the abrupt loss of all (cheap) gas from Russia. Now, the country imports expensive LNG and renewables generate something like 80% on a good day - but thanks to merit order, the most expensive form of power generation sets the price and that is gas.
It doesn't help that thanks to shifts in industry, the grid has to be re-developed north->south instead of west->east and south-north. NIMBYism is rampant in Germany, so new high-voltage lines can take decades. Meanwhile, renewable capacity has to be shutdown if the transmission capacity of the grid cannot keep up during windy, sunny days.
Things are slowly improving what with grid-scale batteries coming online, and one major north-south connection being done. But yeah, it's going to take years still, and if our current governing coalition have their say, it's going to take even longer.
China having managed to position itself as the main driver of the green transition by investing into key industries illustrates the power of state planning. The markets simply can't operate on horizons of decades because there is no immediate profit to be had. You need long term planning and sustained investment that only a state is able to provide.
*electricity . Gas is heavily used for heating , cooking & industrial uses (e.g. drying agriculture like hops, boilers etc).
I raise this point since policymakers get confused and try to ban gas, only to realize how critical gas is for food & industrial applications that consumers enjoy after the fact.
Most of it can be electrified. NYC has banned gas hookups in new residential buildings (I live in one and it's great). Industrial electrification will never be 100% but I've seen estimates as high as 90%. It will take time and money but it will happen.
More good news from Ember, according to their Global Electricity
Review 2026 [1]:
Solar power increased by a record 636 TWh to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.
Wind saw the second-largest increase, growing 205 TWh (+8.2%)
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
For comparison, I have collated information from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System. The fastest that nuclear power generation ever grew was 213 TWh added in 1985. Since the year 2000, the fastest growth year was 2004, with 111 TWh added.
This is exciting news but the term power here should really be replaced with electricity which is clarified early on in the article.
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
It's a good news but I didn't expect that coal is still on the 1st place and not really trending down. I though coal was largely replaced by gas years ago...
Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.
In 2025, renewables generated more energy globally than coal (neck and neck tie, but renewables just edged out coal). This trend is likely to continue.
I have a similar project, I'm so overpaneled I bought an electric heater so I could actually see how many watts I brought in during a nice summer day. The victron UIs have an excellent graph history.
Really curious about the difficulty of doing a self install with Solar. I'm moderately handy (built a Sauna from no plans) and confident with electrical. Any gotchas?
For most purposes, I would avoid the shunt and use a current transformer (for AC) or a DC current sensor (conceptually the same thing but with a Hall effect sensor or other mechanism that works for DC). This way you don’t need anything to touch the potentially rather large voltages on a solar array.
I feel the energy conversation is dominated by people that don't realize how far Solar tech has come recently arguing with other people that don't realize short nuclear half lives have gotten recently.
The percentage increases here don't really tell the full picture. Look at it in terms of pure TWh [1]. China just dwarfs any other country in terms of wind and solar deployment. I guess that's the difference between putting engineers in charge instead of those who believe in the magical powers of red heifers [2].
One of the short-term issues in the US is going to be that a lot of utilities depend on natural gas and natural gas prices are going to keep rising beyond whatever happens in the Persian Gulf because of increased LNG exports (that directly raises domestic prices) and the increased use of gas turbines for AI data centers. Plus all the consumers are going to pay for the infrastructure buildout for electricity for those data centers.
So, despite a large Y/Y solar increase in the US, electricity prices are only going up.
Is it possible to increase the grid by add solar and wind and NOT adding an on-demand backup source (gas, etc.) WITHOUT ADDING RISK?
What I mean is say the grid demands 100. The grid is powered entirely by coal. You give it 120 for 20% redundancy. This is extremely reliable.
The grid demand is now 120. You now need 144 for 20% redundancy. You dont want to use coal. So you add solar and batteries.
Batteries are great because they normalize the volatility of solar generation over time, but they do not make solar truly on demand. So if you add 24 solar to the 120 coal you are increasing the risk on the grid. What often happens is you add 24 solar but you have 24 coal as a backup. Ideally the real-world use will be solar but in case of downtime your grid will not fail.
Take a look at California. Their grid is routinely, daily, generating ~84% of its power from renewables [1] (with ~25GW of existing solar PV capacity, ~6GW of wind, and ~6GW of hydro). They are adding batteries rapidly [2] (with a goal of 52GW by 2045; they are 33% of the way there). They still have ~32GW of fossil gas generation capacity, but it is rarely used constantly at full capacity. They have plans for another ~21GW of solar PV on land that can no longer be farmed due to water shortages [3] [4] (enabling families to keep their land with long term lease payments).
Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5]. You simply keep building more solar collection, storage, transmission, etc. to orchestrate collecting this "fusion at a distance" and distributing it to loads. The sun rises every day, and will for our lifetimes. We continue to deploy batteries and solar at manufacturing capacity, while continuing to increase manufacturing capacity year over year. You fill any gaps with fossil generation until there are no longer any gaps to fill [6].
Tangentially, Australia is currently testing a battery with a 8 hour discharge capability [7] ("Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES)"), as they are rapidly preparing for a network/team of battery storage facilities to assume grid health responsibility from their retiring thermal coal generators [8]. Certainly there is much work ahead in understanding and developing longer duration energy storage systems.
You add 100x1day worth of battery capacity. Which is fairly economical even today (though not economical enough to actually shut down coal). Wouldn't work everywhere (winter in New England needs more than 1 day of backup) but works in some places.
Your existing demand is not flat. Not flat over a single day, nor a single week nor a single year.
So you already have some spare capacity on the system.
If your demand peak was summer air con, then adding the solar makes the system more stable. This can be seen in a few grids that issue less grid warnings in summer now.
Trivially yes, for any locations with summer energy use peaks. The solar output will be the greatest when the demand for cooling is at its greatest.
Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.
Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.
Just ask California. They've basically conducted the experiment you asked for by adding substantial solar & battery. They haven't had a blackout since 2020 and are the most stable grid in the entire US.
We installed roof solar (10kW panels + 8kW hybrid inverter + 32kWh battery + planning/execution) last October for 11k euro. After all the math, our "investment" would pay off in approx 8-10 years (at current electricity prices). That's without an electric car, which we plan to buy sometime in the next two years.
All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteries for their equipment, so much so that one 14-hour grid blackout didn't affect us at all and we were able to use the internet since we're working from home (FTTH + ONT, GPON).
Usual disclaimer, sample size of one. We're in Romania.
On the graph, you can clearly see the seasonal demand for power during the summer months as air conditioning kicks in. The electricity production for gas mimics this as well each year. But the solar output does not seem to have a spike each summer. Why is that? You would think that solar output would be significantly higher when the summer months are here.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 75.0 ms ] threadChina gets it, the USA doesn't.
China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.
The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.
For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.
Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.
And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
Do people people really hate sun and clouds and stuff?
Or are they against the physical capture of geographical processes? ...
I've heard "muh birds" a few times. Ironically, it seems only those who eat chicken who seem to be worried about it :/
Pretty easy sell for me.
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
Maybe not even then. Some still refuse to believe the Earth is round. They can die before they admit they were wrong.
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Just be patient.
Yes, down with Big Sun
Compared to what? Are these people in the oil industry, by any chance?
It was a mistake to shut down the working nuclear power plants, and that also coincided with the abrupt loss of all (cheap) gas from Russia. Now, the country imports expensive LNG and renewables generate something like 80% on a good day - but thanks to merit order, the most expensive form of power generation sets the price and that is gas.
It doesn't help that thanks to shifts in industry, the grid has to be re-developed north->south instead of west->east and south-north. NIMBYism is rampant in Germany, so new high-voltage lines can take decades. Meanwhile, renewable capacity has to be shutdown if the transmission capacity of the grid cannot keep up during windy, sunny days.
Things are slowly improving what with grid-scale batteries coming online, and one major north-south connection being done. But yeah, it's going to take years still, and if our current governing coalition have their say, it's going to take even longer.
I raise this point since policymakers get confused and try to ban gas, only to realize how critical gas is for food & industrial applications that consumers enjoy after the fact.
Solar power increased by a record 636 TWh to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.
Wind saw the second-largest increase, growing 205 TWh (+8.2%)
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
For comparison, I have collated information from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System. The fastest that nuclear power generation ever grew was 213 TWh added in 1985. Since the year 2000, the fastest growth year was 2004, with 111 TWh added.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
Everyone is getting tired of me checking the panel to see how many watts we're bringing in.
Next project, install a shunt and get a Raspberry Pi talking to it over USB. And then I'll be able to build a Grafana dashboard. :)
Incredible gobsmacking amount of stored energy on display here. Great to see. https://bsky.app/profile/neilgrant.bsky.social/post/3mneo3to...
One of the short-term issues in the US is going to be that a lot of utilities depend on natural gas and natural gas prices are going to keep rising beyond whatever happens in the Persian Gulf because of increased LNG exports (that directly raises domestic prices) and the increased use of gas turbines for AI data centers. Plus all the consumers are going to pay for the infrastructure buildout for electricity for those data centers.
So, despite a large Y/Y solar increase in the US, electricity prices are only going up.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/36117/electricity-generated-b...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393661
What I mean is say the grid demands 100. The grid is powered entirely by coal. You give it 120 for 20% redundancy. This is extremely reliable.
The grid demand is now 120. You now need 144 for 20% redundancy. You dont want to use coal. So you add solar and batteries.
Batteries are great because they normalize the volatility of solar generation over time, but they do not make solar truly on demand. So if you add 24 solar to the 120 coal you are increasing the risk on the grid. What often happens is you add 24 solar but you have 24 coal as a backup. Ideally the real-world use will be solar but in case of downtime your grid will not fail.
Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5]. You simply keep building more solar collection, storage, transmission, etc. to orchestrate collecting this "fusion at a distance" and distributing it to loads. The sun rises every day, and will for our lifetimes. We continue to deploy batteries and solar at manufacturing capacity, while continuing to increase manufacturing capacity year over year. You fill any gaps with fossil generation until there are no longer any gaps to fill [6].
Tangentially, Australia is currently testing a battery with a 8 hour discharge capability [7] ("Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES)"), as they are rapidly preparing for a network/team of battery storage facilities to assume grid health responsibility from their retiring thermal coal generators [8]. Certainly there is much work ahead in understanding and developing longer duration energy storage systems.
[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi...
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
[3] 21GW of Solar for California Land That Can No Longer Be Used for Agriculture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488648 - January 2026
[4] https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/
[5] Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
[6] Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615756 - April 2026 (149 comments)
[7] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/australias-first...
[8] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineerin...
(think in systems)
So you already have some spare capacity on the system.
If your demand peak was summer air con, then adding the solar makes the system more stable. This can be seen in a few grids that issue less grid warnings in summer now.
Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.
Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
I want to feed the balcony solar o/p back to the grid and not have a off grid system
Meanwhile I bought a 25W solar panel and a controller and am going to make a solar charger to charge my powerbanks
the spite is the point
(do we survive past 2029? are you sure? I'm not)
https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/trump-to-invoke-...
All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteries for their equipment, so much so that one 14-hour grid blackout didn't affect us at all and we were able to use the internet since we're working from home (FTTH + ONT, GPON).
Usual disclaimer, sample size of one. We're in Romania.
A lot of us know why the US is behind in wind and solar. It's because of a five letter word that starts with "T".
Do better, America.