Solar is not less than revolution in Pakistan. Almost every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs. More affluent houses have almost gone off grid; others are selling back to grid and others who can't afford has their own small scale 12V solar panels to run fans in the scorching summer of Pakistan to save electricity bills. It is all done by people independently without much support from the government as ROI (if you are using full potential of your installed capacity, it can be as low as 1 year and afterwords it will be free) is much better on solar than paying the grid.
I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.
Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.
According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.
Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane.
At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle.
That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.
It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.
The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Not to mention, all the red tape.
But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.
Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done.
And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter.
EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
> countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables
This isn’t surprising; cell phones and mobile payments also took over much faster in Africa than Europe/US because the existing infrastructure (landlines, banks) was highly underdeveloped or unreliable.
> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.
It is absolutely sane and perfectly reasonable. The climate highly support it, you are already used to a grid that in some cases are not available 24/7, and the major energy consumptions are AC and fans which correlate with production.
Sorry, I fixed it to "Almost every". I agree, "Every" is overstated.
I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.
I'm not from Pakistan but Karachi is the only vertical city in Pakistan, most people lives in apartment buildings, I would suggest looking at other cities like Lahore.
I really appreciate the Technology Connections take on renewable energy from solar and batteries including a recyclable component. With fossil fuels, the power plant has to be built, and then the fuel is constantly shipped in, which requires constant extraction. While solar panels and batteries can not only consume their fuel for effectively free, but at the end of their life, the materials in them can be recycled without needing massive mines for fresh glass, aluminum, lithium, silicon, etc.
Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?
For example, if you had an electric golf cart with a solar roof, on a sunny day…
With two adults, a speed of 35 MPH, an LLM suggested a ratio of 10:1—that is, the power demands of the golf cart were 10x what the solar could deliver in real time. (LLM considered also aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance of golf cart tires…). When I suggest a speed of 25 MPH, the ratio came down to 5:1.
Regardless, assuming batteries to store energy on the cart, it suggests a 10 minute drive to your neighborhood grocery store would require the golf cart to sit in the parking lot for close to an hour before it will have caught the batteries back up to their charge before you left home. (And this is at the rather impatient 25 MPH drive.)
To get to a better ratio you would have to engineer like hell to start squeezing the numerator. Make it radically aerodynamic, low-rolling resistance tires (probably the lowest hanging fruit), cut the weight significantly…
I do love the idea of something like an electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk. Maybe not streamlined, but you could get much better rolling resistance with something like bicycle tires—and weight could be kept in check.
> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
My understanding is that when buying a car you are dealing with an oligopoly. You might think that you have a lot of options, but they all come from the same source. Furthermore, big money control not only car production, but oil too. If they allow the ceo of a car company to come with such a car, they loose billions in the oil industry. So they have no incentive to do that.
New options do appear on the market like the new toyota prius with solar panel, but if you look at it you will see that they didn't even try to maximize the solar panel size. Still it gets 2 km extra range in bad conditions. Triple that and you have 6 km, in real conditions. If you use your car every other day, you will never charge it, ever. If you get average or above sun, you can drive it daily and not charge it ever. A big problem if you sell oil.
The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control. Nobody with big money is interested in that.
To understand who controls your life, see all the draconian measures taken against electric scooters: cheap, not poluting, democratic, don't need a lot of space and so on. Everyone with money said: we can't allow that. Write defamatory articles in the media they control, pass laws against it and so on.
> The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control.
It's not that I totally disagree with this - there is some truth to it. But it has no bearing at all on the question "can I put the panels on the car instead?" Which has been debunked in this thread and elsewhere many, many times.
The counterargument to what you say is that Solar is in fact booming. It is coming - oil money can slow it, but not stop it. They have more success in some countries than others. Sorry USA, you're laggards now. But it's on an exponential ramp-up and getting big now.
You absolutely can .. but in order to be self sustaining vehicles need to look somewhat like the builds that appear in Australian multi day solar races - ultra lightweight, extreme streamlining, zero driver comfort, no extras like cargo space and automatic rear doors, etc.
> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.
is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.
Ok, so lets say we didn't want 100% of the energy to come from those "self-sustainable panels on the car", but rather N%, so we keep most everything as-is, except switching all the outside body/chassi panels for solar panels, how much N% could we recover from that? Could it change so someone goes from needing to charge once every 3 days to once every 2 weeks lets say? Together with re-generative breaking, maybe it could at least have some impact.
The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce.
Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
> Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
The cost of solar panels is already low, that's why it's booming. This cost isn't the main constraint any more.
Panels on a vehicle have stronger requirements for low weight, and vibration tolerance than those on a fixed structure. They contribute to the complexity of the vehicle's power systems. They have to be designed with vehicle aerodynamics in mind.
And of course the limited surface area means that all of that for a component that's it's barely able to keep the vehicles' aircon running. The physics of that will remain the same.
At any price point, there are good arguments to put the panels on a fixed structure instead.
So maybe it will happen when we have run out of non-moving surfaces to put the panels on. So, Don't hold your breath.
Well but that would be a problem for keeping the car infinitely running with only solar power. But what about just passively charging it while idle? Cars sit idle most of the time.
> Aptera has this planned but not sure if they ever reach market maturity.
Yes, Aptera does not have a shipping product, and if they ship the current design it might not have a large market for it. The have been promising delivery for a long time now, so it certainly looks a lot like vapourware.
you get too little energy vs the cost of integrating it. It gets worse considering as a driver you want to park your car in shade/garage/multistory parkings
There was a production car planned called the Lightyear One [0], originating from a Dutch student team, but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture.
> but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture
More importantly, seems they stopped manufacture it because they made a new version, that was supposed to be available in 2025, but I don't think I've seen it anywhere.
> However, in January 2023 Lightyear announced that it was halting production of the 0 model, redirecting their efforts towards production of Lightyear 2; Atlas Technologies B.V., the subsidiary responsible for the manufacture of the Lightyear 0, would be allowed to go bankrupt. As of 2023, the replacement, Lightyear 2, is slated to be US$40,000 and available in both Europe and North America, and to start production in 2025.
He came up with a design where the panels can can unfolded for a larger surface area. But you can only do that when the car is at rest. And it's permanently like having a loaded roof-rack. Its's still less practical than mounting solar panels on the roof of a house or other fixed structure.
In a race metaphor I'd say it is a car that has a higher top speed, is already travelling faster than competitors but is still accelerating. However it is still laps behind some competitors that had a head start.
Is that "winning"? I'd say no, but is it going to win? Yes, obviously.
The problem solar will create is that solar doesn't work for highrises. It works for suburbs. Electricity companies will be forced (more and more) to tax suburbs for nothing (for the sun, Louis XVI-style) to keep reasonable energy prices in cities.
Unless of course, cities think ahead for once and city hall gets large solar collectors (at least the physical area) along power lines NOW.
I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies.
If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.
Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built.
But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.
Long distance transmission is part of the cost of production when the location of the production is non-local to the consumption.
With-holding permits is stupid, as are bans on new deployments, but neither are subsidies. You can cut subsidies to zero and at the same time give out all the permits people requests.
The USofA is a broligarchy not a capitalist society, so there's that.
Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc.
There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped back to near zero.
One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
It depends on how much generation you expect to 'waste'. Many plans are targetting a lot more generation than demand, with numbers sometimes stated as 300% generation potential for solar plus wind.
Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.
Yes, that does not really answer my question, though. A global average is somewhat interesting but with solar the situation is bound to vary widly by location. Also, does 'solar' then include battery storage?
I think the key is to combine it with a strong, digitalized grid and a lot of BESS—a technology which is now getting progressively cheaper, just like PV.
I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.
ren will not reach 100% in EU because of necessary grid costs and plain data that shows there are continental weather patterns that VRE+bess alone cant solve. Hydro is already mostly tapped and Norway+Sweden dont want interconnect expansion
There must be some kind of calculation generally based on latitude?
A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?
One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.
-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.
I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons.
The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder).
In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off.
My up time is better than the grid.
The simple fact is that solar plus batteries is a complete solution for 90% + of the worlds population.
One of my side projects was to remove the alternator from the "truckasaurus" and mount solar pv as the only electrical power for starting, lights, etc. It was marginal, but I ran it that way as my only vehicle ,year round, for years.
Relevant?, yes! as my experience has shown me where the margin realy is, and there has been a great deal of technological improvements and cost reductions since I built my system.
I have my quite positive experience with solar too. But "90% population" claim is unrealistic.
For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.
Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.
At a large enough scale everything gets different.
We've already got pumped-hydro storage infrastructure and battery tech, while certainly not as far along as the boosters circa the middle of the last decade promised us, is at a point where it's viable as one part of the puzzle.
Speaking of the larger picture, this is to say nothing of all the other renewable options out there that continue to work when the sun goes down.
EDIT: And it doesn't speak at all to the other "alternative" energy storage options like thermal storage
Solar has progressed so fast that only the most insanely optimistic predictions were accurate in the end.
I'd guess batteries are also at that stage.
Googling it seems that is correct eg:
> In 2017, U.S. grid storage developers promised they could deliver 35 gigawatts by 2025. They beat their target and made batteries a key power-sector player.
> That goal sounded improbable even to some who believed that storage was on a growth trajectory. A smattering of independent developers and utilities had managed to install just 500 megawatts of batteries nationwide, equivalent to one good-size gas-fired power plant. Building 35 gigawatts would entail 70-fold growth in just eight years.
The last ~4% or so when the sun isnt shining, the wind isnt blowing, the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be supplied via power2gas.
Unlike pumped storage and batteries, Power2gas has poor round trip efficiency (40%) but unlike them gas is a very cost effective way to store large amounts of energy for long periods of time.
The ironic thing is that even if we produced all our power in this inefficient way and not just 4% it would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power.
Until natural gas extraction is taxed or banned, though, power2gas probably wont be cost effective. Natural gas is too cheap even with all the wars.
it's winning regardless - every kwh of solar is a kwh less of fossils. You can achieve even deeper decarbonization with nuclear but the perfect shouldnt be the enemy of good. There are countries where nuclear is politically hard and changing ppl's opinions is hard too. So it's either ren+ some fossil firming or just fossils
Another advantage of solar that it is decentralized and difficult/too costly to shut off by a country bombing you (Ukraine benefits from this) (unlike a big centralized power plant).
I think the biggest potential is in the 3rd world countries for which hydrocarbon import is a big drain on their convertible monetary reserves (especially now with the rising oil prices).
A farmer with enough free land and significant diesel bills for his farm machinery would also benefit from having his own solar farm and electric machinery.
Two future developments might be especially useful:
1) extremely cheap (sodium?) batteries (not necessarily ultra compact/light per kwh, just cheap). Moving in that direction but significant price reduction is still needed.
2) an ultra-cheap PV foil you can just roll out and not care too much about the longevity (not sure how feasible, but would be awesome and really handy in many situations)
Do you consider this a novel insight? A factor that needs drawing attention to? Something that isn't being taken account of, and there aren't existing solutions to?
Seriously, what are you adding to the discussion of Solar + Battery systems hereby?
We’re still producing 80% of our energy from fossil fuels and that share is basically unchanged for 30 years.
The largest renewable share is hydropower, not solar.
The hype for volatile renewables on Hackernews is reallt tiresome, but I’m not surprised that the article source posted here is from a German government-funded broadcaster.
In Germany, shilling for renewables is basically part of the state propaganda.
Btw, Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants according to the official database called Marktstammdatenregister.
The energy transition in Germany is not working. Our electricity generation is neither cheap nor clean and national electricity generation has dropped by 20% since 2018.
That’s a lot of text, none of which even attempts to refute the factual claim that solar’s generation share has increased from 1% in 2015 to 10% in 2025.
Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.
They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.
dw doesn't make any reasonable factual claims that are worth refuting. They are a propaganda arm of the German government that will keep repeating lies until the state collapses.
Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-
The extensive EV car subsidies has really got people to buy EV. With 98.3% of all new cars sold, it is amazing what subsidies that accounts for more than 25% of the value of a new car does to encourage people to buy electric. In Sweden, it is a well know concept that when Norway do subsidies, they don't do it ungenerously.
Norway has however started to cut down on those subsidies, with one cut 2023 and now a second cut next year, and then a third one in 2027. They are combining that with extra fees for ICE, and time will tell what that will do to voters.
The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment.
I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied.
Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector.
The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources.
You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.
hydro is mostly tapped, solar on the other hand can grow a lot.
And we are talking about electricity, not energy in general. Tackling energy is more about electrification.
Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.
Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.
The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices
The energy transition in Germany sucks because they are replacing nuclear with solar when they should have been replacing coal with solar.
That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.
If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.
Germany never had a huge amount of nuclear power anyway and keeping it going was expensive. Fukushima was just what pushed them over the edge.
Meanwhile in the UK rate payers are being forced to subsidize nuclear power with a guaranteed strike price that is ~4x what they have to pay for the same amount of power from solar and wind.
Remove the lavish subsidies and make nuclear pay for its own catastrophe insurance and it'd be dead in the water. Those subsidies would be put to far better use on storage, wind and solar.
Your comment is typical of the tortured efforts of skeptics to discredit renewables, also usually applied to electric cars and other climate friendly measures.
You ignore the points made to argue a bunch on non-sequiturs that you think serve your purposes. Plus you throw in various ad-hominem attacks.
The article points out the experiential growth of renewables and logarithmic reductions in price. You don't take issue with that, maybe because you don't understand the consequences of exponential growth?
You mention that largest renewable share is hydro, but the number of locations suitable for hydro is very limited, and the attendant cost is very high.
What you focus on in existing installed capacity. But so what? Yes sources of power that have been installed over hundreds of years are indeed outnumbering renewables. Somehow you don't get that the rapid increase of renewables will wipe out existing forms of power generation in a fraction of the time it took for those to appear.
Renewables are much, much cheaper than other forms, and more scalable (up and down). That is undeniable buy you or anyone else. That will drive installations even in the face of issues such as intermittency because the force of money, along with convenience and flexibility, beats everything.
Solar is not less than revolution in Pakistan. Almost every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs. More affluent houses have almost gone off grid; others are selling back to grid and others who can't afford has their own small scale 12V solar panels to run fans in the scorching summer of Pakistan to save electricity bills. It is all done by people independently without much support from the government as ROI (if you are using full potential of your installed capacity, it can be as low as 1 year and afterwords it will be free) is much better on solar than paying the grid.
I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.
Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.
According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.
Isn't it insane?
Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane. At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle. That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.
Heat reduces solar production, ideally you have very sunny environment with about 25C / 77F.
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It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.
The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Not to mention, all the red tape.
But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.
sOcIaLiSM!!!
Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done.
And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter.
EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
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> countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables
This isn’t surprising; cell phones and mobile payments also took over much faster in Africa than Europe/US because the existing infrastructure (landlines, banks) was highly underdeveloped or unreliable.
Recent Bloomberg opinion pice about factories there and in nearby countries shifting to renewables:
Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/asia-s...
> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.
The US can have this too if it stops demonizing China.
Have what? The US uses far more solar energy per capita than Pakistan.
It is absolutely sane and perfectly reasonable. The climate highly support it, you are already used to a grid that in some cases are not available 24/7, and the major energy consumptions are AC and fans which correlate with production.
Truly, you got to hand it to them. China has done the world a great service.
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915
> Every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs.
Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.
And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.
Sorry, I fixed it to "Almost every". I agree, "Every" is overstated.
I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.
That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]
I'm not from Pakistan but Karachi is the only vertical city in Pakistan, most people lives in apartment buildings, I would suggest looking at other cities like Lahore.
I really appreciate the Technology Connections take on renewable energy from solar and batteries including a recyclable component. With fossil fuels, the power plant has to be built, and then the fuel is constantly shipped in, which requires constant extraction. While solar panels and batteries can not only consume their fuel for effectively free, but at the end of their life, the materials in them can be recycled without needing massive mines for fresh glass, aluminum, lithium, silicon, etc.
Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?
It’s a good question, but the reality is the energy required to power a car is far larger than what you can collect.
The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW.
To convert that to a more familiar car power measurement that’s about 5 horsepower.
Hopefully it’s clear why a realtime solar car is hard.
This is not to say it’s impossible, they have been built. They’re just not super practical for everyday use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_car
I would love to see this laid out practically.
For example, if you had an electric golf cart with a solar roof, on a sunny day…
With two adults, a speed of 35 MPH, an LLM suggested a ratio of 10:1—that is, the power demands of the golf cart were 10x what the solar could deliver in real time. (LLM considered also aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance of golf cart tires…). When I suggest a speed of 25 MPH, the ratio came down to 5:1.
Regardless, assuming batteries to store energy on the cart, it suggests a 10 minute drive to your neighborhood grocery store would require the golf cart to sit in the parking lot for close to an hour before it will have caught the batteries back up to their charge before you left home. (And this is at the rather impatient 25 MPH drive.)
To get to a better ratio you would have to engineer like hell to start squeezing the numerator. Make it radically aerodynamic, low-rolling resistance tires (probably the lowest hanging fruit), cut the weight significantly…
I do love the idea of something like an electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk. Maybe not streamlined, but you could get much better rolling resistance with something like bicycle tires—and weight could be kept in check.
> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
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My understanding is that when buying a car you are dealing with an oligopoly. You might think that you have a lot of options, but they all come from the same source. Furthermore, big money control not only car production, but oil too. If they allow the ceo of a car company to come with such a car, they loose billions in the oil industry. So they have no incentive to do that.
New options do appear on the market like the new toyota prius with solar panel, but if you look at it you will see that they didn't even try to maximize the solar panel size. Still it gets 2 km extra range in bad conditions. Triple that and you have 6 km, in real conditions. If you use your car every other day, you will never charge it, ever. If you get average or above sun, you can drive it daily and not charge it ever. A big problem if you sell oil.
The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control. Nobody with big money is interested in that.
To understand who controls your life, see all the draconian measures taken against electric scooters: cheap, not poluting, democratic, don't need a lot of space and so on. Everyone with money said: we can't allow that. Write defamatory articles in the media they control, pass laws against it and so on.
> The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control.
It's not that I totally disagree with this - there is some truth to it. But it has no bearing at all on the question "can I put the panels on the car instead?" Which has been debunked in this thread and elsewhere many, many times.
The counterargument to what you say is that Solar is in fact booming. It is coming - oil money can slow it, but not stop it. They have more success in some countries than others. Sorry USA, you're laggards now. But it's on an exponential ramp-up and getting big now.
Just, it's not useful on car roofs.
You absolutely can .. but in order to be self sustaining vehicles need to look somewhat like the builds that appear in Australian multi day solar races - ultra lightweight, extreme streamlining, zero driver comfort, no extras like cargo space and automatic rear doors, etc.
Maybe in time efficiencies will get there.
* https://worldsolarchallenge.org/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lVdrHnbYo
Addendum: addressing the [dead] comment below
> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.
is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.
Ok, so lets say we didn't want 100% of the energy to come from those "self-sustainable panels on the car", but rather N%, so we keep most everything as-is, except switching all the outside body/chassi panels for solar panels, how much N% could we recover from that? Could it change so someone goes from needing to charge once every 3 days to once every 2 weeks lets say? Together with re-generative breaking, maybe it could at least have some impact.
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consumer car needs hundreds of pounds of reinforcement... just to pass side impact test
[dead]
The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce.
Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
> Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
The cost of solar panels is already low, that's why it's booming. This cost isn't the main constraint any more.
Panels on a vehicle have stronger requirements for low weight, and vibration tolerance than those on a fixed structure. They contribute to the complexity of the vehicle's power systems. They have to be designed with vehicle aerodynamics in mind.
And of course the limited surface area means that all of that for a component that's it's barely able to keep the vehicles' aircon running. The physics of that will remain the same.
At any price point, there are good arguments to put the panels on a fixed structure instead.
So maybe it will happen when we have run out of non-moving surfaces to put the panels on. So, Don't hold your breath.
Aptera has this planned but not sure if they ever reach market maturity.
There also was a project car from the Nordics I think. Can't recall the name though.
Main problem is the large amount of energy a car needs vs what kind of surface area you have and efficiency we get.
An ideal (100% effiwncy) solar cell of 5m² would still need 20 hours to charge a 100kWh battery. And we are way off on area an efficiency in reality.
Well but that would be a problem for keeping the car infinitely running with only solar power. But what about just passively charging it while idle? Cars sit idle most of the time.
> Aptera has this planned but not sure if they ever reach market maturity.
Yes, Aptera does not have a shipping product, and if they ship the current design it might not have a large market for it. The have been promising delivery for a long time now, so it certainly looks a lot like vapourware.
you get too little energy vs the cost of integrating it. It gets worse considering as a driver you want to park your car in shade/garage/multistory parkings
There was a production car planned called the Lightyear One [0], originating from a Dutch student team, but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_0
> but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture
More importantly, seems they stopped manufacture it because they made a new version, that was supposed to be available in 2025, but I don't think I've seen it anywhere.
> However, in January 2023 Lightyear announced that it was halting production of the 0 model, redirecting their efforts towards production of Lightyear 2; Atlas Technologies B.V., the subsidiary responsible for the manufacture of the Lightyear 0, would be allowed to go bankrupt. As of 2023, the replacement, Lightyear 2, is slated to be US$40,000 and available in both Europe and North America, and to start production in 2025.
> Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly
This is 100% a very common noob question. The answers are therefor easy to find if you try.
https://www.dartsolar.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/194ajsm/my_tes...
He came up with a design where the panels can can unfolded for a larger surface area. But you can only do that when the car is at rest. And it's permanently like having a loaded roof-rack. Its's still less practical than mounting solar panels on the roof of a house or other fixed structure.
In a race metaphor I'd say it is a car that has a higher top speed, is already travelling faster than competitors but is still accelerating. However it is still laps behind some competitors that had a head start.
Is that "winning"? I'd say no, but is it going to win? Yes, obviously.
The problem solar will create is that solar doesn't work for highrises. It works for suburbs. Electricity companies will be forced (more and more) to tax suburbs for nothing (for the sun, Louis XVI-style) to keep reasonable energy prices in cities.
Unless of course, cities think ahead for once and city hall gets large solar collectors (at least the physical area) along power lines NOW.
Coal fired power stations work for high rises and for the suburbs.
Battery backed wind and solar farms work for high rises and for the suburbs (see, for example: South Australia).
Are dw writers ok? 2000 people died due to the nuclear accident at Fukushima?
I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies.
If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.
Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built.
But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.
Long distance transmission is part of the cost of production when the location of the production is non-local to the consumption.
With-holding permits is stupid, as are bans on new deployments, but neither are subsidies. You can cut subsidies to zero and at the same time give out all the permits people requests.
Where at the point in the transition where the level of subsidies, if any, determines the speed of the build out.
The question is: how early do you retire existing thermal power plant?
The USofA is a broligarchy not a capitalist society, so there's that.
Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc.
There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped back to near zero.
> cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order
He is going to pay them $1B to drop their plans: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/23/g-s1-114868/trump-totalenergi...
Broligarchy is the natural end stage of unfettered capitalism. We've arguably never been more capitalist.
Thank you, China.
One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
It depends on how much generation you expect to 'waste'. Many plans are targetting a lot more generation than demand, with numbers sometimes stated as 300% generation potential for solar plus wind.
From the article:
The heat and electricity energy storage need to grow to 46000 TWh [1]. The current value is about 10 TWh.
[1] https://uk.eragroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Global_sy...
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Yes, that does not really answer my question, though. A global average is somewhat interesting but with solar the situation is bound to vary widly by location. Also, does 'solar' then include battery storage?
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I think the key is to combine it with a strong, digitalized grid and a lot of BESS—a technology which is now getting progressively cheaper, just like PV.
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...
I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.
ren will not reach 100% in EU because of necessary grid costs and plain data that shows there are continental weather patterns that VRE+bess alone cant solve. Hydro is already mostly tapped and Norway+Sweden dont want interconnect expansion
There must be some kind of calculation generally based on latitude?
A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?
One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.
-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.
> There must be some kind of calculation generally based on latitude?
I am suspecting the same. Thanks for the reply, not sure why my comment seems to have ruffled some feathers...
Connect enough grids and the sun is always shining.
Yeah, just build a 300 GW transmission line from the US to Europe. It will basically costs nothing.
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that's delusional if you look at EU generation data unless you suggest US-EU-Russia cable
Edit for downvotes, check https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... winter data and navigate through countries and tell me how sun's always shining in EU in winter and what capacity factor it can get in certain timeframes
I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons. The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder). In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off. My up time is better than the grid. The simple fact is that solar plus batteries is a complete solution for 90% + of the worlds population. One of my side projects was to remove the alternator from the "truckasaurus" and mount solar pv as the only electrical power for starting, lights, etc. It was marginal, but I ran it that way as my only vehicle ,year round, for years. Relevant?, yes! as my experience has shown me where the margin realy is, and there has been a great deal of technological improvements and cost reductions since I built my system.
I have my quite positive experience with solar too. But "90% population" claim is unrealistic.
For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.
Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.
At a large enough scale everything gets different.
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»In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off.«
Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.
Sounds like a fair system.
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Except during the night, or winter.
We've already got pumped-hydro storage infrastructure and battery tech, while certainly not as far along as the boosters circa the middle of the last decade promised us, is at a point where it's viable as one part of the puzzle.
Speaking of the larger picture, this is to say nothing of all the other renewable options out there that continue to work when the sun goes down.
EDIT: And it doesn't speak at all to the other "alternative" energy storage options like thermal storage
Solar has progressed so fast that only the most insanely optimistic predictions were accurate in the end.
I'd guess batteries are also at that stage.
Googling it seems that is correct eg:
> In 2017, U.S. grid storage developers promised they could deliver 35 gigawatts by 2025. They beat their target and made batteries a key power-sector player.
> That goal sounded improbable even to some who believed that storage was on a growth trajectory. A smattering of independent developers and utilities had managed to install just 500 megawatts of batteries nationwide, equivalent to one good-size gas-fired power plant. Building 35 gigawatts would entail 70-fold growth in just eight years.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/grid-sto...
The last ~4% or so when the sun isnt shining, the wind isnt blowing, the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be supplied via power2gas.
Unlike pumped storage and batteries, Power2gas has poor round trip efficiency (40%) but unlike them gas is a very cost effective way to store large amounts of energy for long periods of time.
The ironic thing is that even if we produced all our power in this inefficient way and not just 4% it would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power.
Until natural gas extraction is taxed or banned, though, power2gas probably wont be cost effective. Natural gas is too cheap even with all the wars.
it's winning regardless - every kwh of solar is a kwh less of fossils. You can achieve even deeper decarbonization with nuclear but the perfect shouldnt be the enemy of good. There are countries where nuclear is politically hard and changing ppl's opinions is hard too. So it's either ren+ some fossil firming or just fossils
Another advantage of solar that it is decentralized and difficult/too costly to shut off by a country bombing you (Ukraine benefits from this) (unlike a big centralized power plant).
I think the biggest potential is in the 3rd world countries for which hydrocarbon import is a big drain on their convertible monetary reserves (especially now with the rising oil prices).
A farmer with enough free land and significant diesel bills for his farm machinery would also benefit from having his own solar farm and electric machinery.
Two future developments might be especially useful: 1) extremely cheap (sodium?) batteries (not necessarily ultra compact/light per kwh, just cheap). Moving in that direction but significant price reduction is still needed.
2) an ultra-cheap PV foil you can just roll out and not care too much about the longevity (not sure how feasible, but would be awesome and really handy in many situations)
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That's what batteries and wind and hydro are for.
And battery prices and buildout are looking really promising.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...
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> Solar ... Except during the night, or winter.
Do you consider this a novel insight? A factor that needs drawing attention to? Something that isn't being taken account of, and there aren't existing solutions to?
Seriously, what are you adding to the discussion of Solar + Battery systems hereby?
No, it’s not.
We’re still producing 80% of our energy from fossil fuels and that share is basically unchanged for 30 years.
The largest renewable share is hydropower, not solar.
The hype for volatile renewables on Hackernews is reallt tiresome, but I’m not surprised that the article source posted here is from a German government-funded broadcaster.
In Germany, shilling for renewables is basically part of the state propaganda.
Btw, Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants according to the official database called Marktstammdatenregister.
The energy transition in Germany is not working. Our electricity generation is neither cheap nor clean and national electricity generation has dropped by 20% since 2018.
Yet people can’t stop posting this nonsense.
That’s a lot of text, none of which even attempts to refute the factual claim that solar’s generation share has increased from 1% in 2015 to 10% in 2025.
Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.
They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.
dw doesn't make any reasonable factual claims that are worth refuting. They are a propaganda arm of the German government that will keep repeating lies until the state collapses.
It is working perfectly fine: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-
The extensive EV car subsidies has really got people to buy EV. With 98.3% of all new cars sold, it is amazing what subsidies that accounts for more than 25% of the value of a new car does to encourage people to buy electric. In Sweden, it is a well know concept that when Norway do subsidies, they don't do it ungenerously.
Norway has however started to cut down on those subsidies, with one cut 2023 and now a second cut next year, and then a third one in 2027. They are combining that with extra fees for ICE, and time will tell what that will do to voters.
> Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants
No, Germany has 97 coal BLOCKS in its power plants (down from 150 in 5 years), but those are NOT all active.
Also Germany's coal consumption is at an all time low, down a third in only 5 years.
fyi it's mostly because of becoming net importer and deindustrialization. Amount of low carbon TWh is unchanged since 2015
The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment. I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied. Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector.
The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources. You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.
hydro is mostly tapped, solar on the other hand can grow a lot. And we are talking about electricity, not energy in general. Tackling energy is more about electrification.
Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.
Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.
The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices
The energy transition in Germany sucks because they are replacing nuclear with solar when they should have been replacing coal with solar.
That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.
If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.
for them prices are kinda similar. Their npp is 2.5bn/unit. But inland construction is banned.
Theyre replacing both with solar.
Germany never had a huge amount of nuclear power anyway and keeping it going was expensive. Fukushima was just what pushed them over the edge.
Meanwhile in the UK rate payers are being forced to subsidize nuclear power with a guaranteed strike price that is ~4x what they have to pay for the same amount of power from solar and wind.
Remove the lavish subsidies and make nuclear pay for its own catastrophe insurance and it'd be dead in the water. Those subsidies would be put to far better use on storage, wind and solar.
Hydro has its own problems, it traps fish and it significantly changes ecosystems. It might be renewable but not necessary ecological
"Building and recycling windmills has a carbon footprint"-ass argument.
Your comment is typical of the tortured efforts of skeptics to discredit renewables, also usually applied to electric cars and other climate friendly measures.
You ignore the points made to argue a bunch on non-sequiturs that you think serve your purposes. Plus you throw in various ad-hominem attacks.
The article points out the experiential growth of renewables and logarithmic reductions in price. You don't take issue with that, maybe because you don't understand the consequences of exponential growth?
You mention that largest renewable share is hydro, but the number of locations suitable for hydro is very limited, and the attendant cost is very high.
What you focus on in existing installed capacity. But so what? Yes sources of power that have been installed over hundreds of years are indeed outnumbering renewables. Somehow you don't get that the rapid increase of renewables will wipe out existing forms of power generation in a fraction of the time it took for those to appear.
Renewables are much, much cheaper than other forms, and more scalable (up and down). That is undeniable buy you or anyone else. That will drive installations even in the face of issues such as intermittency because the force of money, along with convenience and flexibility, beats everything.