Comment by runako
13 hours ago
Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins:
- California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar
- Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind
- Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar
- The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind
- Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar
There's real momentum happening.
California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors?
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704
One thing about power generation stats like these is they are incredibly sensitive to examination dates given the rapid growth of (especially) solar.
That EIA site cuts off in August. The same EIA report shows solar grew 17% from 2024-2025. You can plug in your own assumptions to the solar growth curve since then, as well as your assumptions about the natural gas curve given the ride natgas has been on since August.
EIA also produces live status on the daily generation mix[1]. 69% today was wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro. 12% nuclear, so some of this is whether you consider nuclear renewable or not.
CA's power generation may cost more, but the pricing (for raw power at least) should be a lot more predictable than those of us dependent on fossil fuels. Natural gas, for example, has undergone a ~100% price round-trip in the last 12 months.
1 - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_...
83 renewable isn’t right, but it’s up to 67% clean in 2025, which is still pretty impressive
There is pushback here against the figures you are quoting.
Here is something real. South Australia electricity production averaged 75% from renewables last year. Wikipedia (for 2023) put it at 70%: "70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources. This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia They averaged 75% in 2025.
South Australia has no hydro to speak of. They have a some local gas, but no local coal. They do have good wind and solar resources. To me it looks like the transition was driven largely by immediate pragmatism concerns, as renewables are so much cheaper than gas. The politicians make a lot of noise about it of course, but I suspect if they had a local cheap source of coal the outcome would have been different.
Their electricity prices are high by Australian standards - but they have to pay for the gas they import to cover the missing 25%, and gas is by far the most expensive form of generation in Australia. And they are paying for all the new equipment this transition requires.
> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar
California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading.
It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels.
Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at the best time of the year and not the full year?
Or am I looking at sources that are >1 year out of date and in one year they've jumped from ~70% renewable to ~83%?
EIA puts this out daily:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_...
Today was 31% solar, 16% wind, 16% hydro, 6% geothermal, etc.
Some of the difference to your numbers will be seasonal/weather-related, but the pace of solar and wind installation is such that data that's even a year or two old can be wildly out of date.
AIUI, there has been excess solar at peak, but batteries have growing very fast. That might have caused a big change even in a year.
Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.
And wood, coal, and oil are renewable. It's funny that we have fixated on "renewable" when carbon in the atmosphere is the problem, isn't it?
Solar will no longer be renewable in 5 billion years as well.
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California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster
2022 - 48% gas power on grid
2025 - 25% gas power on grid
What insane progress.
Most expensive electricity in the contiguous United States. By quite a margin.
By contrast, Georgia, which has to pay for the "disastrous" Vogtle 3/4 nuclear construction project, pays less than half that.
Remember: disastrous nuclear projects are significantly better than renewable successes.
Supply costs have surprisingly not that much to do with Californias silly electric rates. They load into the retail rates all kinds of disaster recovery costs, environmental blah blah costs, distribution upgrades, social programs, the list goes on. Plus straight old fashioned corruption in a state sponsored monopoly.
You can get some idea of the BS that gets loaded in by comparing some rates from municipal grids like SMUD vs pg&e. Same supply, fraction of the end user rate.
Anyway, that is to say theres very little useful to draw on here in comparing nuke to renewable cost.
GA resident here. Let's not close the books on Vogtle yet, as our electricity rates are also moving up quite significantly. Let's get to a steady state before we declare a cost win.
IIRC our rates are up ~30% since 2024, and our electricity prices are 5th highest in the nation. I need to underline that this is in one of the lower-wage states in the country, with few state-level labor protections.
Also: the finances on Vogtle were sufficiently bad that they led to a rapid run-up in consumer electricity rates that generated political fallout. First: two members of the Public Service Commission lost their seats to Democrats, who do not generally win statewide races here. Second: the Federal government has had to specifically loan money to the operator to subsidize consumer rates. The Federal government could equally subsidize California rates down to the average or below if it so desired.
That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July.
The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.
Electricity is cheap in Georgia because Georgia is generally not a desirable state for business. Electricity, along with a lot of others things, is expensive in California because it's California. There's a lot of talent in California, a lot of inertia, and a huge economy.
12 Billion in loan guarantees doesn't get paid in bills and isn't an accounting trick that costs nothing: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60682
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> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind
The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/12mo/monthly
That’s just a random website. Dutch bureau of statistics:
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2025/hernieuwb...
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I failed to find the "86%" figure. The total energy mix shows "66% renewable".
This is just goalpost moving. Only a couple of decades ago we were at a solid 0% everywhere.
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind
The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass.
As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.
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Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures?
I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable.
For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc.
Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.
Where can I look up this numbers? (Just curious)
For California, CAISO publishes a ton of data. Here is daily fuel mix - https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso
You can also see Texas (ERCOT), New York and a few other operators.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
This is a goldmine of data, how did you find out about it? Thank you so much for sharing
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You’re a bit off on the California numbers. It’s off my about 10%. Either ways, what a state. It’s basically a country on its own.
good hilights! but - and i mean this kindly - you are starting to talk like an AI: "overshadowing real wins" "There's real momentum happening".
Isn't that the list of high energy prices and blackouts?
Are you referring to California? IIRC the prices are driven by several factors, including expensive payouts for wildfire damage, but there isn't anything suggesting that renewables is a major factor. And rolling blackouts haven't been a thing since 2020. That might have been arguably related to renewables since they were experiencing abnormally hot climate change related heat waves that were extending into the evening hours and driving high air conditioning load beyond the time solar was prepared to handle it. I believe that in the meantime they've installed quite a number of batteries, which is why it is not a problem now.
Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple.
Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...
> Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense
Can you cite this please?
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