Comment by nozzlegear

9 hours ago

Didn't the US very recently pass the milestone of generating more energy from renewable sources than from natural gas? Like within the last week or two?

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nozzlegear

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carefree-bob  9 hours ago

No, not even close.

US energy sources for 2024 (last year for which we have data):

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...

   natgas: 38%
   oil: 35%
   coal: 10%
   all renewables: 9%
   nuclear: 8%

Within all renewables, in quadrillions of btus:

   biofuels: 2.6
   wood: 1.9
   wind: 1.6
   solar: 1.4
   Hydro: 0.8
   waste: 0.4
   geothermal: 0.1

Total: 8.8 quadrillion btu = 9% of total energy

  • nozzlegear  9 hours ago

    https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables...

    Renewables generated more energy than natural gas for the entire month of March, 2026. That's a new milestone baby.

    • carefree-bob  8 hours ago

      Except that didn't happen, and it's not a milestone.

      First, you are confusing share of electricity generation with the share of all energy. Electricity is only 21% of all energy. Natgas, oil and coal are crushing it in that remaining 79%.

      Second, the article is wrong, even for electricity. To their credit, Canary Media showed in their graph that this data is for electricity only.

      The data for March is not out yet. Here is the latest official data from the EIA. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/

      It only applies to January 2026, and the next release is April 23, and then you will get data for February 2026. All data has a 2 month time lag. Your spidey senses should have been tingling if an article published April 10 claimed to have data for the month of March, but this is why you don't get your statistics from activist blogs, but from official sources.

      So if they are not accessing the official data, what are they accessing? They claim that their source is "Ember", but what is Ember? It is an environmentalist think tank. Well, maybe Ember has their own people calling up power companies and compiling data faster than the EIA. That would be pretty, cool, right?

      Except they don't. Look at Ember's page.

      https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

      what do they cite as their data source: EIA.

      It's right on the website.

      So Ember is just pulling EIA data, and then filling the last two months with data they made up, but citing it as EIA data. And this, uh, sympathetic adjustment of EIA data is why Canary Media turns to Ember rather than directly pulling from EIA.

      I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out.

      Of course everyone else will have forgotten by then.

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