This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
I think that's part of what's notable about this. The administration hasn't been able to reverse the trend despite putting a massive thumb on the scale against projects like offshore wind and tariffs on solar panel imports.
There's probably a delay in the effects though since projects started before they took office are probably starting to thin out and finish up. We'd have to look into the permitting of new projects or wait for to see how big the decline in new capacity turns out to be in a couple years.
I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.
> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc
Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.
It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.
For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.
> For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything.
Because renewable energy is Communism, or something.
But seriously: $$$$. The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful. The owners of these companies and their media co-conspirators should be tried in the Hague for what they have done to our planet just to keep making fucking money.
That's a link to a global chart. The OP is talking about the US. It's not surprising that countries that have to import natural gas are moving away from it and countries with plentiful local suppliew are doubling down on it.
> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.
First, I live 150 yards from a major freeway - I-90 in WA, it's three lanes in each direction here. There are no tiny black particles over everything in surroundings, and my outdoors AQI (from my own sensor) is normally in single digits and basically only ever gets above 50 if it's wildfire smoke or the neighbors are burning something.
But second, if we developed a reliable and cheap way to, say, teleport people over long distances, why not tear it down?
Some of these plants are being retrofitted for dual firing. They can burn coal & natural gas at the same time. I wonder how that factors into these statistics.
Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.
A shame electricity is not the whole picture when it comes to energy. The resurgence in EV sales off the back of high gas prices is awesome, but almost 100% of bulk transport costs still rely on oil. Also, unlike EV's which can be plugged in at home for most of their needs, bulk-transport will require considerable new infrastructure to make the transition. Still a way to go.
It's a couple of months since I did the calculations, but I do believe 2035 is for all energy, not just electricity.
It's easy to drag out a flat line in an exponential graph - but the line better start bending soon or we'll end up with a truly mind boggling amount of solar energy.
For people who are interested in this space should very much read EMBER. They make digestable, data rich reporting.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
- 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 since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%)
- 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...
This is a great link. The most interesting feature of the solar graph is the amplitude of the seasonal variations. It looks like we typically generating ~100% more solar power in July than December.
If "we need to store solar energy from summer to winter" is indeed a significant issue, maybe you could use the extra power in summertime to make natural gas [1] and then store the gas until you need it in the winter.
Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections.
To completely decarbonise we probably will need to eventually make liquid fuels for long distance air travel. But it may make more sense to do that nearer the equator to maximise the return on the capital investment by running it constantly rather than only during the summer.
Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
It can't be more or much more than the 800W as currently done in Germany because it would not be safe with the way electricity is delivered to a home.
The reason is: when you pull electricity from the grid, the fuse would blow if you tried to pull too much current (e.g. you connect four hair dryers on the same outlet). It blows to prevent the wiring in your home from overheating and catching on fire. With balcony solar, you plug it in your home outlet which is already behind the fuse, which means the fuse cannot react and cut off power if you try to feed in more than the capacity allows. You could be maxing out on the current you are pulling from the grid, and then on top of that you would be adding your balcony solar.
Why it's allowed at all in Germany and other places is because the fuse will blow above 10A and the wiring in the house is 16A, so there was always a buffer or overcapacity in the wiring, presumably just in case. So they allowed 800W of balcony solar which is roughly 3.5A and still there is some wiggle room left.
Also why pull from the grid at all: your appliances actually just use the electricity from the grid. In Germany and I guess most of Europe they run a three phase system, so your balcony solar might not be in the same physical circuit as your appliances in use. With balcony solar your meter just offsets your consumption with whatever you are feeding it at the moment. From the grid standpoint if you are running something using 800W and feeding in 800W, it's 0.
Of course it can work without this too, but this defeats the purpose of balcony solar, which is plug it in and it works simplicity.
Another limitation is the transport capacity of each power line and each transformer (power lines and transformers don't care for the direction of the electricity, only for the amount of electricity).
For example if each house in a city would have 25A fuse and all the houses would simultaneously draw 25A, or simultaneously supply 25A the grid would collapse.
Usually the Diversity Factor for apartment block electric grids is around 35%.
This is very interesting and helpful info! I guess my fantasy is that a standard electrical panel would eventually have a literal plug on it where you could plug a larger system in, just as you would an outlet in the balcony situation, and then it would I think be, using your word, in "front" of the "fuse" (using quotes because I'm not sure I have the behind/in front of language correct, and when you use fuse here in the states it would be a breaker, I guess, not an actual fuse). This solution would of course have to mitigate things like fire risk, or blowing up the house or grid itself. I'm just hopeful it's coming because I think the install rate would go through the, pardon me, roof.
i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.
that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.
any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.
we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US
That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I'm sure there's some happy medium where they'd be happy, as you say, but at some number I'm guessing they'd fight back against too much adoption.
> my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
This alone would be incredible from wider adoption of balcony (incredible for the consumer I mean). If you knock a few cents per kWh off, which I think you can do with daytime/early evening usage (when the panels are still producing some energy so no storage required) that would be fantastic. Baby steps to a full system that you can DIY without anyone objecting.
i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid.
the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs.
they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especially where the marginal cost of the energy is very low.
the more users who disconnect, the more the fixed costs must be recouped from a shrinking customer base, triggering more incentive to leave the network. this is called the death spiral.
In addition, things like balcony solar don't save them cost: it introduces complexity because they need to safely manage that load, they need to be able to predict and measure it; in my experience working with utilities and network operators for many years, they flat out don't want these distributed generation sources unless they have a lot of say in how they are added to the grid, and how users can be charged for the privilege of generating their own power. that is often a very significant barrier to regulatory change.
>how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source?
We don't need a more plug and play system. A zero agreement interconnection for whatever UL certified 300W-ish scale is fine and should be widely deployed.
There needing to be interconnection agreements with your utility and an inspection is not a blocker that needs to be removed. Most places require a licensed electrician for complex work, having the electrician fill out a form and having a utility inspection is how things should be.
Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the cost of installation today is... epic (so epic in fact that the overall cost of install has actually gone up even though material costs have come down). Admittedly off-grid installs are a tiny fraction of places on the planet, but it's the trigger that led me to ask about this.
Perhaps you're just responding because I brought up grid tie (fair!), but I'm wondering why not aspire to remove the blocker, which would mean de-risking the installation so that laypeople could do it without having to get an electrician involved (which is what's so amazing about balcony).
Regulation aside, a significant issue is physical area. Most people won’t have access to enough area in the right direction to make it a primary source.
There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no.
Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets.
That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’s PowerAssist.
(Which limits the rate at which power draw can change. Very useful when you use a house-sized generator; it amounts to synthetic inertia. I have a 7kW generator, but a 7kW step load would stall it.)
Ah, this is why I come here. I had no idea that was the case. I feel like there was a story going around recently about how hard it is to restart some power generator if it gets knocked offline. Maybe it was about Hoover Dam now that I think about it (i.e., how bad it would be if the Colorado gets too low).
Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
A standard rooftop solar install with micro inverters is already pretty much plug and play. Wiring it up is the easy part.
Even a more complex system with large centralized inverters and battery backup can be about as plug and play as a desktop computer if you use an all-in-one inverter/charger/controller.
The challenge is scale. You can't take 10kW of solar and plug it into an outlet. It requires more hardware and wiring than that.
I don't see anyone replying to you here, and I don't know what your background is in this, but I think and hope you're spot on here. The more I've read replies in this thread the more I think this is mostly regulatory and maybe slightly a hardware issue (hardware issue is that there needs to be some kind of plug on an electrical panel that would remove the risks of having to pull the face off the panel, install a new breaker and connect the inverter).
The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.
US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.
Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:
> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China
This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.
China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
Not just the US, a lot of developed countries have outsourced the problem to China (or other countries) to look good on paper, and tanked their local manufacturing as a by-product. It will be interesting how history records this moment.
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.
To be clear, fuel cells are considered "low air pollution" because they eliminate certain nasty combustion products (NOx), but they still produce as much CO2 per kWh as a gas turbine.
Arguably that CO2 stream is concentrated and a candidate for capture/sequestration, but no one is doing that in practice.
There was an article recently about how the West Asia war is quickly decarbonising South Asia. Lot of solar and wind projects in the pipeline for SA countries. Especially because now renewables are a national security issue
I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.
It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org
I told someone about UBI and they hadn’t heard of it, 4 or 5 years ago, despite being an executive at a charity that is supposed to help people with food money.
No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
It will be interesting to see how solar evolves in the coming decade in US, maybe it could reach the current share of gas produced electricity, 40% . The country with the highest share of solar electricity is Hungary 27%, but they are part of the European electricity grid with lot of export and import.
Gas turbine manufacturing factories are very expensive and gas turbine manufacturers have already experienced turbine market crashed in 2018. Nobody wants to sit on loans for expensive idle factories in 5 years when the AI hype stops.
Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper.
Most places can't run on residential solar + battery 365 days in year and need grid connectivity. As more homes install residential solar + battery the grid costs, which are independent of the number of hours when the grid is used, will stay the same. The amount of consumed gas will be lower. The costs of building gas power plants will stay the same (they are the backup), the costs of maintaining gas power plants will increase (more frequent ramping up and down).
"Ramping damage in gas turbines refers to the wear and tear or stress that occurs as a result of frequent changes in the operating load, also known as load cycling. Gas turbines are designed to operate efficiently at steady-state conditions, and deviations from these conditions can lead to various issues"
The US has literally double its total electricity production in solar and batteries stuck in the now 5 year FIFO permit hell we require for grid additions that will cause most proposals to pull out before completion
> Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy
People at this point should realise that Trump is lying.
He also does the same with regards to Iran.
It is time to not only look at the Epstein connection, but also the corruption in that whole family dynasty. There has never been as much theft, I claim, as with that dynasty. (And Epstein plays a role because superrich partied with underage girls, and they told Trump to shut down all investigations. This is corruption in its final stage. Same here - Trump babbles about old energy but his superrich friends expand on renewables. And profit. As always.)
This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
I think that's part of what's notable about this. The administration hasn't been able to reverse the trend despite putting a massive thumb on the scale against projects like offshore wind and tariffs on solar panel imports.
There's probably a delay in the effects though since projects started before they took office are probably starting to thin out and finish up. We'd have to look into the permitting of new projects or wait for to see how big the decline in new capacity turns out to be in a couple years.
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The numbers for 2014-2024: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...
I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.
> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc
Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.
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The invisible hand of the market will always win
It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.
For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.
> It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants,
For many years coal has been more expensive than solar and wind. That's why utilities are decommissioning the plants.
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> For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything.
Because renewable energy is Communism, or something.
But seriously: $$$$. The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful. The owners of these companies and their media co-conspirators should be tried in the Hague for what they have done to our planet just to keep making fucking money.
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No, this is actually solar's output increasing.
Natural gas's share of electricity generation has been falling for five years straight:
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/gas-share-in-global...
That's a link to a global chart. The OP is talking about the US. It's not surprising that countries that have to import natural gas are moving away from it and countries with plentiful local suppliew are doubling down on it.
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The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Storage is the issue. You still need to supply base load (well, all load) at night.
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> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.
> nobody likes to tear down the interstate
Lots of urban areas in the US have been resisting, tearing down, and/or relocating major roads since the freeway revolts of the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal
I have two things to say to that.
First, I live 150 yards from a major freeway - I-90 in WA, it's three lanes in each direction here. There are no tiny black particles over everything in surroundings, and my outdoors AQI (from my own sensor) is normally in single digits and basically only ever gets above 50 if it's wildfire smoke or the neighbors are burning something.
But second, if we developed a reliable and cheap way to, say, teleport people over long distances, why not tear it down?
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I think the freeways are going from larger particles to smaller ones as DEF gets rid of the bigger diesel particles.
smaller stuff is more dangerous and goes deeper into your body:
- PM10: inhalable dust entering the nose and mouth.
- PM4: respirable fraction that can reach the gas-exchange region.
- PM2.5: fine particles that penetrate deep into the lungs.
- PM1: ultrafine particles with potential to translocate beyond the lungs.
Solar has also overtaken fossil gas.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables...
Some of these plants are being retrofitted for dual firing. They can burn coal & natural gas at the same time. I wonder how that factors into these statistics.
The growth of solar is astounding. I dug into data a while back and tried to do some visualizations of it, mainly for my own understanding:
https://torkeldanielsson.se/solar-energy-forecasts/
Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.
A shame electricity is not the whole picture when it comes to energy. The resurgence in EV sales off the back of high gas prices is awesome, but almost 100% of bulk transport costs still rely on oil. Also, unlike EV's which can be plugged in at home for most of their needs, bulk-transport will require considerable new infrastructure to make the transition. Still a way to go.
Something like half of all bulk transport is moving fossil fuels around. So there’s already a huge win
It's a couple of months since I did the calculations, but I do believe 2035 is for all energy, not just electricity.
It's easy to drag out a flat line in an exponential graph - but the line better start bending soon or we'll end up with a truly mind boggling amount of solar energy.
There was this launched some time ago: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/incat-launches-worlds...
It'd an electric ship, which has what is basically a grid scale battery power plant on board to power it.
The problem is range. Good enough for it's intended use as a ferry in South America. But it's going to need to be towed there from Tasmania.
There was a global agreement to shift ocean transport from oil.
The US killed it.
The US and Israel attacked Iran causing chaos in oil markets and put it back on track.
https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/imo-...
+1 to the Guardian for mentioning their data source, but -1 for not linking to it.
+2 for EMBER for having a data source AND being able to link to the parameters that show solar overtaking coal for the month in the US.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
For people who are interested in this space should very much read EMBER. They make digestable, data rich reporting.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
This is a great link. The most interesting feature of the solar graph is the amplitude of the seasonal variations. It looks like we typically generating ~100% more solar power in July than December.
If "we need to store solar energy from summer to winter" is indeed a significant issue, maybe you could use the extra power in summertime to make natural gas [1] and then store the gas until you need it in the winter.
[1] https://www.terraformindustries.com/ is a startup working on turning solar power into natural gas
Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections.
To completely decarbonise we probably will need to eventually make liquid fuels for long distance air travel. But it may make more sense to do that nearer the equator to maximise the return on the capital investment by running it constantly rather than only during the summer.
Have EMBER been vetted by the Ministry of Truth?
Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
It can't be more or much more than the 800W as currently done in Germany because it would not be safe with the way electricity is delivered to a home.
The reason is: when you pull electricity from the grid, the fuse would blow if you tried to pull too much current (e.g. you connect four hair dryers on the same outlet). It blows to prevent the wiring in your home from overheating and catching on fire. With balcony solar, you plug it in your home outlet which is already behind the fuse, which means the fuse cannot react and cut off power if you try to feed in more than the capacity allows. You could be maxing out on the current you are pulling from the grid, and then on top of that you would be adding your balcony solar.
Why it's allowed at all in Germany and other places is because the fuse will blow above 10A and the wiring in the house is 16A, so there was always a buffer or overcapacity in the wiring, presumably just in case. So they allowed 800W of balcony solar which is roughly 3.5A and still there is some wiggle room left.
Also why pull from the grid at all: your appliances actually just use the electricity from the grid. In Germany and I guess most of Europe they run a three phase system, so your balcony solar might not be in the same physical circuit as your appliances in use. With balcony solar your meter just offsets your consumption with whatever you are feeding it at the moment. From the grid standpoint if you are running something using 800W and feeding in 800W, it's 0.
Of course it can work without this too, but this defeats the purpose of balcony solar, which is plug it in and it works simplicity.
Another limitation is the transport capacity of each power line and each transformer (power lines and transformers don't care for the direction of the electricity, only for the amount of electricity).
For example if each house in a city would have 25A fuse and all the houses would simultaneously draw 25A, or simultaneously supply 25A the grid would collapse.
Usually the Diversity Factor for apartment block electric grids is around 35%.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/electrical-engineering/diversi...
https://ecalpro.com/compare/demand-diversity-100-apartments
This is very interesting and helpful info! I guess my fantasy is that a standard electrical panel would eventually have a literal plug on it where you could plug a larger system in, just as you would an outlet in the balcony situation, and then it would I think be, using your word, in "front" of the "fuse" (using quotes because I'm not sure I have the behind/in front of language correct, and when you use fuse here in the states it would be a breaker, I guess, not an actual fuse). This solution would of course have to mitigate things like fire risk, or blowing up the house or grid itself. I'm just hopeful it's coming because I think the install rate would go through the, pardon me, roof.
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i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.
that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.
any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.
we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US
Have you seen this? Free battery in NYC if you charge it with off-peak power
https://everyelectric.com/
That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I'm sure there's some happy medium where they'd be happy, as you say, but at some number I'm guessing they'd fight back against too much adoption.
> my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
This alone would be incredible from wider adoption of balcony (incredible for the consumer I mean). If you knock a few cents per kWh off, which I think you can do with daytime/early evening usage (when the panels are still producing some energy so no storage required) that would be fantastic. Baby steps to a full system that you can DIY without anyone objecting.
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i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid.
the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs.
they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especially where the marginal cost of the energy is very low.
the more users who disconnect, the more the fixed costs must be recouped from a shrinking customer base, triggering more incentive to leave the network. this is called the death spiral.
In addition, things like balcony solar don't save them cost: it introduces complexity because they need to safely manage that load, they need to be able to predict and measure it; in my experience working with utilities and network operators for many years, they flat out don't want these distributed generation sources unless they have a lot of say in how they are added to the grid, and how users can be charged for the privilege of generating their own power. that is often a very significant barrier to regulatory change.
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>how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source?
We don't need a more plug and play system. A zero agreement interconnection for whatever UL certified 300W-ish scale is fine and should be widely deployed.
There needing to be interconnection agreements with your utility and an inspection is not a blocker that needs to be removed. Most places require a licensed electrician for complex work, having the electrician fill out a form and having a utility inspection is how things should be.
Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the cost of installation today is... epic (so epic in fact that the overall cost of install has actually gone up even though material costs have come down). Admittedly off-grid installs are a tiny fraction of places on the planet, but it's the trigger that led me to ask about this.
Perhaps you're just responding because I brought up grid tie (fair!), but I'm wondering why not aspire to remove the blocker, which would mean de-risking the installation so that laypeople could do it without having to get an electrician involved (which is what's so amazing about balcony).
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Regulation aside, a significant issue is physical area. Most people won’t have access to enough area in the right direction to make it a primary source.
There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no.
Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets.
That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’s PowerAssist.
(Which limits the rate at which power draw can change. Very useful when you use a house-sized generator; it amounts to synthetic inertia. I have a 7kW generator, but a 7kW step load would stall it.)
Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...
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Ah, this is why I come here. I had no idea that was the case. I feel like there was a story going around recently about how hard it is to restart some power generator if it gets knocked offline. Maybe it was about Hoover Dam now that I think about it (i.e., how bad it would be if the Colorado gets too low).
Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
I saw that Virginia and Maine have a little bit of momentum towards balcony solar. This is the video I saw that in: https://youtu.be/2RqhK2w8rrA
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
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A standard rooftop solar install with micro inverters is already pretty much plug and play. Wiring it up is the easy part.
Even a more complex system with large centralized inverters and battery backup can be about as plug and play as a desktop computer if you use an all-in-one inverter/charger/controller.
The challenge is scale. You can't take 10kW of solar and plug it into an outlet. It requires more hardware and wiring than that.
but you CAN just plug all of your stuff into the inverter.
It’s primarily a regulatory issue, and more states in the US will approve it over the coming years.
I don't see anyone replying to you here, and I don't know what your background is in this, but I think and hope you're spot on here. The more I've read replies in this thread the more I think this is mostly regulatory and maybe slightly a hardware issue (hardware issue is that there needs to be some kind of plug on an electrical panel that would remove the risks of having to pull the face off the panel, install a new breaker and connect the inverter).
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The US currently is at per capita GHG emissions approximately at the the same level as it was in 1910.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
Despite not being in the paris treaty, the us needs only a 10-12% reduction to meet the paris accord requirements on schedule (43% decrease by 2030).
The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.
US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.
Yes, but it was most recently at the same level between 1939 and 1940, according to that graph.
And total US GHG emissions are currently at about the same level as they were in 1988.
US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China. China's massive footprint of Coal should be added to US emissions.
Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:
https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/china-has-quickly-and-sha...
Still, that is a good point, a lot of the emissions from manufacturing have been shifted to other countries.
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> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China
This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.
China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
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Not just the US, a lot of developed countries have outsourced the problem to China (or other countries) to look good on paper, and tanked their local manufacturing as a by-product. It will be interesting how history records this moment.
The trend has China installing as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined every single year within a reasonably small margin.
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.
Quickly being in the next decade or two.
To be clear, fuel cells are considered "low air pollution" because they eliminate certain nasty combustion products (NOx), but they still produce as much CO2 per kWh as a gas turbine.
Arguably that CO2 stream is concentrated and a candidate for capture/sequestration, but no one is doing that in practice.
There was an article recently about how the West Asia war is quickly decarbonising South Asia. Lot of solar and wind projects in the pipeline for SA countries. Especially because now renewables are a national security issue
You mean the "US-Israel war of aggression against Iran"?
Let's not avoid assigning responsibility when it is so clear.
> West Asia war
Oh, snap, did Turkey attack Cyprus again? :-p
What West Asian war? Isn't Iran firmly in the Middle East by any reasonable definition?
West Asia is a less Eurocentric than “Orient” or “Middle East.” I like it.
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The middle east is in Asia, no?
don't worry this administration is giving nearly a billion dollar bailout to coal using war powers so congress can't block
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/04/trump-coal-d...
They could have used it to retrain coal workers or help them transition to some other job instead of a handout to plant and mine owners.
But then normal people would have more money, and centi-millionaires would have less.
Apparently, both are against the US government's policy.
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I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.
It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org
I told someone about UBI and they hadn’t heard of it, 4 or 5 years ago, despite being an executive at a charity that is supposed to help people with food money.
Oil next.
USA became top 1 oil exporter, so we'll see how that goes
they'll run out of countries to invade (or to sell oil to) at some point, so green alternatives will -eventually- prevail...
This administration is hitting milestones without even trying!
Hehe, it is actually trying very hard not to hit the milestones.
No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.
Funny, I initially read the OP title as
> Solar generates more energy in US than coal for the last time
Then the actual title is what confused me for a second.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477729
Easy, the previosu government destroyed coal for solar, it is easy that way.
Note that coal is dropping precipitously, which increased the effect.
In other news:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
In 2025 US produced from solar 388.82 TWh, from gas 1,807.34 TWh.
So solar has long way to grow to replace gas in US electricity production.
That shift is going to happen a lot quicker than people expect, here's the expected 2026 US grid additions:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
- Solar: +87 TWh/year (assuming 23% capacity factor, lower end of US range)
- Gas: +9TWh/year (6.3GW new, 4.6GW retirements, higher end of US capacity factor of 60%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67206
This is in the face of massive growth for grid demand for the first time in decades, so the trend will accelerate.
New gas turbine manufacturing capacity is tapped out, causing new gas CapEx to get more expensive:
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/gas-turbine-prices-so...
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
It will be interesting to see how solar evolves in the coming decade in US, maybe it could reach the current share of gas produced electricity, 40% . The country with the highest share of solar electricity is Hungary 27%, but they are part of the European electricity grid with lot of export and import.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/hungary
Gas turbine manufacturing factories are very expensive and gas turbine manufacturers have already experienced turbine market crashed in 2018. Nobody wants to sit on loans for expensive idle factories in 5 years when the AI hype stops.
https://www.primary.vc/articles/the-gas-turbine-bottleneck-r...
Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper.
Most places can't run on residential solar + battery 365 days in year and need grid connectivity. As more homes install residential solar + battery the grid costs, which are independent of the number of hours when the grid is used, will stay the same. The amount of consumed gas will be lower. The costs of building gas power plants will stay the same (they are the backup), the costs of maintaining gas power plants will increase (more frequent ramping up and down).
"Ramping damage in gas turbines refers to the wear and tear or stress that occurs as a result of frequent changes in the operating load, also known as load cycling. Gas turbines are designed to operate efficiently at steady-state conditions, and deviations from these conditions can lead to various issues"
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeff-shan-a8962b36_ramping-da...
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The US has literally double its total electricity production in solar and batteries stuck in the now 5 year FIFO permit hell we require for grid additions that will cause most proposals to pull out before completion
On the other hand.
Here we are reading about solar overtaking coal. Coal was producing more grid electricity than gas relatively recently, in 2015.
The rate of growth of solar-produced electricity is accelerating. Given another decade, there's every chance it can supplant gas as well.
I like it.
> Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy
People at this point should realise that Trump is lying.
He also does the same with regards to Iran.
It is time to not only look at the Epstein connection, but also the corruption in that whole family dynasty. There has never been as much theft, I claim, as with that dynasty. (And Epstein plays a role because superrich partied with underage girls, and they told Trump to shut down all investigations. This is corruption in its final stage. Same here - Trump babbles about old energy but his superrich friends expand on renewables. And profit. As always.)
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See that's why the cool kids are moving to clean coal /s
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Coal-powered AI has fewer hallucinations.
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Your comment reminded me of this classic: https://youtu.be/EYMjvXdrZIw?si=rYpJm3SP2kcAWPs_