A recent story by The New Yorker dove into the astonishing growth of solar energy over the past few years. Among other extensive data, the magazine notes that renewables made up 96 percent of demand for new energy throughout the globe in 2024; In the United States, 93 percent of new energy capacity came from solar and wind.
But while renewables writ large are having their day, the speed at which solar energy in particular is growing blows everything else out of the water.
For example, it’s now estimated that the world is now installing one gigawatt worth of solar energy infrastructure every 15 hours — or about the output of a new coal plant.
For some historical context, the New Yorker notes that it took 68 years since the invention of the first photovoltaic solar cell in 1954 to construct a single terawatt’s worth of solar power. It took just two years to hit the second terawatt in 2024, and the third is expected within mere months.
This explosive growth has been fueled by huge efficiency gains in solar energy output, breakthroughs in manufacturing, and streamlined installation processes. There’ve also been huge developments in panel recycling, meaning the darker side of solar energy — mineral extraction and panel fabrication — might one day be a thing of the past.
Yet, we use shitton more power than we used to even 5 years ago. Solars were believed to replace electricity generation methods based on fossils, not to add to equation eh
I am old enough (i.e., older than 5 years old) to remember the conservative talking point that it wasn’t meaningful for western countries to curb emissions because China.
Eat China’s solar dust now.
People still try to do this and insist on absolute emissions numbers rather than per capita to do so.
Yes Canada’s total emissions with 40 million population is doing great compared to China’s, what a feel good statistic, I guess we should build those pipelines and liquify that natural gas
I’ll give another factoid:
In a sunny day, around noon, many EU countries have below-zero prices for electricity exports:
It comes with a different set of issues, but this is not prospective or a hypothetical: this is the world we are living in, with the operator of the French grid warning that we are currently at solar saturation.
Now we need the other part of the puzzle: energy storage. On a HUGE scale.
China is already on it.
negative prices only exist because the operators of big solar parks have not considered implementing circuit breakers into their solar parks in the past.
with these breakers, whenever the energy prices are about to go negative, the breaker disables the solar park and it stops feeding into the grid. it’s a very simple measure but very effective. in theory, negative energy prices should not exist that way.
Circuits breakers are an obvious solution and there seems to be reasons why these are not implemented. I am not knowledgeable enough about the question but there seems to be a lot of counter-intuitive incentives that makes the energy market drop sub-zero occasionally. It is more of a market artifact than the absence of circuit breakers.
I have seen people in France explain that this is Germany undercutting prices to ensure France can’t have profitable private solar power companies but this sounds a bit conspiracy-theory to me, as Germany is not the only one doing it (but the biggest one in terms of volume)
Where is this graphic from? It’s awesome!
RTE (French national grid operator)'s realtime data. It is indeed awesome to have realtime trackers of that!
EDIT: looks like the link in english is dead right now, here it is in french: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-aux-frontieres
Where are these negative prices? I’m in Switzerland and my electricity price just keeps going up.
These are the prices on the European market for electricity exchange between countries. It has a whole can of worms when it comes to problematic incentives, but it is indeed not consumer prices and (IMO) designed to enrich useless intermediaries.
We pay for our electricity based on the market price, and it indeed goes negative. Although the separate transfer fee means we still pay.
If energy has a negative cost wouldn’t this make it worth doing things that take a lot of energy at that point
like mine bitcoin?Not sure how much would fit that though, industry that can use a lot of power and is ok with irregular running times. Hydrogen production through water electrolysis is a popular idea but not sure if it’s at a point of being useful at scale.
Careful: negative price ≠ negative cost. Below zero prices are a market artifact usually.
The fact that this happens during peak HVAC use is a nice thing though.
And yes, we need intermittent industries, but the problem is, when you invest money in hardware, even to mine bitcoin (I would rather sell GPU time to train deep learning models personally) or to produce hydrogen, every hour not spent running your capital-intensive hardware is considered a cost that is not really compensated by energy price unless you run on donated hardware.
The negative prices are partly caused by the way the grids are designed. Basically, where the solar parks are today, used to be end of the line in the coal power days. So the grid can’t handle the influx of energy in that area. It remains to be seen if this will still be the case in a few years, assuming the grid will be expanded in these areas. We would still need some form of storage though.
Another option would be electro-chemical processing of metals which uses a lot of electricity and could in theory be only turned on when there is surplus power.
i think that current electricity prices are a good way to regulate which consumer runs at what time
after all, prices are lowest when there’s lots of renewables feeding into the grid. and that is also when the consumers get the cheapest power, then that is when they should be consuming the energy that is available.
Or storing it. That’s the ideal time for EV charging.
I’ve read that this phenomena - near zero energy at times of peak production, is producing some interesting effects on some areas of energy use.
For example, one potential use of this excess energy is hydrogen electrolysis. Traditionally, industrial electrolyzers have been built to maximize energy efficiency. They’ll use expensive platinum anodes to get the absolute most out of every watt of power.
However, in this application - taking advantage of dirt cheap intermittent electricity - we might not actually want to optimize for efficiency. These machines are expensive. And if you’re only running them for a few hours a day, making the machines cheaper to build may trump making them maximally efficient. You need a machine cheap enough to run for just a few hour a day and let sit idle the rest of the time. So some companies are developing electrolyzers that are designed to use the cheapest materials possible, even if they’re less efficient than those made with platinum anodes. Dirt cheap electrolyzers might have 20-30% less efficiency than the expensive ones, but if they cost a small fraction to build, it can be worth it. That extra energy was just going to go to waste anyway.
When energy is essentially free but highly intermittent, it starts changing the whole calculus for how you build industrial machinery. You start optimizing more for lower CAPEX and less for efficiency.
To illustrate, we (Netherlands) have industries getting PAID to absorb the surplus electric energy. Mainly when they need to heat water for all kinds of processing.
The US under Donald Trump, meanwhile, is drastically reversing course on a renewable future. His recent Big Beautiful Bill includes an end to tax incentives for new buyers of solar panels and batteries, and grants massive subsidies to the fossil and biofuel industries.
To justify the move, Trump blamed solar and wind infrastructure for skyrocketing energy costs, despite overwhelming evidence that solar energy makes the broader energy grid more stable, and energy much cheaper. That being the case, it’s probably no shock to discover the president has more than a few ulterior motives.
The USA is trying to hold the whole world back. Currently they’re putting pressure on Canada and other countries to back off electric vehicles and other renewable energy projects. For its own survival, humanity needs to kick these regressive right-wingers aside.
The amount of energy wasted on stupid shit is unbelievable as well.
We need to laud efforts put into renewables, as much as we need to decry wasteful energy usage.
i saw a nice infographic a while ago which put that nicely:
installing renewable energy reduces our CO2 emission by like 90% if fully implemented,
meanwhile cutting back our bullshit CO2 emission only reduces our total emissions by sth like 3%.So the much more effective strategy is to focus on renewable energy sources, not so much on energy consumption.
Could you share a link to the infographic? I’d be curious to see the details.
Renewables like solar have a great potential at reducing CO2, but ONLY IF it replace fossil fuels.
As an example, big tech is wasting so much energy of AI they’re increasing both renewable and fossil fuel consomption to cover rapid rise in energy use. The end result is more pollution.
We are looking to add solar to our roof this year, and even if wet do not add batteries we will still generate enough to run our ac during the hottest parts of the day. And hopefully the added shade from the panels will require the AC to run a little less.
I can tell you after doing it on a house in Colorado, it’s a satisfying thing. It covers the sunniest hours, and we have batteries enough to get us past peak hours. I do wish we built it bigger and put more batteries in it, but that seems always true.
Solar and AC is a great combo. Almost by definition, when you need AC you know the sun is shining and so the energy to run the AC is therefore free
I live in the UK so no AC and tbh not really worth bothering with it. What really could excess solar energy be used for in summer? Also don’t drive so no car charging, got a heat pump for heating and hot water but heating is unused in summer and hot water isn’t used much either. Just a little for showering but even then not very much as I go for cool showers.
Dehumidifier if it’s wet or you have a basement. Washing machine. Clothes dryer on a timer if you don’t hang dry. Dishwasher if you have one (uses more power than you think - they start with cold water and electrically heat it even if you have a water heater). Pump water to a cistern if you have a well (or lake if you’re on a bit of land - good for irrigation and even pumped hydro). Any tool that uses a universal motor. EV charging (including bikes).
Look around your house - anything that you only do once a day or less is fair game.
Sadly I think none of those options really apply to me. We don’t usually have basements here and dehumidifiers are more commonly used in winter rather than summer. Washing machine I do have but run it on a low temperature so while that would work it isn’t going to be making much difference. Clothes dry outside, don’t have a dishwasher, water is from the mains, no EV to charge.
A well could be nice for garden water rather than using the mains but I live in the middle of a town and my back garden is only around 50m², that said I just looked it up and apparently you don’t need permission if you extract less than 20m³ a day. So from a legal standpoint I could do it and there is no way you could use that much water for a residential property unless you have a large pool that you are regularly filling and emptying for some reason.
On our forever home, I want to install solar panels and a redundant AC system, or maybe just a backup AC system in a single room. We’re in the US PNW. Here, heat waves are becoming more and more a threat to human life. Where we’re at, we can get rare heat waves that go up to 112F, and that’s in an area where historically AC wasn’t common. It’s only in the last decade or two that it’s started to be viewed as a necessity. But thankfully when we get more of a dry heat, and the highest temp days are win the Sun is shining brightly. So I would like to have a setup where our home was essentially equipped as a lethal heat wave survival shelter, where we would be fine even if the grid fails. And part of that would likely just be keeping a duplicate AC, maybe just for a single room to shelter in, in the event of a lethal heatwave.
My parents have solar panels, A/C, and a heat pump pool heater and their electric bill is practically nothing in the summer.
This sounds like a level of rich I was previously unaware of. Pool heater?
It’s not uncommon in the Northeast. It lets you get more use of the pool earlier and later in the season. You can start swimming in mid May and go right through to the end of September.
I live in the UK and have been swimming in the sea since April, main limitation I find is if it’s a warm day or not as getting out to cold wind is pretty miserable. Water temperature is just a suggestion - double digits is optional. Though yeah 8°c usually means it will be a short swim.
Currently the water is 19c in the sea where I live, never seen it this warm, so I guess thanks global warming?
It’s about a six hour drive to get to the ocean from here, and we only have rivers full of agricultural runoff or ice-cold mountains streams to swim in.
I don’t believe you. You’re clearly lying.
