EuropeCongrats! India also hit their target of half of their electricity coming from renewables middle of last year - five years ahead of their 2030 target according to the Paris agreement. Love to hear news like this!
Just think about how hard the current energy crisis would hit us if we still would produce hundred percent of our electricity with fossil fuels.
Just think about Iran being able to deal with protests, without the oil money funding the government. It is also not just Iran.
Coal enters the chat.
It's dirty but it's cheap. So if price and supply are the main worries, coal would be an excellent option.
Mining costs are not cheap. In Poland real price of coal is 300eur /MWh. Only coal, but we need to burn it in power plant…
IIRC it's still a bit cheaper than gas, but pretty close.
If exchange rates come into play it can of course get a lot more stark. Like, North Korea probably burns coal in anything humanly possible. They don't have domestic oil and forex to buy things is precious to them.
It's unstoppable. But it could go faster...
I mean, why is China investing so heavily into renewables? Not because they want to do good for the planet and from the goodness of their hearts. It's the cheapest energy source there is, and it could not give less fucks about some global crisis.
So please, EU, put the pedal to the metal.
Its preparation for Taiwan. The Sun is not affected by a US naval blockade.
It's also incredibly difficult for the supply of sunlight to be disrupted compared to oil or gas.
Chinese investment in renewables so far means they grow renewables while also growing coal. Between 80 and 100 gigawatts of coal production were added in 2025. Unfortunately, coal and gas production is steadily increasing worldwide. Contrast G7 trying to improve own living standard by reducing fossil usage locally, with G20 trying to fast-forward economic growth by any means available. Wind and solar grow fast, but they add to total production, rather than phase out fossils, almost everywhere outside EU. Source is the same, just a different page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source
Global North can't pretend to be green itself while still externalizing harmful production and growing trade with countries ruled by people who don't care about resource depletion and the planet remaining livable. I think there's no alternative to focusing on producing locally (adhering to own democratic regulations, labor union negotiations etc) while implementing degrowth policies, both helping other countries do likewise and putting pressure on them to do so through trade measures.
No thanks to Germany.
Right... the country that basically brought solar to the point of cheap mass production years ago while also having double the average EU renewable share in their energy mix is the bad one...
... in some alternate reality produced by propaganda-induced brain-damage.
No need to insult me with cheap shots.
I'm referring to the changes made by the energy ministry.
But sure, let's call me brain damaged.
You too have a good day pal.
Why? They have well above the average of renewables?
That's right, but our energy ministry (Mrs. Reiche) is currently working on correcting that.
I should clarify my comment, that's where I was aiming. Thanks.
Alternative energy will never make enough energy, we have to hyperfocus on nuclear energy! See!
One problem that I see with nuclear is that energy production has to be accessible enough such that anyone can create their own independent network. I don't believe nuclear has achieved this yet.
One thing nuclear energy has over wind and solar is that it's very reliable. Cloudy day? No wind? No electricity, or much less anyway.
Water turbines in a dam seems to be quite reliable, even though it varies with the seasons of course, but more reliable than wind at least.
What people overlook that reliability doesn't matter that much. What actually matters is availability exactly matching the demand. And guess what... constant nuclear production is as far off as fluctuating renewable power.
Everyone can seemingly grasp the concept of solar production peaking at noon while the demand peak is about 5 hours later and that it needs storage to shift the production to the demand peak. But they don't understand that constant production of nuclear needs a similiar amount of storage to shift all that power produced at night and not needed to the day when there is demand.
And the exact same thing is true for seasonal changes. It would be insanely expensive to produce the amount of nuclear power you need in those few cold winter nights and then have moverproduction most ofthe time. So you need seasonal storage for a lot of it, so you can instead build capacities for your average demand over a year and shift the produced energy around.
The storage you need for renewables is again comparable. In fact the pure capacity you need is actually lower, but then you need the ability to unload much more in a short time frame should weather patterns be really bad for renewable power. Which evens out in regards to costs. Renewable storage need less capacity but has higher demands on the storage and grid.
Thanks for the insight
Nuclear is an expensive alternative to big batteries. I’m not sure about the long term economics but a megawatt of nuclear is more expensive up front
There are two countries heavily pushing for a properly sized hydrogen market for industry use as well as long-term storage: Germany and France.
So basically everytime you hear arguments of storage in a nuclear vs renewable discussion, you can be sure it's bullshit. The people actually doing the planning know well that nuclear as well as renewable models need similiar huge amounts of seasonal storage.
(The French model of today explicitly only works economically via exports and only as long as all their neighbours use fossil fuels. That's not a viable model when nuclear and/or renewables are in use everywhere.)
Right, so nuclear should probably be sort of a filler during a period of low output from renewables, I guess?
It serves as a base, yes. It doesn’t respond to changes in demand quickly. I suspect that tech has gotten to the point where batteries are a better investment.
