'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity

https://news.sky.com/story/unstoppable-force-of-solar-power-propels-world-to-40-clean-electricity-report-finds-13344230

by belter • 1 year ago

177 192 1 year ago

news.sky.com

melling• 1 year ago

“ And solar was the fastest-growing electricity source for the 20th year in a row.

It now provides 7% of the world's electricity”

nasmorn2• 1 year ago

Exponential growth is unintuitive. More than a full percentage point was added last year and that will continue to accelerate. Even the IAE is predicting 14% share by 2030 and they have underestimated solar for the last 10 years now

Gibbon12• 1 year ago

My comment perceptually, exponential growth looks like bring hit by a wall. It's nothing at all until it is. It'll be 1%. And in a while it double. And double a again. And again. And each doubling is the same amount of time between them.

We're close to production of solar and wind exceeding recent growth in energy demand. When that happens it'll start cratering oil and gas demand.

skybrian• 1 year ago

The question is when it starts looking more like an S-curve. That’s hard to predict because it depends on energy storage.

_aavaa_• 1 year ago

They have underestimated solar for the last 10 years now

That is an incredibly large understatement. They have gotten it shamefully and fundamentally wrong year after year.

https://i.redd.it/zz9p8ekoss7d1.jpeg

brazzy• 1 year ago

Not everything that grows quickly is exponential. What evidence specifically do you have that the growth is proportional to the already existing capacity? Or even that it will continue to accelerate?

A counterpoint: the recent quick growth has been fueled by panels getting cheaper. They used to be the majority of the cost. But that's not true anymore. The cost will soon be mainly installation (i.e. labor) and space. Neither are amenable to drastic further decreases.

Fortunately we've already reached the point where it's the cheapest option, so that it will continue to replace other power sources even if it does get much cheaper anymore.

pfdietz2• 1 year ago

If it doubles every 3 years, it goes from 7% to 100% in 11.5 years (assuming total electricity use stays constant, which is wrong.)

All the gnashing about what this or that government policy change will do is just noise compared to this global trend.

recursive2• 1 year ago

And in 15 years it will be over 200%

blitzar2• 1 year ago

And to think the sun doesnt even shine all the time.

Night_Thastus• 1 year ago

The economics have shifted. It used to be that solar or wind were more experimental, and lacked any economies of scale. Their production was poor and less was known about how they fared in the long term.

Now, their prices have gone down, their generation per unit has gone up, and much more is known about how they behave long-term.

The world has a LOT of power generation. It will take time to replace. But with every time that some existing power generation source shuts down due to age, or expansion occurs somewhere, it will inevitably be done with solar/wind. It's just more cost effective now.

In the end it is not environmental concerns that will cause solar and wind to become commonplace. It's just economics. Slapping down something that generates power for 20-30 years with no input fuel is just way more economically feasible than anything that requires fuel. They still have maintenance costs, but it's nothing by comparison. They can completely undercut other sources of power.

hinkley• 1 year ago

Solar and wind have economies of scale and always have.

How Big Projects Get Done describes roads, wind and solar as three of the top five projects types for likelihood to come in on time and on budget.

Why? The first pour and the last pour on making a road are substantially the same. The people working on it get better at doing so as they go. They iterate on the process and reduce waste. Solar and wind are installing the same structures 10, 20, 50 times so they go fast once they start and the scope can be adjusted up or down as long as you have contracts in place.

Building a nuclear plant takes for-fucking-ever, there are a million different tasks to do, and they are built so far apart that getting the same team to build another means a long commute and a different local government to contend with every time. So budgeting is difficult.

tracerbulletx• 1 year ago

Storage capacity on the grid will need to massively increase as well for solar to go much further.

jillesvangurp4• 1 year ago

Exactly. This is what people keep underestimating. The way we currently generate power is expensive and inefficient. A lot of what we do is energy intensive. Which means it requires a lot of money to do.

Transport is a good example. A long distance truck can take up to 300 gallons of diesel. It will drive quite far on that. But that's over 1000$. A well utilized truck goes through well over 100K$ of fuel per year. That's a lot of money.

Enter electric trucks. Yes they have range limitations (depending on their battery size). But they don't use up 100K $ worth of electricity per year burning over 1M $ of fuel over it's lifespan. Not to mention all the maintenance and parts associated with keeping diesel engines going.

Solar/wind/battery power has essentially no marginal cost. Electric trucks powered by that still have some marginal cost but it's a lot lower than that of a diesel truck. And even at current grid prices (typically determined by the cost of fossil fuels), it's probably earning itself back. What happens when diesel trucks follow the same cost curve that EVs went through? You don't need to be a genius to figure out that there are going to be a lot of truckers and trucking companies that can't afford to stick with diesel for very long when everybody starts decimating their fuel expenses.

That's just trucks. The same kind of economics are happening across pretty much every sector that can feasibly be electrified. It's not all happening at once. But probably in hind sight in a few decades it will have happened very quickly. One moment everybody was mostly burning diesel, petrol, methane, and coal and a few short decades later all of that is gone because it became way too costly to continue doing any of that.

wongarsu4• 1 year ago

Which has always been the explicit goal of many solar subsidies across the world over the last 20 years: generate substantial demand for the technology while it's still expensive and risky, phase out subsidies as the price comes down. It worked beautifully

giancarlostoro• 1 year ago

It will take time to replace. One way I've thought about, and some might hate me or this idea (or both) since I see a LOT of homes where I live in Florida going Solar, I keep wondering to myself, what happens if a law passes that makes it so new housing must contain solar as an option, and then over time, make it fully mandatory. Then you'd see a lot of newer homes with solar out of the box.

m463• 1 year ago

I wonder how the tariffs will play into this.

ZeroGravitas9• 1 year ago

Visually it looks much more hopeful:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-solar?t...

kleiba• 1 year ago

See, it was around 7% five years ago in Germany, but has since doubled to 14%. There's no reason solar cannot grow equally exponentially in other countries, too.

bwb• 1 year ago

I am excited to see the next 20 years :)

nxm• 1 year ago

China keeps adding coal power plants like no other and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future

slaw3• 1 year ago

In 2024, the world added 553 GW of new solar capacity. China added 277.17 GW.

jasonsb• 1 year ago

They add coal as peaking power plants. They're not planning to run the grid on coal.

throwawaymaths4• 1 year ago

will continue to do so for the foreseeable future

Not really, there is going to be about a 40-year trough in the Chinese economy due to demographics. At some point soon, manufacturing in China won't make sense anymore, (and world wide demand will also decrease due to demographics) so presumably China will be able to decommission a lot of their power generation instead of adding to it. Will they axe their coal? Time will tell, but adding capacity will end, and not too far in the future, either.

skrebbel• 1 year ago

Sure but they're also absolutely plastering entire valleys in solar panels simultaneously.

itishappy5• 1 year ago

On the other hand, the share of power produced by coal (and other fossil fuels) in China has been decreasing for over 10 years while the US has remained relatively stable. This tend will also continue for the foreseeable future.

VerminOctopus12• 1 year ago

Funny to read these comments when China is easily dwarfing all other nations in solar capacity and technology. You can make these dismissive comments all you want, but China is going to be at the forefront of “green” energy production this century.

hnaccount_rng3• 1 year ago

They are already ramping down new construction and they are starting to replace older (less efficient) plants. It's quite likely that one of these last 3 years will have been peak coal in China. The bad news is: That's a lot of coal that being burned. The good news is: They are less reliant on "recouping costs", which means _those_ plants will be shut down as soon as that's feasible

tim3338• 1 year ago

Running them less though:

In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They’re now running around 50% (https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants)

toomuchtodo5• 1 year ago

China’s Coal Generation Dropped 5% YOY In Q1 As Electricity Demand Increased - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/20/chinas-coal-generation-... - April 20th, 2025

passwordoops• 1 year ago

For more breathless headlines touting a green transition as emissions continue to mysteriously increase at a record pace?

throwawaymaths4• 1 year ago

It's not a mystery. The US and EU have year on year been decreasing emissions for fifteen ish years now (yes, including during trump I, even if you account for the COVID drop).

lm284696• 1 year ago

Exactly, this graph sums it up: https://climatanthropocene.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/co...

We talk more about it but in the facts nothing changes, if anything it's accelerating

nitrix• 1 year ago

Okay, but put the panels on rooftops, not over that nice greenery.

Filligree• 1 year ago

The greenery may be perfectly fine with it. A lot of plants prefer shade, though of course that’s so they can still grow while shaded by trees.

You might say “put in a forest”, and I’d agree, but if that’s not going to happen then we might as well have the solar panels.

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

Putting solar on rooftops has at least one really unfortunate drawback, at least in Anglosphere nations with the fucked up common law system. Rooftop solar vests the owner with a claim to a right to the sun, and a way to stop people from building anything next to their house.

atlantic• 1 year ago

It's not "over" greenery. Land is entirely cleared of vegetation before panels are installed, including the occasional forest. Thousands of larger birds are killed by wind farms. Offshore wind farms are creating deserts for fish. Understandably, many prefer the good old days before the planet was being saved.

Dylan16807• 1 year ago

Why would they prefer the older methods that do more land damage and kill even more animals?

recursive2• 1 year ago

Wait until you find out what fracking and oil drilling do.

krn1p4n1c• 1 year ago

DWs recent doc showed fish thriving around offshore farms and high success rates of preventing bird strikes by painting the blades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3395_T1N-fo

mrexroad• 1 year ago

Can you cite the offshore wind farm induced fish desert? I’d be interested to understand the dynamics.

bmicraft• 1 year ago

Have you seen what just mining coal does too a landscape? I don't think so.

The only reason for that is that coal isn't new and thus not reported on in the news.

wongarsu4• 1 year ago

Putting solar panels over a grassland is a lot better for the environment than using the same area for agriculture. It's not like we have a lot of meadows just lying around unused that are used for solar projects. It's also a lot cheaper than installing panels on roofs.

However we should normalize panels over parking lots. Parking lots are just concrete wastelands, and while lifting the panels up over the cars requires a bit more material it is otherwise basically free real estate in areas with high electricity use (great to minimize grid losses)

acc_2972• 1 year ago

The greenery in question appears to be a tidal estuary (but I'm not 100% sure) and it also appears to be close to the downtown center of a city of 4 million people who all need some amount of electricity to live their daily lives. The ecosystem of the body of water on which these panels are installed is I would imagine relatively undisturbed by the solar PV - it's a question of aesthetics whether or not this habitat has been degraded.

My feeling is that these over-water panels generating a not-insignificant amount of power are an ideal compromise between the sprawl of the built environment of (Taizhou, China) and the natural ecosystem.

exabrial• 1 year ago

Yeah, no. That picture is disgusting.

Look at all of that natural habitat plowed through will diesel bulldozers, hauled off with giant diesel trucks, displacing animals and plants and insects. The habitat is permanently ruined.

This is dumb and shouldn't be celebrated.

Solar is fine in already disturbed areas. Stop clearing more land for "green" projects.

acc_2972• 1 year ago

I believe that the installation in that picture and a number of other installations in the Taizhou region are built over a river system or some kind of tidal water reservoir I was unable to find the exact area but [1] is a nearby installation.

Land use is a large contributing factor to climate change but this particular image seems to be the best case scenario for large solar installation the ecosystem (marshland?) appears to be relatively undisturbed (also considering it is centrally located in a city of 4 million people solar panels or not it seems pretty lush). And I'll parrot an often cited statistic: "the entire U.S. could be powered by utility-scale solar occupying just 0.6% of the nation’s land mass" this (imo) makes a good case for solar PV as a relatively large chunk of installed grid capacity it just seems like a better compromise than the alternatives.

If utility scale battery storage ever pans out (that or UHV transmission or both) then we could see renewable sources like solar+wind actually work as base-load capacity.

Others also comment on this thread that converted agricultural land (i.e. field to pasture) meshes well with solar PV installation the plants typically do not need full sun. I would guess that a small percentage of installed solar required any kind of land shaping or clearing although it does happen [2].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546...

[2] https://www.cmigroupinc.ca/solar-farm-environmental-impact-b...

lm284696• 1 year ago

Daily reminder that fossils aren't decreasing and renewables are just added on top.

The only recent time fossil decreased was during covid, and even then it barely was a dent. To meet our climate goals we'd need something in the same vein as covid... constantly

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

sightbroke5• 1 year ago

Article is limited on numbers perhaps but does state:

Phil MacDonald, Ember's managing director, said: "Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force.

"As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world's ever-increasing demand for electricity."

Despite the rise in renewable power, electricity from more polluting fossil fuels crept up by 1.4% last year due to surging demand, meaning emissions from the sector rose too to an all-time high.
Ember forecasts the growth in clean power will soon outpace the growth in demand, helping to displace fossil fuels from the system.

Is fossil fuel use growing at an increasing rate or decreasing rate? Is non-carbon emitting energy supplies growing at an increasing rate or decreasing?

lm284696• 1 year ago

None of them are decreasing globally, that's the point

bryanlarsen6• 1 year ago

Per capita fossil fuel consumption has been dropping for ~10 years. 2025 will be the year where total CO2 emissions drop and continue to drop. They were hoping that 2024 would be that year, but 2024 GDP growth was higher than expected. The 2025 trump-cession guarantees that CO2 emissions will drop in 2025.

https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...

sightbroke5• 1 year ago

The 2025 trump-cession guarantees that CO2 emissions will drop in 2025.

I do not want to start a whole political tirade so the following is meant more as humor:

Wouldn't that be ironic. Trump's actions help curb global climate change and bankrupts billionaires.

lm284696• 1 year ago

Per capita

I have another question then, does the planet care about "per capita" or about "total" emissions ?

Every few years they come up with the same fucking graph were the solid line goes straight up until "now" and the dotted line magically decreases in the close future and reach 0 in 50+ years, when none of us will be alive and accountable. meanwhile: https://climatanthropocene.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/co...

slaw3• 1 year ago

The world's population is projected to continue growing for the next 50 to 60 years

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

perrygeo2• 1 year ago

Thank you. At this point the renewable energy cheerleaders have resorted to greenwashing; we need voices of reason to hold us accountable.

The headline was clearly written to tell a story - that renewables are winning. According to what metric? If the goal is to reduce dependence of fossil-fueled carbon emissions (remember that pesky detail?) then renewables are evidently failing at their core objective. It's observable truth but a very uncomfortable one, as shown by the number of people downvoting - most would rather shift the goalpost than admit failure.

sightbroke5• 1 year ago

The subheadline:

Solar power has doubled in just three years, according to thinktank Ember, but rising electricity demand from air conditioning, AI and electric vehicles means electricity from fossil fuel sources still grew.

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

When do the fission cheerleaders capitulate?

zozbot2344• 1 year ago

The point of fission is that it still yields power even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. The alternative is to run gas peaker plants, or even dirtier sources like coal. Storage is a non-starter, even the best form of energy storage (pumped hydro) cannot cope with a dip lasting more than a few days or weeks.

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

So, never, for your part, is what you are saying? Have you updated this copypasta at any time over the last 15 years?

myrmidon• 1 year ago

Gas peaker plants are not "the alternative" to nuclear power, they are exactly what nuclear power needs, too, because regulating nuclear plants down is not what you wanna do after investing billions into it-- you need those plants running on full tilt for like 90% of the time, and even then its gonna take decades to pay back the investment.

Meanwhile, 1kW of solar with 1kWh of storage can be had for $1k on Amazon, yields 1-2MWh per year and pays for itself within the decade, with costs still trending down. Yes, fully getting rid of fossil gas is an ongoing challenge, but a much easier one than ramping up nuclear reactor build rates by a factor of 1000 or so...

itishappy5• 1 year ago

Fission plants are way too expensive to let idle. They make ideal baseload plants, but they suck as peaking plants.

1970-01-012• 1 year ago

When volcanic eruptions are 100% predictable 3 years in advance.

tick_tock_tick• 1 year ago

I mean solar is basically worthless at any large scale if we get fission actually working. The fission dream will only die if we get to the point where solar/wind/etc and grid storage have gotten so cheap no one can make any money selling electricity.

xyzzy123• 1 year ago

Various parts of the energy sector (line maintenance in particular) seem to be hit pretty hard with cost disease & liabilities, plus there are often 2 or 3 companies, a market (being gamed), local authorities (that need a cut and have admin costs) and a regulatory structure between you and the power station.

I dunno how it will all play out but given how "overhead" costs keep rising it's possible that private solar & storage costs drop low enough that its cheaper than grid power in many places despite being much less efficient from first principles.

Physics vs beauracracy.

From my perspective, prices for full "off grid" setup dictate the maximum that utilities can charge, basically the main thing keeping them honest at this point. The other thing to price in would be the likelihood of new taxes / fees or bans on local generation if it looks like the grid will hit a death spiral.

mentalgear2• 1 year ago

I, for one, welcome the solar age. Truly clean power that can be generated decentralised, on a regional, even local commune level.

It's wild how big companies, certain countries and billionaires are still holding on to nuclear fission (not fusion).

Nuclear reactors:

- take decades to build

- go massively over budget, at least 2x if not more [0]

- are inherently uneconomically: energy companies would never invest/build them on their own, only by lobbying governments for HUGE subsides (in various forms) do they get build

- inherently uninsurable: no private insurance company would insure a plant, again if private companies would need to build/run them on their own, every insurance company would deny them

- deconstructing them takes again billions and decades

- there's still no real-world solution (or even long-term secure storage) for nuclear waste in the world

---

Solar / Wind / Storage

Compare the 60 Billions for 1 single nuclear plant (UK) to what you would get from the same investment in solar (plus battery tech getting cheaper and better for storage). We are talking about differences in the magnitudes.

About the only value nuclear fission has is that's a central power source which gives the entities owning it huge power over the consumers.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/uk-nuclear-plant-hinkley-point-co...

wortelefant• 1 year ago

This is not an adequate way to look at nuclear. If you check the stats of established constructions and not first of a kind prototypes (check Barakah instead Hinkley), the construction time is closer to 10 years, often less.

With transmutation and the option for recycling it altogether, waste is not an issue. Only the low fission parts of the spent fuel is low-grade active for longer than 1000 years, but this is such a low level of radiation, it is comparable to natural uranium formations and not an issue. The high radiation part of the fuel has lost the dangerous level of radiation in less than 1000 years and can be recycled before. The arenic compounds and other substances as byproduct of copper etc production for the mass of renewables have a much longer shelf life of toxitity. Also, you need more of them.

mentalgear2• 1 year ago

- Even if 'only' 10 years construction time: How much solar energy can be build in that time at a fraction of the cost?

- So we need to find secure expensive, leak-free storage only for 1000 years? Most countries cant even plan 5 years ahead.

- No words on generated Energy produced per Dollar.

Your rebuttal is not as significant as you might think.

pydry5• 1 year ago

The average is probably between 10 and 20 years.

This is on top of an LCOE that is 5x that of solar or wind power and the need for catastrophe insurance to be provided essentially for free by the taxpayer on top of that.

(Fukushima cost about $1 trillion to clean up, the liability cap for US plants is about $250 million because otherwise private insurers who understand the risks better than you or I WILL NOT shoulder the liability)

The cost of nuclear can be dragged down by taking various risks that the people getting that sweet free catastrophe insurance would probably be happy with.

raxxorraxor• 1 year ago

With transmutation and the option for recycling it altogether, waste is not an issue

Yes, waste is an issue. We only recently got the first permanent storages and their viability is to be tested.

Dropping barrels in the ocean was just kind of recently disallowed. Nuclear waste processing still drops contaminated water into oceans and rivers.

Water is a brilliant radiation absorber. But you can be sure this radiation will at some point reach the food chain. These are insurmountable costs and other technologies don't have these problems, toxicity of materials is different from ratiation from decaying materials.

Perhaps there is a place for nuclear power, but its problems should not be ignored or downplayed as well as its costs.

ZeroGravitas9• 1 year ago

The mention of nuclear in the article was weird:

But [solar at 7%] remains eclipsed by wind, which grew to 8% last year, and nuclear to 9%.

Which is a bit mangled but seems to be suggesting nuclear grew to 9%.

Nuclear did grow slightly in absolute terms, but in percentage terms it hit a 45 year low as the total grew faster and so the share shrunk.

gandalfian• 1 year ago

And yet sometimes I wonder. In the Uk you need most of your energy in the cold dark winter. So if you require enough non solar renewables to get you through the winter with net zero and those renewables are still available in the summer time are large scale solar not a bit redundant? Sunnier countries that have high electricity demand for air conditioning during the sunny periods would seem to have a better match mind.

pydry5• 1 year ago

It's usually windy when it's dark and cold and vice versa.

You should be wondering about the combination of solar + wind energy + short term storage + long term storage.

zozbot2344• 1 year ago

It's usually windy when it's dark and cold and vice versa.

Usually, but not always. You can have many days or weeks, e.g. in mid-winter of overcast weather and very little wind. This is a real problem for renewable energy sources, they're not comprehensively viable unless supplemented by alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.

sapiogram3• 1 year ago

That's a weak correlation at best. What about when it's still weather in winter? It's not unusual at all.

ZeroGravitas9• 1 year ago

The UK plans are mostly wind e.g. from the latest carbon budget:

Low-carbon supply: by 2040, our Balanced Pathway sees offshore wind grow six-fold from 15 GW of capacity in 2023 to 88 GW by 2040. Onshore wind capacity doubles to 32 GW by 2040 and solar capacity increases to 82 GW

And once you multiply by capacity factor the solar and onshore wind are about equal so solar will be less than a third of modern renewables.

Plus UK wind peaks in the winter.

Gibbon12• 1 year ago

I think Scotland is already a net exporter of electricity due to wind.

itishappy5• 1 year ago

To be honest, peaker plants that sit offline for most of the year but can spin up in unfavorable conditions seems like an ideal application for fossil fuels. They're basically grid-scale emergency generators. Building an oversized battery farm that can store 3 weeks of energy and gets used once every other year probably won't make economic sense anytime soon.

mr_toad• 1 year ago

The UK might to think nuclear, if only so that it isn’t totally reliant on a foreign power for its nuclear deterrent.

tim3338• 1 year ago

We have a few reactors and used to make bombs, the first tested in 1952. It's been a bit outsourced to the US these days though which might end up changing.

bluescrn• 1 year ago

Unstoppable force meets 104% tariff...

api• 1 year ago

First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Part of this extreme reckless tariff push is definitely protectionism for the fossil fuel industry.

WillPostForFood• 1 year ago

Do you think that was Biden's motivation when he put a 50% tariff on solar panels?

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ustr-biden-tariff-increase-...

bitethecutebait• 1 year ago

two more parts:

- a call to action

- dump and pump stock market scheme

how many HN users, say top 5000 commenters and people with craziest CVs and or income will profit of that? it would be stupid not to, right?

mullingitover• 1 year ago

Part of this extreme reckless tariff push is definitely protectionism for the fossil fuel industry.

Indeed, it's becoming very obvious that the US is slowly turning into a resource curse nation. Sad.

Of course US tariffs are only going to make those Chinese panels cheaper for the EU and the rest of the world, which will then be less reliant on US-sourced fossil fuels. In the long run, putting up a wall in front of the your beachfront property is not going to protect your house when the tide comes in.

zardo• 1 year ago

It's too stupidly done to be protectionism.

tim3338• 1 year ago

I hope they are enjoying the drop in the oil price from $71 when trump did his Apr 2nd announcement to $57 now.

whazor• 1 year ago

Solar panels are also produced in USA. The producers might increase their prices but so might oil/gas/other energy companies.

VerminOctopus12• 1 year ago

They’re simply not as good as the Chinese ones.

relaxing2• 1 year ago

Last I looked 100% of the US manufacturers were assembling panels with silicon from China.

Maybe some domestic monocrystalline wafer production has come online recently? Curious if anyone has updated info.

toomuchtodo5• 1 year ago

~50GW was imported with the expectation of tariffs [1]. That is a bit under 1 year of US deployment reserve.

Solar is about to get hit with tariffs, but stockpiles give buyers opportunities - https://electrek.co/2025/04/08/solar-hit-tariffs-but-stockpi... - April 8th, 2025

Domestic supply chain looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790553 (courtesy u/jax)

According to [1], the USA in January 2025 has almost 50GW/yr module manufacturing capacity. But to make modules you need polysilicon (25GW/yr manufacturing capacity in the US), ingots (0GW/yr), wafers (0GW/yr), and cells (0GW/yr). Hence the USA is seemingly entirely dependent on imports, probably from China which has 95%+ of the global wafer manufacturing capacity.
Even when accounting for announced capacity expansion, the USA is currently on target to remain a very small player in the global market with announced capacity of 33GW/yr polysilicon, 13GW/yr ingots, 24GW/yr wafers, 49GW/yr cells and 83GW/yr modules (13GW/yr sovereign supply chain limitation).
In 2024, China completed sovereign manufacturing of ~540GW of modules[2] including all precursor polysilicon, ingots, wafers and cells. China also produced and exported polysilicon, ingots, wagers and cells that were surplus to domestic demand. Many factories in China's production chain are operating at half their maximum production capacity due to global demand being less than half of global manufacturing capacity.[3]

(citations in their comment)

blitzar2• 1 year ago

95% of the world doesn't live in America, all the more for the rest of us. America can enjoy its beautiful coal.

jiggawatts2• 1 year ago

I just got a flashback to Trump enunciating “Clean coal, beautiful clean coal!”

thundervelvet• 1 year ago

Neat, solar power growing this fast is really good news!

1970-01-012• 1 year ago

Moore's law for solar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

ck2• 1 year ago

Meanwhile in the USA the whitehouse just bailed out the coal industry.

mrguyorama• 1 year ago

Actually no, coal is still going to die in the US unless China sells us their coal for dirt cheap.

You get more watts per human labor hour with our abundant natural gas reserves. No matter how cheap you drive labor, it will still be more economical to use that labor to drill wells.

Coal was always dying, especially in the US, because of economic concerns. It's a stupid source of energy.

The fact that anyone in the US even thinks of coal is absurd. There are maybe 60k coal miners in the US. It hasn't mattered in decades.

seeg• 1 year ago

What about

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/19/1032215/solar-pa...

alright2565• 1 year ago

Through incredible human ingenuity, we have convinced the two most abundant elements in the earth's crust to give us free energy. Once they are no longer effective, after several decades of service, we put them back in the earth where we got them.

Is this a problem worth solving?

Is it a problem worth giving any amount of thought to at all, when the alternative is killing people both directly through pollution and indirectly through climate change?

Fruitmaniac• 1 year ago

America is so fucking backwards it makes me cry

phendrenad2• 1 year ago

Is there a source for the claim that solar provides 7% of the world's power? I'm trying to track down the source of this figure. I see that the global "photovoltaic (PV) capacity" is at 6.6% (according to a trade organization that represents manufacturers of solar panels). I don't see a definition for "PV capacity", but I assume it means the total theoretical output of all installed solar panels, even if the output is much lower (due to panels being sub-optimally located, aligned, or having degraded over time).

I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm just not buying the 7% figure as the evidence stands.

ZeroGravitas9• 1 year ago

The news story is reporting on the new report from Ember think tank, which has interactive data charts on their site.

It shows solar PV as 6.91% of global electricity generation last year:

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

'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity

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