Despite what's happening in the USA, renewables are winning globally

https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/despite-whats-happening-in-the-usa-renewables-are-winning-globally/

by pseudolus • 9 months ago

168 181 9 months ago

thebulletin.org

WillPostForFood• 9 months ago

The featured image in the article is looks like an ecological nightmare.

https://thebulletin.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/GettyImag...

zdragnar3• 9 months ago

On the one hand, there are some benefits to the ground cover that aren't possible in wide open plains.

On the other, a bad hailstorm means a lot of glass and scraps to pick up.

sigwinch3• 9 months ago

Panels can endure hail as well as cars and roofs, so we’re talking catastrophic hail; where we’ve seen economic losses as bad as tornadoes.

So, I’d worry about wind wrecking and broadly casting those slivers.

Rather than pick them up, maybe consider further crushing them into the ground. While that’s not good for farmland, the area under the plume of a coal plant is already broadly contaminated.

PeakKS• 9 months ago

Wow you're right, a massive coal plant would be much more ecologically friendly.

sigwinch3• 9 months ago

Nah, burning an entire field of panels produces less heavy metal contamination than a day of coal.

BLKNSLVR4• 9 months ago

I've only heard a couple of things on the topic, but there is research into multi-use of land for large scale solar with existing agriculture.

https://cleanenergycouncil.org.au/news-resources/new-guide-s...

aaronbrethorst• 9 months ago

The most remarkable details about solar panels I've heard recently came from the environmentalist Bill McKibben[1] on a podcast[2]:

I was standing in a cornfield in Illinois this time last summer, with a farmer who grew corn for ethanol and was converting much of his fields to solar arrays. He said, I can grow in this acre, and he pointed to an acre in a good farmerly way, he said, in this acre, I can grow enough ethanol to run my Ford F-150 pickup, most beloved vehicle in the American iconography. It’ll run 25,000 miles off the ethanol I can grow on an acre in a year. If I cover that same acre with solar panels, then I can produce enough electrons to run my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, I can run that not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben

[2] https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening/di...

kragen6• 9 months ago

Wow, that's astounding. Thanks.

HellDunkel• 9 months ago

So the eqivalent solar energy is 700 000 miles… a year?

dreamcompiler• 9 months ago

Not to mention that the cornfield has to be essentially torn down and rebuilt every year, while the panels will just sit there quietly working for at least 20 years with very little maintenance.

grues-dinner5• 9 months ago

The figures are, if anything, an underestimate.

An acre of solar is about 350-450,000 kWh/year. An F-150 Lightning does 2 miles per kWh. So that's about right.

One acre of corn makes about 400 gallons of bioethanol. Even the newest F-150s do an atrocious 18 mpg in real usage, so you need nearly 1500 gallons to go 25,000 miles. So this figure is presumably ignoring the non-ethanol content of the fuel, which is most of it.

cmxch• 9 months ago

A regular ICE fuel system will make it 700,000 miles but the battery won’t.

hshdhdhehd3• 9 months ago

As does:

* Picture of a city

* Picture of ploughed fields (was wooded preciously)

* Picture of any other type of power generation plant

grues-dinner5• 9 months ago

Picture of ploughed fields

We've cleared nature for farms for so long that the fields feel like nature that should be preserved.

Not content with cutting down the forests, now even the hedgerows are in the way.

Compared to what was there before (often forest), a gigantic monocrop industrial field is about as ecologically friendly as a car park. And the car park won't dump fertiliser into the water courses either.

dvrj101• 9 months ago

especially this one : https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:834/format:webp/1*A7cL...

- https://medium.com/appalachian-studies-fall-2017-projects/mo... - https://e360.yale.edu/features/a-troubling-look-at-the-human...

Gigachad• 9 months ago

From what I’ve seen, solar panels end up being quite good for plant life since they provide partial shade from the sun. Basically a shade cloth that’s productive on its own.

kragen6• 9 months ago

Great for lettuce, terrible for corn and wheat. Farming is complicated. Horses for courses.

perilunar• 9 months ago

And for animals. I’ve seen plenty of discussion about grazing sheep around panels. They keep the grass down and enjoy the shade.

zdragnar3• 9 months ago

Duh? The US has a lot of easy and cheap access to fossil fuels. With Russia cut off, solar is a really easy part of the equation for a lot of countries.

Here in the US, I'd expect we wouldn't be adding much new coal or nat gas either if it weren't for all the data centers going up everywhere. The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.

softwaredoug4• 9 months ago

Nat gas, yes.

Coal is largely keeping existing plants going. I’m doubtful we’ll see anything like we saw when 50% of US power in the early 2000s was coal.

Hammerhead12321• 9 months ago

The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.

I know these things use a lot, but relative to the national usage is it a significant number? I’ve read this statement a few times but the amount is never quantified to something that makes sense. Like, how much has electricity usage increased in the last two years and can be directly attributed to data centers?

Nursie3• 9 months ago

Bitcoin famously uses as much as a mid-sized country like the netherlands now. Wouldn't surprise me if AI use follows.

more_corn• 9 months ago

Yes. The amount of gpu power required to train a foundation model is staggering. Inference isn’t cheap either. There’s a massive boom in datacenter construction. If you remove investment in AI infrastructure and related investments is growth in 2025 would be .01%

gambiting• 9 months ago

According to this - 4% of all electricity used in the US in 2023 was used by AI data centres, predicted to go up to 7-8% in 2028. In some countries like Ireland it's already over 20% of all electricity usage.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-cen...

BLKNSLVR4• 9 months ago

The US is choosing to make itself increasingly redundant. Increasing speed whilst in Reverse gear whilst talking as if they're highway cruising in 5th.

It's nice to know that the rest of the world is still pushing forwards, up a steep hill, in first gear. I hope it can continue, and the hill shrinks.

zdragnar3• 9 months ago

Not the rest of the world, but China. 80% of all panels come from there, and they want to keep it that way.

It'll lead to sone interesting and unpleasant political fights in the future, I suspect.

softwaredoug4• 9 months ago

They also lead the world in emissions and what the US does / doesn’t do won’t be a major driver. Our carbon peaked in 2007

It’s more an issue of US ability to compete in an emerging market IMO.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...

bytesandbits• 9 months ago

US is the only country besides China with significant solar panel manufacturing (although much much much lower). It's not that.

bruce5118• 9 months ago

It doesn't really matter where the panels come from. Yes the manufacturer captures some of their value, but that's in the range of 20% of their overall value (and dropping).

In my country there is no govt subsidy for solar. But math doesn't lie. A typical residential system returns 16% on capital invested. Not surprisingly residential solar here is now measured in Gw.

The good news for the US is that it really doesn't matter if they fall behind. Solar can be installed so quickly that any lost impetus can be made in in a year or two. There's basically very little lead time required between decision and implementation.

gritzko2• 9 months ago

I was checking Google Maps recently. In such places as Islamabad or Cyprus, residential solar is big. I also hear, the price of panels is low % of the entire installation.

What excites me is that solar works one level up. Coal is energy, solar is a source of energy. If you sell solar panel manufacturing equipment, you work in the second derivative.

That literally levels up the game.

anothernewdude• 9 months ago

By the time re-industrialisation kicks in, the US will be well placed to replace China as a source of cheap labour, once living standards decrease to that level.

kragen6• 9 months ago

What makes you think reindustrialization will kick in?

pengaru• 9 months ago

By the time re-industrialisation kicks in, the US will be well placed to replace China as a source of cheap labour, once living standards decrease to that level.

That's going to take some a serious baby boom, I'm not seeing it.

trenchpilgrim• 9 months ago

China hasn't been where the cheap labor is for many years now. Cheap labor is in SEA (Mayasia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc) Bangladesh/India, Mexico, Brazil, and African nations like Nigeria.

rayiner4• 9 months ago

This is a funny accusation considering that the U.S.’s advantage over other countries has only grown over the last decade: https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2022/02/05/comparing-e...

Germany’s per-capita GDP was 76% of the U.S. in 2015 and is 61% today.

tokioyoyo• 9 months ago

I hear that, but then you look at China’s GDP/pp numbers, QoL improvements over the decade, and can’t really take it that seriously.

Hnrobert42• 9 months ago

GDP per capita is not the only measure of forward progress.

protocolture3• 9 months ago

I think when I was very young, the US briefly offered an appealing lifestyle.

But its one of the few countries these days where I believe emigration would send me significantly backwards.

GDP isnt an interesting metric for this conversation tbh. The US can be "Winning" the monetary accumulation race while still being a terrible place in most other aspects.

Why dont you use "Adult literacy rate" as a comparison.

FranzFerdiNaN2• 9 months ago

Who cares if all that GDP ends up in the hands of the top 0,01% or so.

The average American really does not have a 40% better life than the average German.

BLKNSLVR4• 9 months ago

On the topic of renewables, though, the US has been resistant at best. Prior to turning into the active hindrance it currently is.

Krasnol• 9 months ago

Your link points to an article from 2022...

We'll see how that goes.

epistasis4• 9 months ago

The US is being run according to what a weak and cowardly person thinks a strong person looks like.

It's bad decisions again and again, fundamentally from insecurity and incompetence. It all with the idea of trying to impress some really scared people with blustery demonstrations of force, because the scared people imagine themselves using lots of force if they were ever to have power in their lives.

Synthetic7346• 9 months ago

A more apt analogy would be that everyone is going up the hill in 1st, and the US is going up in 5th, lugging the engine. It's a matte rif when and not if the engine stalls

softwaredoug4• 9 months ago

“The IEA has, consistently over the last couple of decades, way underestimated how fast renewables are growing,” said Robert Brecha, a senior climate and energy adviser at Climate Analytics,
The policy outlook for renewables in the United States is so bleak that the IEA lowered the country’s renewable capacity growth expectations by 50 percent compared to last year’s projections.

Maybe room for optimism they are underestimating what non govt supported solar growth would be in the US?

hshdhdhehd3• 9 months ago

Capitalism aligns with being green, leaving right wing narrative-driven policy in a very confused state.

intermerda• 9 months ago

American conservatives have long stopped pretending to have any policy other than bowing to their King.

geraneum• 9 months ago

Apart from the obvious, another aspect of renewables that I hope will make the world a better place is the potential to be fucking free from oil and gas. Imagine the geopolitical impact of that. But, here’s a lesson from WW2. Unless we can pack the energy produced by renewables into tanks, jets, aircraft carriers and such effectively (cost, scale, etc.) nothing is gonna get meaningfully better there.

bawolff• 9 months ago

Its probably also going to trigger a bunch of wars in the short term.

Wars tend to happen when power dynamics change. Either someone is on the rise and thinks they can get more or someone is on the decline and can no longer hold on to what they used to have. I think the middle east is going to be a blood bath once the oil stops making bank. But its not just them, when oil goes away it changes the power dynamics across the world.

grues-dinner5• 9 months ago

Theoretically, with enough cheap renewable energy, synthetic hydrocarbons could fuel the war machine.

It would need possibly big, vulnerable plants to refine, but so does jet fuel and diesel now.

Adding that much electrical capacity is a civilisational task, but an electrical "JP-8 at home" plant in theory is a good security asset, especially for countries with poor oil supply.

jopsen• 9 months ago

Many countries have some oil and if the civilian economy didn't drink so much -- there probably be plenty to make jet fuel, etc.

vanviegen2• 9 months ago

tanks, jets, aircraft carriers

Will these still be relevant in 15 years time, given the pace at which military drones are developing?

Perhaps long-range drones/missiles will be using fossil fuel, but not nearly as much as the heavy, bulky military vehicles designed to carry personnel.

SJC_Hacker• 9 months ago

Whether they are manned or not doesn’t matter. They still need power which is mostly oil based except the smaller, short range drones. The longer range, bigger drones and missiles are jet powered

ggm2• 9 months ago

Winning here, means "are able to supply power at a price, which makes their backers money without having to invest in mines and wells"

If you hold assets which embody mines and wells, you are concerned at this point you're going to have a stranded asset. Strategically, you need the market to endure and so decisions of short term pain like dropping pricing, become important so you can stop people fleeing to other forms of energy. But, if the pricing has to drop below your cost of extraction and processing, there's a limit to how far you can go. Well, that point, for some forms of energy, was reached some time ago.

I think when the Saudi Arabian government started seriously diversifying their economy, it was a pretty strong signal.

Even in my home state (Queensland, Australia: Liberal/National right wing government, backed by coal and mining interests) the commercial realities of owning coal fired power stations has reared it's head, and the state government is making market interventions to prop up coal. It also fixes pricing decisions in state to return a significant profit to the state government with that coal price backed energy supply, which I believe is not dissimilar to Ontario. (happy to be corrected) -People are voting with their feed for rooftop domestic solar and batteries, and the pricing spiral continues.

They could do what the other (Labor) states are doing and get with renewables. They just cancelled pumped hydro, wind and solar deployments on pretty thin logic, but they can't stop the private sector and the move there is pretty clear: It's just cheaper as a path to profit, to sell electricity based on renewables right now. If you don't own a giant hole in the ground of coal generation, you get your money back faster building anything else BUT coal fired power now.

BLKNSLVR4• 9 months ago

Ironically "The Sunshine State".

ggm2• 9 months ago

When Labor flipped the licence plate tagline to "the smart state" in 2001 a lot of people thought it was a poor attempt at humour. Apparently the "the sunshine state" was brought back by popular acclaim, but I can't say I felt consulted or cared.

shmerl• 9 months ago

Luddites can't stop progress. But they'll try to slow it down.

FranzFerdiNaN2• 9 months ago

The luddites were 100% correct though. They saw that machines werent the problem per se, but the fact that labor wasnt getting their share anymore. And we're seeing it time and time again. Labor invents new machines and methods, and capital takes all the profit.

energy123• 9 months ago

The real world doesn't fit into these trite categories and explanations this easily.

AlexandrB• 9 months ago

Here's a counterpoint: https://brawlstreetjournal.substack.com/p/dead-man-walking

According to a recent study by the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry, annual investment in the energy, industry, building, and transport sectors would have to more than double if current energy policies were to continue: from an average of around €82 billion between 2020 and 2024 to somewhere between €113 billion to €316 billion in 2035. Early transition models had projected a fraction of that.

We'll see, but I don't know what to believe anymore. In particular, Germany's deindustrialization is unmistakeable and expensive energy may be the culprit.

rayiner4• 9 months ago

Germany has dropped from 76% of US GDP per capita in 2015 to only 61% today.

If AI turns out to be economically valuable the EU fixation on non-nuclear renewables may have turned out to be a very costly error.

gritzko2• 9 months ago

France is 60% nuclear

ta20240528• 9 months ago

Germany has dropped from 76% of US GDP per capita in 2015 to only 61% today.

Largely because the USA added $6 trillion to their GDP via fantasy 'hedonic' and 'imputed' components.

OKRainbowKid• 9 months ago

Correlation is not causation.

oezi2• 9 months ago

Let me understand the AI argument you are making: Are you saying that if AI is valuable (which is likely) then not having cheap electricity is going to be downside?

I would have two objections:

- Data center operation and construction is only a fraction of the value creation. If Europe is behind on the AI race it won't matter where the data centers are because the profits are going to go to US companies (as with Google and Facebook so far).

- What makes you think that Nuclear would help in any way to have cheap energy? Nuclear has become by far the most expensive energy generation method. Building new nuclear is unfeasible in the west.

rwyinuse• 9 months ago

It's mainly German fixation, not EU fixation.

at-fates-hands3• 9 months ago

Germany tried to go 100% renewables and then found out it wasn't possible, then made a deal with Russia to supply what they needed to cover what renewables couldn't. Right up until Russia invaded Ukraine:

A huge increase in gas prices triggered by Russia’s move last month to sharply reduce supplies to Germany has plunged Europe’s biggest economy into its worst energy crisis since the oil price shock of 1973.

Gas importers and utilities are fighting for survival while consumer bills are going through the roof, with some warning of rising friction.

“The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German housing enterprises GdW. “Germany’s social peace is in great danger.”

https://www.ft.com/content/d0c5815f-f0a2-49ad-8772-f4b0fbbd2...

They did eventually move to get off of their reliance on Russian energy over a year later, but what they did as go back to coal and nuclear to keep the lights on after divesting from Russian energy imports:

In its race to find alternate sources of energy, the country has reopened coal-fired power plants, delayed plans to shut down its three remaining nuclear power plants, and pushed to increase capacity to store natural gas imported from other countries such as Norway and the US.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Lindner pointed to the speed with which a new liquefied natural gas terminal had been built in Germany - in a record of around eight months, he said. More infrastructure investments were planned, he added.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400

morsch• 9 months ago

Pretty much all of this is wrong or misleading

The Energiewende wasn't an attempt to go 100% renewable

Germany's dependency on Russian gas goes back to the 1990s and beyond

While people were worried about the impact of sanctions on Russian gas, the actual impact was lower than expected. Consumer bills did not go through the roof, partly due to government intervention

Combined power generation share from coal compared to before Russia started a war with Ukraine is slightly down, nuclear is 0 (or a percent or two if you consider imports), gas is marginally up

oezi2• 9 months ago

If you visit the German study cited you will see that only a third of those transition costs are for electricity generation and transmission networks. The remainder is spent on climate change adaptations of housing, transport and industry.

I personally believe the transition to electric vehicles will soon reach a tipping point due to reduced battery prices and won't add much cost. Costly building upgrades (insulation and heat pumps will be delayed), but renewable installation will continue strongly. It is just to cheap not to do it.

cheunste• 9 months ago

I can tell you one area in renewables that's NOT winning. Offshore. In the industry, there was some talk about how GE is pulling out of the offshore wind turbine market. Sucks to be wind farms that were built using those GE turbines.

at-fates-hands3• 9 months ago

Also not winning:

‘World’s largest’ solar plant in Calif closing – $1.6 billion Ivanpah casts a shadow on DOE loans – ‘Federal data concluded the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year’

The 386-megawatt plant lagged in producing promised electricity levels and faced criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of its associated bird deaths. While estimates vary, some federal data concluded that the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year flying into concentrated beams of sunlight.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/02/05/worlds-largest-solar...

idontwantthis2• 9 months ago

Do you understand the difference between solar thermal and photovoltaic?

rsynnott6• 9 months ago

That is not the largest solar plant (I’m guessing the article was written by our good friends the magic robots); there’s one with almost 10x the nameplate output in China, though likely more in reality, as concentrated solar thermal plants don’t work properly. It’s the largest concentrated solar thermal plant; it’s a dead-end technology (it looked plausible in the 90s when PV tech was expected to progress far less quickly than it actually did). You might as well claim that cars are dead on the basis that Wankel engines were a failure.

epistasis4• 9 months ago

Terrible for the US, and it means that we will lose out on yet more of the new energy economy.

youngtaff2• 9 months ago

Offshore is certainly winning in the UK and around the North Sea

ZeroGravitas2• 9 months ago

And it's cheaper than coal in China and lets them put generation near the populated coast.

And linking the two the Chinese Mingyang Smart Energy just announced an up to $2 Billion investment in a wind turbine factory in the UK.

rsynnott6• 9 months ago

Offshore’s doing fairly well globally, but I’m not sure how much of an export market GE has, and in the short term ol’ minihands has wrecked it in the US. Again, however, he won’t last forever.

pyuser5833• 9 months ago

Isn't US a massive producer of renewables?

adventured2• 9 months ago

Yes, this thead is filled with propaganda.

The US is by a dramatic margin the world's #2 producer of solar.

The US is by a very dramatic margin the world's #2 producer of wind.

None of which takes anything away from China's remarkable production.

In solar the US = #3 + #4 + #5 combined.

In wind the US = #3 + #4 + #5 + #6 combined.

danny_codes• 9 months ago

Presumably commenters are talking about the fact that the current US administration has taken an anti-renewables position and cut funding for renewable energy projects. With a hostile federal policy, it somewhat calls into question whether the US can sustain it's progress in renewable deployment. Personally though I think we will continue to make progress, just slower than before.

epistasis4• 9 months ago

It's a growing industry around the world but Trump is trying to reverse that. The only "propaganda" is your own.

Just two days ago, what would be rhe US's largest solar project, the 6.2 GW Esmeralda, was listed as cancelled by the BLM:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-and-environ...

After many months of delay because Trump said he was going to be really hard on the permit review, it was apparently cancelled for no reason.

Previously, Trump tried to retroactively revoke permits on offshore wind projects that were mid construction, with billions spent. Even if he didn't win in court, the scheduling of ships for this is so delicate that a delay of months could scuttle the build for years as ships move on to other engagements, basically ending any profitability.

This is having a huge chilling effect on our renewables buildout as the magus shakedowns are capricious and massive increase investment risk.

Even if there is growing investment in renewables in the US, it will be a shadow of what it would be otherwise.

And with gas turbines on many year back order, Trump is locking in higher electricity prices fire to shortages because he's trying to block one of the only fast ways to bring new generation into the grid.

classified• 9 months ago

Despite all the tech, the US are so incredibly backwards, in so many ways, that I'm wondering how they're not literally still burning witches.

ViewTrick10022• 9 months ago

Despite all the noise renewables make up 90% of new capacity in the US.

We are witnessing the complete transformation of the grid to renewables. The question is if it takes 10 years or 20 years depending on how quickly we deploy incentives to phase out existing capacity.

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2025/10/solar-and-wind...

softwaredoug4• 9 months ago

It's true, but will that 90% hold after the expirations of the credits, etc for solar?

ViewTrick10022• 9 months ago

Renewables have been the unsubsidized cheapest energy source for a while now.

Recently unsubsidized renewables and storage started undercutting fossil fuels in major markets around the world.

This is what is so interesting with renewable energy. They are the first energy source since the advent of fossil fuels lowering the price floor of energy globally.

Removing the credits will like I said only shift the implementation period due to using tax money to tilt the scale in one way or the other.

ZeroGravitas2• 9 months ago

Renewables are winning in the USA too. A few tens of billions in handouts to Trump's crony capitalist pals and general regulatory and legislative chaos (in renewables specifically but in everything else too) isn't going to change that.

thefz• 9 months ago

Because drum roll the USAs are not the world.

silexia• 9 months ago

You cannot trust the numbers out of China and Russia, I would be surprised if this were true when you see the actual numbers.

Beyond that, an increase in CO2 globally seems like it would be countered by an increase in plant mass taking it up?

asacrowflies• 9 months ago

Are we really repeating 40 year old nonsense to try and debunk climate change??? Everything old is new again

bithead• 9 months ago

Solar at least is a much faster way to add capacity to the grid than coal or natural gas, particularly residential rooftop solar. In a competition with China for AI predominance, trump shot the USA in the foot by deep sixing renewal incentives.

fdschoeneman• 9 months ago

This piece would be more useful if it explained what it means by winning. Early on, it seems to define winning as the amount of taxpayer subsidies going towards it, at least in the US; but then it talks about the growth in the rest of the world without showing, at least before I stopped reading, how much of that growth is driven by tax and regulatory incentives.

neko_ranger• 9 months ago

Any article saying China is leader in renewables gets the big doubt.

Despite what's happening in the USA, renewables are winning globally

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