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Comment by layer8

7 hours ago

That’s fair, but factoring the energy loss in, it still remains the clearly larger share.

Does it, though? Assuming 80% of energy use is fossil and fossil has a 50% loss, if all that fossil were to transition to ~100% efficient electricity[0] we'd already be at 33% of our renewable electricity needs. That's quite a bit more than the 20% the "80% fossil" seems to suggest!

"One-third done" sounds an awful lot like we're going to start seeing optimistic "we'll be halfway there at the end of the decade" headlines soon...

[0]: Things like the grid and car batteries don't operate at 100% but closer to 95%, but things like heat pumps operate at 300% efficiency, so I reckon that'll more-or-less cancel out for back-of-the-napkin math.

Yes we're not done yet, but renewable only started gaining share again around 2010, and how quickly solar/battery is being deployed is really impressive.