The growth is still slow compared to China and the evolution of the international order though. Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
EU is doing just slightly better than US. US has the advantage of its fossil fuels but it's actually China that is doing the revolution. They are accelerating and at some point not too far away will reach abundance and switch off all the fossils.
It's unwise that the new US administration be pushing for the opposite of China. But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU:
They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.
China is probably doing it for geo-political purposes (ie: if there is no oil, I can still move people with trains). They are ready to take a financial hit for that safety net. Europe is in a similar predicament but even the Russian war didn’t seem to teach them a lesson?
>Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable
Claims like this would need to be quantified further in order to make any real predictions, but I think these sorts of predictions about future electrification may turn out to be shockingly wrong.
For example, many predict we have or will soon hit peak oil. Whereas I would wager it will continue to grow. You didn't mention global oil production, but I want to get specific. 50 years from now I think global oil production will be higher than it is today.
There is a strong desire by many for oil production to decrease and to electrify, but the incentive structure just isnt there. It's too cheap and useful and the energy demand is effectively unlimited. Im not even saying we shouldnt move away from it. Just that we wont.
Europe hit its peak oil some time ago and the peak wasn't that high. Anyway, electricity is inherently more efficient and less problematic than the chemical alternatives. I guess you can bet on chemical energy if you have plenty of it. Its just that electricity is superior in every way.
Also fossil reserves have other uses too, I also don't expect oil production going to 0 anytime soon.
Global oil numbers went horribly wrong when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prices multiplied and EU was left paying for an invasive force because it was still not %100 renewable. Considering the damage done by the oil supplier war machine, fossils are just outrageously expensive. Biggest mistake ever was to rely on fossils.
I dont understand what you are saying with this comment. They were importing before the war now they are still importing. That just shows how durable the demand is for oil.
Its not durable demand for oil, its a demand for energy and shows how bad idea is to rely on suppliers you don't control. Build enough renewable energy infrastructure and the demand for oil goes away.
Energy demand is unlimited, but oil isn't cheap anymore. Synfuel will eventually replace petroleum as PV gets cheaper, but also an engine to convert oil into electricity (or, almost equivalently, mechanical work) is too expensive to compete with PV when you have grid access.
I wouldn't bet against your 50 year prediction but that's because there will always be more infrastructure to extract oil, even as the oil left to extract dwindles. My own prediction is that rates of oil extraction will continue to increase with minor fluctuations until about 2160 and then fail off a cliff.
Oil isn't a binary for energy though. There's a growing need for it in other industries, from plastics to pharma to fertilizers. Moreover, oil production is currently staying high because the OPEC cartel can't simply afford to shut down well production - only scale it down very gradually and pray that no one finds out (which is impossible given that oil is sold on the spot market). On the other hand, American Big Oil is dependent on global prices - too low and drilling deep or fracking becomes infeasible for them, while high prices mean economic slowdown (due to domino effects on other industries) until OPEC bandies together to stabilize prices to reasonable levels (which is $65-75 per barrel).
Currently we're in a situation where OPEC, remembering 2014 and hell bent on diversification, is offloading record quantities of crude into the market, to ensure that American production stays infeasible.
Anything that needs oil can be produced from coal. There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.
The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue.
In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
So many wrong points here. The coal to liquid (CTL) process looks good on paper up until it isn't. Like you mentioned, it requires a lot of energy, energy which most countries cannot afford to divert. There's no point in using nuclear or renewables for CTL when SABIC can simply undercut you on price by 10x or more.
> There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.
Oil is currently at 61-65 USD per barrel, with OPEC ensuring it stays that way because even they know it's only going to fall from there. Even the 61-65 USD price point leaves a bad taste in their mouths.
> In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
No, with renewables and storage offering cheap electricity, oil also gets cheaper!
In fact, I'd argue that CTL is something only countries with extremely abundant domestic reserves of coal can do - China, South Africa and Australia. In fact, nearly every planned CTL plant has been delayed or scrapped in the US as infeasible.
That's highly variable - a significantly large volume of coal mined globally is via bucket-wheel excavators / mobile strip mining machines.
That's overburden removal followed by near surface bed extraction with machines - no underground mining, underground being the mining domain that sees high injury and death rates.
Regardless, fuel from oil or fuel from coal is still fuel from dead and buried organics, from resurfaced long buried carbon products, and still introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere which is counter productive toward any goal of reducing the insulation factor of the atmosphere.
Long term if people would really like to do something with CO2 emissions then CO2 captured from atmosphere can be used for chemical processes instead of coal/oil.
Got a link to a Technical Economical Feasibility Report on this?
As in, what can practically be achieved in the real world at large within the next 25 years that can be immediately funded with a forward capital loan to break ground on a plant within 12 to 18 months and start operating within five years?
How does actual atmospheric carbon capture scale out within a useful time frame?
less d3mand for oil, more demand for energy, much more to the point is the endless potential of abundent solar energy and the comming crisis caused by the end of scarcity
your grandkids will dealing meems of archiologists finding fossil fossil fuel cars
Trumpism is clearly spreading… The reason China solar is booming is because of structural incentives. Solar is “dirt cheap” compared to oil/gas. That’s why Africa is importing records of it and breaking that record every next year. It’s not because it’s eco-friendly (people in Africa or Pakistan don’t know what that means), it’s because it’s more affordable.
In Tunisia, the pay-off time for a solar installation is around 4-5 years (granted we still have net-metering, so free storage). You are either ignorant or too poor to not install solar.
However, electrical solutions are often more efficient, so this can be misleading because a transition means you're getting a large amount "for free" as a result of the improved efficiency.
Instead of moving your car from oil to solar, you're moving the car from oil to electricity, and then electricity is fungible so you don't care that it was made with a solar array - but the efficiency win was from going to electricity.
You have to distinguish between transportation (electricity and oil) and source of energy (only oil).
To have electricity you would need to invest at once in both generation, transport (the grids are not enough), storage and change in use (replace cars with electric ones). Your return will depend as well on the technology developed and none of the above fields is stable yet.
I am a fan of going electric, even if only for more sovereignty, but it is not as simple as "electricity is more efficient".
You have to be especially careful when comparing oil/gasoline vs solar/electric through. Oil has an especially well developed infrastructure for it being drilled, refined, delivered and stored. Electricity on the scale to power all transportation does not, so there are large short-term costs.
In terms of effeciency, you don't replace a billion BTU's of oil with the same amount of electricity, what you want is locomation. Only about 25% of oil's energy ends up spinning the wheels, compared to 85% of energy using an electric powertrain.
In rich countries the electrical grid only needs to roughly double to power all transportation. The US did that in the 01960s, and China did it in the 02010s and probably will have done it again this decade.
The grids is minimally impacted by EV’s. A great deal of charging happens at night when there’s vast excess capacity in generation and transmission. Even if you assume it’s split 24/7 each car only uses roughly 500 watts averaged throughout a year.
More importantly if 100% of new cars went electric it’d still take 25 years to finish so it’s a rounding error to grid operators outside of a trivial number of substations for fast chargers. As crazy as it sounds when you include training LLM’s are using more electricity than every EV combined.
Electricity is already beating oil for lots of low temperature applications (e.g. home heating and cooling) because heat pumps are so much more efficient than burning fuel.
That chart is misleading in the other direction, it’s comparing energy released by burning fossil fuels not useful work preformed.
A solar powered EV goes a lot further per unit energy working with electricity than per unit energy of gasoline. Heat pumps are vastly efficient using electricity than even the most efficient natural gas furnace. It’s actually more efficient to use natural gas to make electricity to then use a heat pump than it is to run natural gas to people’s homes.
.... and is that the maximum percentage of renewables 54% ? what is the minimum daily percentage? There should be a measure what is the maximum percentage over a month? to see how renewable system handles outages of renewables ( ie no solor or wind ? and storage is the sole supply? How long can storage supply the needed power is the next question ? The needed storage and transmission changes are hard and expensive.
Yes, because you can't just increase capacity with solar. It has to be backed up by base power. Add 10% solar? OK now you need 10% from natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc. You need to add both solar and something durable then you can just use the solar until you cant.
Look what happened in Portugal when it got cloudy.
This comment is always so strange to me - do you really, seriously believe that the people setting up the grids never thought about dunkelflaute? And I don't mean that in an attacking way, I'm genuinely curious about your thoughts there.
Like, yes, we're aware. At least in the german south we have the opposite problem right now. We are getting negative electricity prices (you get paid for taking some) more often because we have more electricity than we can use due to solar, at least during the day. Proper power storage is being built at this very moment all over the country.
Aside from dunkelflaute, the wind is statistically stronger when solar power generation is low, so at night and when it's super cloudy. And dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year. (german perspective, don't know enough about the other countries' grids)
Regarding that problem in portugal, you misunderstood something there. The big 2025 power outage wasn't caused by clouds, it was an combination of localized blackouts and a sudden power _surge_ which caused a cascading failure which couldn't be stabilized by the conventional power plants even though on paper they had the capacity. How did you get the idea it had anything to do with "cloudy" weather?
RE "... dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year..."
My guess is its VERY expensive to build the needed storage so the supply reliability matches the current reliability 99.99%? ? ( in my area there has never been any unintended power outages for several years ) Which is why its never been done?
Then again maybe people will be more tolerant of the situation. I've always though smart meters could always have a "mode" to reduce everyone's max demand to a small amount ...like a few hundred watts ...too help handle extended periods of dunkelflaute
People setting up the grids answer to politicians. They do what they can within the constraints given by public policy. If public policy is completely idiotic, like the one in germany, there's no much they can do other than try to duct tape whatever they can.
Electricity demand is elastic, and electricity is dynamically priced. Plenty of industries are able and willing to reduce their consumption to avoid paying 100x more than usual, or even get paid to reduce their consumption.
A data center with backup generators can easily switch from grid power to generator power. If you're installing those generators for redundancy reasons anyway, why not make some extra bucks by signing a first-load-to-shed contract with the power company?
Yes, but not for the vast majority of industrial energy consumption, because of the outsized consumption of electric arc furnaces and a few other things like that.
Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU
From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy.
Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.
That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.
Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing
The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost.
It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.
Then you store that energy or find a way to use it. Melt ore when its abundant, then make metal when it is abundant, then dig holes when it is abundant, then use the metal to turn the hole into a reservoir when it is abundant and eventually use the reservoir to pump in and out water as a way to store the abundant energy for use when its not.
All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.
Not saying we should continue using fossil fuels forever, but being unrealistic about how hard the transition to intermittent renewables will be isn't sensible
Having more generation capacity also makes renewables less intermittent though, becuase for example with enough solar capacity then even on a cloudy day they may produce enough energy to cover demand.
It doesn't solve the problem completely, but it surely helps.
> All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.
There’s quite a bit of complexity leading to the “simply storing in a tank” step.
On the other hand, the additional solar capacity during overcast days might still be worth the additional investment.
Electricity might become free on sunny days, but you'll still have to pay serious money for it during cloudy windless days. Even a solar panel operating at 10% capacity becomes worth the effort.
But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.
Using more energy is not itself "wasteful". For example, the US spends a bunch of extra energy on air conditioning, and as a result less older people die of heat deaths in the summer compared to Europe (and of course the population at large is generally more comfortable).
> But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If I find myself finding obvious "errors" in other people's plans and easy solutions they "just" have to implement then I'm usually missing something.
Europe's strategy to tie themselves economically to Russia for the purpose of peace didn't work out but a lot of the infrastructure and energy investments were made when that was the strategy. The other thing is that you're talking about electricity, fossil fuels have thousands of uses so you can't "drop everything".
Europe didn't tie themselves to Russian fossil fuels for the purpose of peace. They bought the cheapest energy available to them, and this was the basis of their economy. You can't just compete with oil and gas coming out of a pipeline, regardless what a computer programmer may believe about energy policy and electrical grids.
One of the biggest thing a lot of people are missing is that from this year Solar + battery became cheaper than coal in China. And avg annual price decline for solar and battery is still around 8-10% ie if you don't go to solar and electric machinery you will not be able to compete with China as they are about to reach the point in the next 10 year where electricity/energy is practically free.
It is weird to me that nobody wants to import Chinese electric cars. If Chinese investors and politicians are really subsidizing the production of electric cars, importing them would be basically having the new grid subsidized by a foreign government!
The usual argument is that this kills the domestic car industry, leaving us fully dependant on Chinese cars: what's going to happen when they hike their prices by 1000%, or threaten to stop all exports?
Pretty sure it's because a domestic auto industry is considered strategically important to maintain in case of war. Also, the supply chain employs a lot of people and maintains industrially important skills.
Look at the absolute values, your kettle doesn't run of fractions it runs on absolute power and EU&US are about the same. USA has fractionally lower renewables because they have very large fossil production. EU is making up for its lack of fossils through high efficiency policies.
In 2014 Russia decided to attack Ukraine because its political ambitions had been thwarted.
A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine.
Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010.
Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.
Fair enough, Germany isn't all of Europe, though of course it's part of it. Still, Germany, which completed its nuclear phase-out by permanently closing its last three reactors in by 2023 even while energy prices were sky-high. I know this firsthand as I was living there, and our energy bill jumped from around 100 to 250. Belgium followed a similar path, shutting down one reactor in September 2022 and another in February 2025.
I heard a few years ago that China was building up to two new coal power plants every week causing huge amounts of pollution. Looks like they still do. Yes they scale up renewable energy but what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate. At least with the EU and the US you can see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.
> what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate
It doesn't scale at the same rate though. Renewables are accelerating which means in China especially you see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.
The fossil thing about China is kind of understandable because don't forget that pretty much everything we all consume is made in China.
They were building new coal plants that were far more efficient, while also closing down extremely old inefficient and dirty coal plants. So overall it was a net gain.
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If this is not happening without government's help then it's not profitable. Which means a forced transition to solar requires to "drop everything" quite literally.
AFAIK its more complex than that. It requires high capEx at first, it needs the grid to match it and affects previous investments. The solar got cheap fast, wind didn't as much but it has its own advantages like it works when solar doesn't etc. A lot of government coordination is needed to work.
The governments can be very effective with that through providing long term visibility and reducing the risks.
You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining.
The problem is that nuclear had a fixed cost per year, not per unit produced. A reactor sitting idle costs about the same as a reactor running at 100% capacity.
This makes them fundamentally flawed as backup generation. Nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity when operating at full capacity, having it run only 5% of the time makes it completely unaffordable as it'll cost 20x as much.
When used traditionally, nuclear costs about $175/MWh. Solar and wind costs about $50/MWh. Use nuclear as backup and it'll cost $3500/MWh. Orrr, you've suddenly got a $3450/MWh budget to spend on storage for renewable energy...
There is another under discussed alternative UHV power transmission, e.g. south to north: Morocco has great conditions for solar.
Or East to West, the sun rises and sets at different times.
We still need more storage and generation, but a better grid would help a lot.
No need to obsess with solar if it doesn't work for you, its just that solar is so good. It uses manufactured devices that you just point to the sky and makes your machine run. For stability of course you need something like nuclear or storage.
Industrialized countries generally need stability when it comes to electricity. People also want to watch TV whenever they like and take a hot shower whenever they feel like it.
Pursuing an industrial strategy predicated on eternal cheap Russian gas (a strategy no doubt encouraged by Russian influence post-GDR) left Germany vulnerable to this situation. It is indeed admirable that they are willing to give it up now for principals, unlike Orban and Hungary.
> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.
You factored in a new grid and backup nuclear plants/gas power plants requiring >100B investments in Germany or Tesla Megapacks in excess of 100 metric tons?
Take a look at what is needed to make Germany “green” by a reputable and independent institute:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.
What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight?
I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.
> And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day
You can't generate excess electricity because you don't have enough land or rooftop (I mean maybe you do, I'm talking about the typical homeowner). Utilities can overbuild panels because they're extremely cheap.
LFP batteries have a self-discharge rate of 2-5% per month. Once they're cheap enough, over-building batteries to move summer sunshine into the winter months also becomes an option*. At $100/kwh, you could power Sweden 6 months a year for about $60bn (EDIT: $6tn, sorry) in batteries (yes labor and everything else will probably double that cost). And that doesn't even account for recent advances in sodium batteries, which reportedly bring that price down to $20/kwh
* (Any battery experts know why this might be wrong? I'm using basic arithmetic, not physics. That tells me a battery charged to 100% in July or August will still have > 70% charge left in December)
Germany would require a ballpark of 100 MILLION tons of Teslas Megapack grade batteries to run on battery for 2 weeks - which is even shorter than what we had to endure due to “Dunkelflauten”.
Why would Germany need to run solely on battery for 2 weeks? Do you expect 2 weeks with 0 sun and wind all over continental Europe?
In any case, at $100/kwh, it would cost $250bn (EDIT: $25tn sorry) in batteries and maybe the same in installation costs to power Germany for 6 months a year. At the lower $20/kwh price tag it would be more like $5tn, compared to Germany's ~$4.5tn GDP. Over 10 years it could be done.
I mean not the whole Europe and this is obviously geography-dependent, but those "dark periods" are fairly common for Germany, as in there are weeks-long periods where Germany itself produces basically no electricity from wind or solar. In the most extreme case some years back, that "dark period" lasted almost two months.
This isn't to say they can't import it from elsewhere, they just can't make any of their own. Adding more capacity wouldn't do anything, it would take an incredible amount of batteries to handle the more extreme end of those "dark periods".
But that's my point. It would cost 1 year's worth of German GDP in batteries to power Germany on batteries for 6 months. No one would ever need that much battery backup. And while it's a huge number, it's not an unfathomably huge number.
Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need (read up on Fraunhofer on the thinking: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... ) . But that infrastructure will sit there idle most of the time. That’s not driving down electricity prices. And you’ll still end up with higher carbon emissions than France.
> Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need
Paying for the plant but not having to pay for it to run most of the time is probably cheaper than having it running most of the time.
Maybe there's opportunities for net metering for customers with backup generators. At the right price per kWH, I would run my generator and feed into the grid... personally, my fuel cost is likely too high for that to make sense very often, but I think there's likely some hidden capacity there with the right incentives.
Germany will require 100-150 GW capacity which cost about 1000 EUR/kW and would require an investment of 100+B EUR.
Electricity prices already skyrocketed in Germany and no end in sight.
Listen: I invested in PV, in low energy houses, in heat pumps - but the PV/wind strategy doesn’t work the way people would like them to in their ideology and Germany has proven that.
I think I'm more or less agreeing with you. You've got to build the gas plants (or something), for the dark and windless days of winter, right? That's going to be expensive, but PV/wind won't solve it, so you have to build it.
Now that you've built those plants, would you rather pay to operate them year round, or only when needed?
PV/wind won't help you reduce capex for winter, but it should reduce opex on gas. And that's something.
Spending capex on interconnections may reduce the total dispatchable capacity needed; if it's done carefully. Having more time zones in one grid helps because peaks correspond with time of day; having more latitude helps because day lengths and cloud cover varies. Having more of both helps because still air tends to be geographically bounded. But long distance transmission is expensive.
I’d rather build nuclear plants and not keep them entirely idle but forego the investment into additional PV and wind. Don’t get me wrong: when the sun shines and the wind blows we cover 100% of our need essentially. That’s great. But we can stop now.
Because we produce too much on some days and put our grid at risk and we produce too little to often on others and put our grid at risk
Batteries are definitely an option for day -> night shifting. If not today, then soon, and without requiring and technological advances.
Seasonal or month-long periods of low-generation are another matter, and as-yet an unsolved problem. It may be that synthesizing fuels ends up being a sensible option here.
You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).
I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.
This is straight up misinformation. Nuclear power is not a peaker.
Gas is, batteries are. Nuclear power provides baseload and must be paired with a peaker too - almost always gas (France uses epic amounts of gas when its nuke plants are down for maintenance).
The reason why we have gas as a peaker instead of batteries? Gas is cheaper, and batteries dont get lavished with subsidies like nuclear power does.
>I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up
We look at real models based upon real data, for example:
I’m not saying “no gas”. I’ saying: no more PV or wind because we already stress our grid with too much electricity on some days and we have periods of days or week where we need to essentially generate 100% without any PV or wind.
Not all gas plants are made equally. There's a huge difference operation-wise between "able to scale at any moment from 0% to 100% within 15 minutes" and "can start going online within 30 days".
Most current plants are either designed to run basically all the time, or only run a couple of hours multiple times a day.
A renewable grid needs generation which is fully shut down for months, but can scale up to 100% within days when weather forecasts predict it'll be needed. The current plants might work as a stop-gap measure, but long-term we'll need to build something designed specifically for this application.
> You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
Which does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
Why waste money on horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power? Who looks at Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C and friends and draw the conclusion that they want some more?!?
> Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
The regime can just make it illegal to do rooftop solar or home batteries. In a functioning country this is easy enough to push through as a safety measure (lithium battery fires are legit scary, at least in videos). In the U.S. you can just start a campaign to get people fired for endangering their neighbors with dangerous woke energy, no legislation needed at all.
That report is from 2020. Costs have fallen greatly since then, particularly for battery storage. And even so, that report doesn't say fossil fuels are needed (although the "net zero" solution still is allowed to burn some, I'm guessing because CO2 absorbed into the oceans isn't being counted?) It even says explicitly that hydrogen would be used for long term storage! See pages 5 and 6.
With hydrogen available renewables can straightforwardly get to 100%. Germany has plenty of geology for hydrogen storage. As I mentioned elsewhere, long term thermal storage is also a possibility, with recent developments there suggesting very competitive capex.
France generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because France's nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
When people talk about countries having "energy independence", isn't moving to renewables the right move? (Since you reduce your demand for fuel inputs to 0, assuming a 100% transition)
Australia's reticence in embracing renewables has always seemed obviously corrupt to me given the abundant natural sunlight resources Australia is blessed with, combined with the 100% reliance on importing of oil-based fossil fuels.
Australia is self-sufficient in keeping the lights on, due to large coal reserves, but wouldn't be able to transport anything if petrol dried up (and I think Australia only has twelve days of petrol reserve storage). Just imagine the chaos... To the point I would think it would be a National Security priority to electrify transport and build whatever is needed to support that electrification.
There was a Turnbull era report that suggested they could have energy security AND water security, long term, by building 70 - 120 pumped hydro dams. Pumped Hydro would give them heaps of energy storage, and the dams could be tapped in severe droughts.
We got Snowy 2.0 out of that process, and a few state governments have some fast tracked private pumped hydro dams, but ultimately there isnt enough political spine in the whole country to tackle it.
We cant really scale renewables without storage, and battery storage at scale would probably suck up the worlds supply of lithium. The big battery in SA is great for market arbitration, and smoothing out the frequency, but if it was tapped to supply baseload, would not give you very long. The demand for these batteries would be huge if its left to them.
As it is we will move slowly in kinda the right direction, and probably get very lucky. Thats how Australia works usually, just a country of people gambling constantly on remaining relatively lucky.
We could do coal liquefaction if it came to it. But I'm unsure on how fast we could get it up and running, and how much fuel we could get. Might be just enough to allow for just enough transportation for food so no one starves.
For many countries, pure renewables plus batteries only works with an international grid. In a different thread here, Germany was coming up quite a bit during the dunkelflaute, and the only way to go pure renewable is to import energy from, say, Morocco.
It does achieve potential independence from current adversaries, but only by introducing dependence on other nations instead.
Countries like the US have it a little better independence-wise, except we need (a) significant buildouts of batteries that don't rely on rare earths, because we can't mine them here for environmental reasons, and (b) massive buildouts of solar panels in regions across the country.
The upper midwest has something similar to Germany's dunkelflaute- it gets cold enough windmills may even be net negative to keep their turbines ice free, and we can go weeks under total cloud coverage.
Supporting all of that is possible, but requires overbuilding the grid to such an extent that the carbon cost of the cement and metals added to the grid would extend the payoff period quite a bit. It's definitely not a free lunch, though probably better to start now than hope for miracle cold fusion or something equally silly.
Isn't there a sweet spot where solar is too much of your energy mix -- due to its intermittency? I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )
If you're in the Atacama Desert, I doubt it's 40%, but not really relevant.
This is ALL renewables, not just Solar - the article states that Solar is ~20% now in the EU.
Wind typically counts for ~15%, and Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.
So most places can pretty easily get to ~40% solar, ~15% wind, ~15% hydro = ~70% renewable.
Throw in ~20% Nuclear (basically all of Europe before Germany sh*t the bed), and you're at ~90% - with limited need for storage - a large portion of which could come from infra that already exists for pumped hydro and regular overnight solar storage.
We're quite a ways away from diminishing returns.
We're ~8 years away from a global ~40% of electricity coming from solar EVEN IF it continues to grow at ~30% YoY.
You mean low water levels? Isn’t it caused by agriculture water use? A dam allows to use more water (for agriculture) but one can choose not to use more.
>I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
You can get pretty high before the economics get sketchy. Below analysis concluded that for many sunny places that point is in the 90%+. Most of EU will be lower than said sunny places, but point is it's not 40%. And the sprinkling of wind, nuclear, geo, hydro means there is a fair bit of room to still push.
Plus both solar and storage tech is still moving rapidly
I don't know of any specific thresholds, but it's worth mentioning that 54% of Q2 was renewable, and solar peaks in Q2. Solar was also only 36.8% of that renewable generation (just under 20% of Q2's total), so there's a long way to go before solar is 40% of the total energy mix.
If there is an important threshold when solar reaches 40% of the full year's production, then solar will need to almost quadruple before that's a concern. For all of 2024, solar was 22.4% of renewables, and renewables were 47% of the total[1], meaning that solar was 10.5% of total electricity over the full year.
The issue is not sorely about negative price. It’s about keeping base capacity profitable so the grid doesn’t collapse.
The energy strategy of the EU was hopeless for a long time and is only marginally better now. It’s not as braindead as the monetary union but close. Germany was actively sabotaging France for a long time while having to restart coal power plants and investing in gas fuelled capacity.
Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left.
I’m French. Unless something major changes, I hope we will be out before the UK comes back. I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.
I’m not too surprised about my original comment being downvoted while being entirely factually true. It was a bit much from me to expect people to understand the underside of running too much intermittent energy sources and how this is currently dealt with (the braindead part). I invite the champions of solar to explain to me the current plan of the EU for actually running the whole grid past 2050 while phasing out the coal and gas (hint: there is none).
Anyway I invite everyone to take a look at what the EU used to do nuclear, how it was purposefully omitted from the definition of clean energy for years, how they used to fine France despite its energy being clean, how it forces the French energy operator to sell at a loss, how it impedes France properly managing its dams and then look at who actually pushed for these policies while buying Russian gas and burning coal. The whole thing is a complete joke. At least they apparently saw the light on nuclear. That’s a start.
Different situation. France has only itself to blame for the current situation and has plenty of things it can still do to avoid a crisis. Plus the debt holders are very diversified.
The Greek crisis is very different because the debt was mostly held by German banks - the German did to do something of all these excess savings and the Greek economy suffered a lot from the euro. Reforms were needed but the way the whole thing was handled is a disgrace.
Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.
That’s a risky bet but I personally prefer that to the current situation. I would honestly be ok with staying in the union if we could exit the euro while staying but I don’t think it’s possible.
It’s me being dramatic for useless flair. I edited it out a minute after posting because it adds nothing to the discussion but you read it before I did.
It’s a monetary union with no common fiscal policies and no mechanism to correct disparity between members. Complete train wreck since it has been put in place.
Germany has been abusing it from the start running huge trade surplus, compressing salaries, using its excess savings to buy foreign debts instead of investing and being shielded from monetary appreciation by the consumption and investments of other countries. The euro is basically Germany robbing blind the other members while pretending to be virtuous and blocking most of what could have improved the situation.
> and no mechanism to correct disparity between members
AFAIK, they created some mechanisms after the 2008 crisis. Every country there now effectively prints money in differing rates, and the EU only regulates some limits.
During winter, France uses ~50% more electricity per day than during summer.
And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
If you don't have month-long battery storage, in order to be fully solar based France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer.
> And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
This doesn't matter. If you look at the monthly stats, solar panels in France produce ~3x more in the summer than the winter at a month by month view. As such, you only need 3x extra overall, and some day to day storage.
Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology. Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) or long term thermal storage.
> Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology
I've heard this before but can you explain why? A cursory web search tells me batteries hold charge pretty well for 6 months. And the new sodium batteries from CATL are certainly cheap enough.
For long term storage, capex is king, not round trip efficiency. The capex of batteries ($ per kWh of storage) is much too high. There aren't enough charge/discharge cycles to amortize that capex. This is unlike with diurnal storage, where there are many thousands of cycles over which to spread that cost.
not really. At this point, solar is basically free, and having extra free energy has all sorts of benefits. For the EU, in particular, it greatly reduces their dependence on Russian oil and gas. if all you do with extra solar is replace 2 extra hours a day of natural gas consumption, you effectively make yourself have 12% more storage, which decreases Russian leverage.
in EU: gas, oil is still 60% of usage. You are not going to heat you home during winter with electricity anytime soon, same like we are not all gonna drive electric cars this decade.
Heat pumps account for 2/3 of new heating installations in Germany [1].
Modern buildings with effective insulation seem to make them quite viable, but that hinges on the availability of attractive electricity prices.
The second factor is that carbon-based fuels may become more expensive over time, so perhaps electricity costs “just” needs to remain stable to become attractive.
I'm sorry but this thread does not talk about using PV to heat your home in the winter. But it is absolutely possible to use electricity to heat homes, it's widely used in northern countries. And the nice thing about electricity is that it can be generated in one place and used in another.
This thread is talking about reduction of dependence on oil&gas supplied by various nefarious regimes, though. Still quite a challenge in the winter, with barely any sun out there.
"it can be generated in one place and used in another."
It can, but we are far from having such a robust grid all across the continent. I am not even sure if we are getting closer. Both economic and political aspects come into play, which might be harder to address than the purely technical ones.
For example, France really does not want cheap Spanish solar energy to flood the French market, hence the inadequate connection over the Pyrenees.
Everyone knows that, including the European Commission, but France is one of the two really big continental players who can do anything they want and cannot be effectively punished. The "everyone is equal, but some are more equal" principle.
If you mean getting rid of oil and gas on a short scale, there won't be majority for that. By 2040 or 2050 maybe, with some significant exceptions (I don't believe in large electric jets; small aircraft maybe).
Solar and wind are extremely reliable, because they are distributed. Unlike large-scalec fossil or nuclear, a single plant going offline isn't a big deal.
Solar and wind are quite predictable - it's just weather forecasting. We have a pretty good idea what it is going to produce 7 days from now - we just can't control it.
Solar and wind can provide rotational mass. Existing installations just aren't engineered for it, because grid following makes more sense in a fossil-heavy grid. If extra inertia is needed, batteries are the perfect source for it, as it can instantly scale from -100 to +100 to soak up excess or fill in shortages. Or we can just install a bunch of flywheels, no big deal.
Yes, its because it is still short of %100 renewables and EU is importing its fossil fuels. When Russia invaded Ukraine it caused a spike in prices, now its coming down. Prices will go down as renewables proliferate, probably we will pay some fixed amount as equipment maintenance fee once its %100.
Our electricity was a lot cheaper when we had more nuclear.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that dismantling functional nuclear power plants, like they did in Germany and Sweden, has been detrimental for Europe.
Now the same people who were opposing nuclear are saying we should pursue wind and solar. Give me a break.
It's just Germany that shut down a few reactors, their internal politics and has nothing to do with EU or people who want renewables due to climate, ecology or political reasons.
Probably more to do with taxes etc. Better would be to look at cost of production and not cost to consumer with taxes and fees. Then you arent comparing the production but rather different models of socity
Only when it’s dark, overcast, winter or really cold. Otherwise it’s mainly due to the extreme overcapacity required to handle distributed unreliable energy sources as well as an increasing fleet of electric cars, stressing every last kilometer of the grid.
And windmills, a reliance on methane gas as gap-filling and a few other issues.
(Sorry, I know snarking is frowned upon on HN - but we choose this collective delusion over the hellish, yet stable, Cherenkov light of nuclear)
How will you make the electricity cheaper when nuclear power requires above 20 cents/kWh excluding transmission costs and everything else to get built in 2025?
You also do know that said nuclear plants won't deliver a new kWh to the grid until the 2040s?
Fucking Germany though with insistence on coal, Russian gas and no nuclear. I'm so suck of literally paying for their mistakes. I wish we could just disconnect them from our grid until they take some responsibility. Also stop dragging your feet sending weapons to Ukraine.
It's because of stupid tribalism and hysterical non-thinking. When I was there 10 years ago it was really common to see the 'Atomkraft? - Nein Danke' stickers in public places. I guess when the position is held by a majority, that created an environment where people, especially policy makers, did not want to challenge it for they'll get excluded for wrong-think.
It is only changing because an even stronger fear (Putin) took hold.
without going full conspiracy, how much of the AI hype is driven by entities highly invested in the emerging surplus power from gas and coal, or who think they can make bank on a small nuke SMR play if they get the correct contracts with a Datacenter?
If we stopped doing insane things with GPUs then what's left is a viable business with CDNs and cloud computing for purposeful activity.
Burning coal 24/7 to make dali-m images is silly. But, if I was long on SMR I would totally play up how much power they need and if need be, co-fund the GPU farm to buy my power.
Is that not just the electricity version of the GPU maker taking a position in the AI sector as long as the money comes back to buy GPU (which btw, just happened bigly)
Literally the first sentence: More than half of the European Union’s (EU) electricity came from renewables in the second quarter of 2025, and solar is leading from the front.
I really hate this kind of article. Because they do twist numbers to serve a narrative (on renewable energy) instead of showing the complete picture fairly.
> June 2025 was a milestone month: Solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time ever.
Yes June was a record for Solar power production due to an amazing weather....
But it was a pure disaster for Solar power profitability with an all time low.
The peak was too large for the grid to consume and the price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours.
That should bring serious questions on the ROI of any future investment in solar capacity and about Europe electricity storage capacity.
> Some countries are already nearly 100% renewable. Denmark led with an impressive 94.7% share of renewables in net electricity generated
This is also miss-leading. Production does not mean Consumption.
Denmark is very far from 94% consumption based on renewable. It rely heavily on import from German grid (Coal and Gaz powered) almost every night and this is a disaster in term of CO2 emission.
That leads to emissions over ~140CO2g/kwh in average, meaning way over what other Scandinavians countries are able to do (e.g Sweden < 15gCO2/kwh)
> In total, 15 EU countries saw their share of renewable generation rise year-over-year.
Yes but that does not mean CO2 emissions are falling (which should be the only thing that matter).
Belgium is closing perfectly working nuclear powerplants recently that are providing around 30% of the country consumption.
Meaning the country CO2 emission are expected to increase significantly this year due to that and this is just plain stupid.
Spain might follow a similar track and this is disastrous.
- Renewable are good but what Europe need is massive investment in energy storage through battery and/or pump hydro. And this is nowhere here. Blind praise in solar capacity is counterproductive.
- If we do not carefully control our current capacity of non-controllable renewable in Europe, we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come. And this is the taxpayer will have to sponge all this mess financially speaking.
- What matters is CO2 emission and CO2 reduction, not renewable capacity. This kind of article favors wrong political decisions by putting first and foremost renewable capacity as the only metric that matters. The Belgian nuclear situation is one of these terrible decisions.
To provide some numbers on the storage side of things. On European battery storage [1]:
* 2024 - 21.9 GWh installed.
* 2025 - 29.7 GWh predicted to be installed.
* 2029 - Between 66.6 GWh and 183 GWh to be installed for 2029. Total capacity estimated to be 400 GWh.
The UK also recently received applications for 52.6 GW of storage Long Duration Energy Storage cap and floor scheme [2]. LDES in this context is classed as 8hrs or greater. Seasonal storage is not included.
I don't know if this sufficiently plugs the gaps, but it does show a large increase in installed battery storage, which appears to be accelerating.
Solar capacity is over 400GW now in Europe and projected to be over 700GW in Europe in 2028.
So, considering that. The battery storage estimate you give is still one order of magnitude under of what would be needed. Even considering the optimistic numbers.
Apologies, the 2029 figure was the annual install amount. Total estimated installed amount is 400 GWh. Solar Power Europe says "780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition".
From the page[1]:
> By 2029, the report anticipates a sixfold increase to nearly 120 GWh, driving total capacity to 400 GWh (EU-27: 334 GWh). However, this remains far below the levels required to meet flexibility needs in a renewable-driven energy system. According to our Mission Solar 2040 study, EU-27 BESS capacity must reach 780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition.
This is also only up to 2029. Battery prices are dropping and the amount of batteries being manufactured is increasing, so I don't agree the continued installation of solar is a big problem.
> Apologies, the 2029 figure was the annual install amount. Total estimated installed amount is 400 GWh. Solar Power Europe says "780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition".
It is still nowhere enough. It is barely the capacity to support few hours of consumption of the European grid.
Most of the solar production will go wasted.
That means that the price of the solar production will tank and go negative during most of the spring-summer period.
And that is terrible as far as ROI on the production systems are concerned.
> It is still nowhere enough. It is barely the capacity to support few hours of consumption of the European grid.
You just need to move the excess to times of high demand.
> Most of the solar production will go wasted.
Germany saw renewable curtailments (including wind) of 3.5% in 2024. I can only find reports it will reach 10% by 2030 in Germany and 10% in the EU. I would define "Most" as 50%+.
> That means that the price of the solar production will tank and go negative during most of the spring-summer period. And that is terrible as far as ROI on the production systems are concerned.
This depends on the market. The UK guarantees a price for renewables that have a Contract for Difference (CfD), so they're unaffected. I don't know much about the other European markets, so this might happen.
Any developer will account for this though, so money will flow out of renewables and into storage if there are serious issues around over capacity - unless you have schemes like the UK's CfD.
Finally, I disagree with your prediction
> we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come
You have plenty of price signals in energy markets so I can't see a scenario where there's a complete misallocation of resources into renewablews and not storage. In addition investment predictions for renewables and storage are healthy and not of an industry in distress.
> price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours
Sounds like a great investment opportunity for storage providers?
Isn't this how it's going to work itself out just due to pure economics? Solar panels become so cheap to build and install that people keep doing it just to eke out more power during the more expensive duck curve hours/cloudy days. This causes even more overproduction during the daylight hours, which makes storage more attractive to build
My understanding is that most new solar being built today is being paired with batteries for this reason. Then they can sell the energy at night when the price is better.
Add to that cost of electricity routinely rising in EU. The practice shows that with the current technology intermittent renewable generation above a certain threshold in the total generation mix results in a sharply higher cost of electricity for consumers when accounted for all additional expenses (storage, more robust grids, "smart" grid controls, etc.). And we got this with massive EU subsidies on top of dirt cheap solar panels subsidized by the Chinese government.
TBH your first phrase is how every bad comment starts so I can understand reflex downvotes, BUT, your actual content after that is fantastic, and it took me a while to mentally go to "oh wait they make sense here"
Yeah, and you can even consider yourself lucky if it's just downvotes, sometimes your messages just get flagged, like when I called renewables being a major reason for the Iberian blackout with citations from the official report.
OK and did they increase not renewables by 54%? You can't really increase overall capacity from solar, wind etc. Look at what happened in Portugal when it gets cloudy.
The growth is still slow compared to China and the evolution of the international order though. Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
I love exploring these graphs: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
EU is doing just slightly better than US. US has the advantage of its fossil fuels but it's actually China that is doing the revolution. They are accelerating and at some point not too far away will reach abundance and switch off all the fossils.
It's unwise that the new US administration be pushing for the opposite of China. But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.
How much of total transportation is trains?
China is probably doing it for geo-political purposes (ie: if there is no oil, I can still move people with trains). They are ready to take a financial hit for that safety net. Europe is in a similar predicament but even the Russian war didn’t seem to teach them a lesson?
Not great. 7.0% of person-kilometers travelled.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
That's in the EU, though. China?
>Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable
Claims like this would need to be quantified further in order to make any real predictions, but I think these sorts of predictions about future electrification may turn out to be shockingly wrong.
For example, many predict we have or will soon hit peak oil. Whereas I would wager it will continue to grow. You didn't mention global oil production, but I want to get specific. 50 years from now I think global oil production will be higher than it is today.
There is a strong desire by many for oil production to decrease and to electrify, but the incentive structure just isnt there. It's too cheap and useful and the energy demand is effectively unlimited. Im not even saying we shouldnt move away from it. Just that we wont.
Europe hit its peak oil some time ago and the peak wasn't that high. Anyway, electricity is inherently more efficient and less problematic than the chemical alternatives. I guess you can bet on chemical energy if you have plenty of it. Its just that electricity is superior in every way.
Also fossil reserves have other uses too, I also don't expect oil production going to 0 anytime soon.
Yeah that's why you have to use GLOBAL oil numbers. They increased imports of oil when the production went down.
Global oil numbers went horribly wrong when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prices multiplied and EU was left paying for an invasive force because it was still not %100 renewable. Considering the damage done by the oil supplier war machine, fossils are just outrageously expensive. Biggest mistake ever was to rely on fossils.
I dont understand what you are saying with this comment. They were importing before the war now they are still importing. That just shows how durable the demand is for oil.
Its not durable demand for oil, its a demand for energy and shows how bad idea is to rely on suppliers you don't control. Build enough renewable energy infrastructure and the demand for oil goes away.
Conventional oil peaked around 2008. Shale oil (and others that need fracking)'s peak should be somewhere between 2019 and now IIRC
It's not that there's is less and less oil, it's just that harder and harder to get it
Energy demand is unlimited, but oil isn't cheap anymore. Synfuel will eventually replace petroleum as PV gets cheaper, but also an engine to convert oil into electricity (or, almost equivalently, mechanical work) is too expensive to compete with PV when you have grid access.
I wouldn't bet against your 50 year prediction but that's because there will always be more infrastructure to extract oil, even as the oil left to extract dwindles. My own prediction is that rates of oil extraction will continue to increase with minor fluctuations until about 2160 and then fail off a cliff.
Oil isn't a binary for energy though. There's a growing need for it in other industries, from plastics to pharma to fertilizers. Moreover, oil production is currently staying high because the OPEC cartel can't simply afford to shut down well production - only scale it down very gradually and pray that no one finds out (which is impossible given that oil is sold on the spot market). On the other hand, American Big Oil is dependent on global prices - too low and drilling deep or fracking becomes infeasible for them, while high prices mean economic slowdown (due to domino effects on other industries) until OPEC bandies together to stabilize prices to reasonable levels (which is $65-75 per barrel).
Currently we're in a situation where OPEC, remembering 2014 and hell bent on diversification, is offloading record quantities of crude into the market, to ensure that American production stays infeasible.
Anything that needs oil can be produced from coal. There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.
The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue.
In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
So many wrong points here. The coal to liquid (CTL) process looks good on paper up until it isn't. Like you mentioned, it requires a lot of energy, energy which most countries cannot afford to divert. There's no point in using nuclear or renewables for CTL when SABIC can simply undercut you on price by 10x or more.
> There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.
Oil is currently at 61-65 USD per barrel, with OPEC ensuring it stays that way because even they know it's only going to fall from there. Even the 61-65 USD price point leaves a bad taste in their mouths.
> In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
No, with renewables and storage offering cheap electricity, oil also gets cheaper!
In fact, I'd argue that CTL is something only countries with extremely abundant domestic reserves of coal can do - China, South Africa and Australia. In fact, nearly every planned CTL plant has been delayed or scrapped in the US as infeasible.
Why would you extract those things from coal, when right now there's plenty of oil?
Coal is enormously more abundant.
Yet more costly and injurious to extract.
That's highly variable - a significantly large volume of coal mined globally is via bucket-wheel excavators / mobile strip mining machines.
That's overburden removal followed by near surface bed extraction with machines - no underground mining, underground being the mining domain that sees high injury and death rates.
Regardless, fuel from oil or fuel from coal is still fuel from dead and buried organics, from resurfaced long buried carbon products, and still introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere which is counter productive toward any goal of reducing the insulation factor of the atmosphere.
Long term if people would really like to do something with CO2 emissions then CO2 captured from atmosphere can be used for chemical processes instead of coal/oil.
Got a link to a Technical Economical Feasibility Report on this?
As in, what can practically be achieved in the real world at large within the next 25 years that can be immediately funded with a forward capital loan to break ground on a plant within 12 to 18 months and start operating within five years?
How does actual atmospheric carbon capture scale out within a useful time frame?
Yes, hence more demand for oil
less d3mand for oil, more demand for energy, much more to the point is the endless potential of abundent solar energy and the comming crisis caused by the end of scarcity your grandkids will dealing meems of archiologists finding fossil fossil fuel cars
Trumpism is clearly spreading… The reason China solar is booming is because of structural incentives. Solar is “dirt cheap” compared to oil/gas. That’s why Africa is importing records of it and breaking that record every next year. It’s not because it’s eco-friendly (people in Africa or Pakistan don’t know what that means), it’s because it’s more affordable.
In Tunisia, the pay-off time for a solar installation is around 4-5 years (granted we still have net-metering, so free storage). You are either ignorant or too poor to not install solar.
However, electrical solutions are often more efficient, so this can be misleading because a transition means you're getting a large amount "for free" as a result of the improved efficiency.
Instead of moving your car from oil to solar, you're moving the car from oil to electricity, and then electricity is fungible so you don't care that it was made with a solar array - but the efficiency win was from going to electricity.
You have to distinguish between transportation (electricity and oil) and source of energy (only oil).
To have electricity you would need to invest at once in both generation, transport (the grids are not enough), storage and change in use (replace cars with electric ones). Your return will depend as well on the technology developed and none of the above fields is stable yet.
I am a fan of going electric, even if only for more sovereignty, but it is not as simple as "electricity is more efficient".
You have to be especially careful when comparing oil/gasoline vs solar/electric through. Oil has an especially well developed infrastructure for it being drilled, refined, delivered and stored. Electricity on the scale to power all transportation does not, so there are large short-term costs.
In terms of effeciency, you don't replace a billion BTU's of oil with the same amount of electricity, what you want is locomation. Only about 25% of oil's energy ends up spinning the wheels, compared to 85% of energy using an electric powertrain.
In rich countries the electrical grid only needs to roughly double to power all transportation. The US did that in the 01960s, and China did it in the 02010s and probably will have done it again this decade.
The grids is minimally impacted by EV’s. A great deal of charging happens at night when there’s vast excess capacity in generation and transmission. Even if you assume it’s split 24/7 each car only uses roughly 500 watts averaged throughout a year.
More importantly if 100% of new cars went electric it’d still take 25 years to finish so it’s a rounding error to grid operators outside of a trivial number of substations for fast chargers. As crazy as it sounds when you include training LLM’s are using more electricity than every EV combined.
Electricity is already beating oil for lots of low temperature applications (e.g. home heating and cooling) because heat pumps are so much more efficient than burning fuel.
That chart is misleading in the other direction, it’s comparing energy released by burning fossil fuels not useful work preformed.
A solar powered EV goes a lot further per unit energy working with electricity than per unit energy of gasoline. Heat pumps are vastly efficient using electricity than even the most efficient natural gas furnace. It’s actually more efficient to use natural gas to make electricity to then use a heat pump than it is to run natural gas to people’s homes.
So 20% from renewbles, 10% from nuclear, and roughly 25% from fossil fuels and 45% lost as waste heat when using fossil fuels.
So we're more than half way there.
.... and is that the maximum percentage of renewables 54% ? what is the minimum daily percentage? There should be a measure what is the maximum percentage over a month? to see how renewable system handles outages of renewables ( ie no solor or wind ? and storage is the sole supply? How long can storage supply the needed power is the next question ? The needed storage and transmission changes are hard and expensive.
Yes, because you can't just increase capacity with solar. It has to be backed up by base power. Add 10% solar? OK now you need 10% from natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc. You need to add both solar and something durable then you can just use the solar until you cant.
Look what happened in Portugal when it got cloudy.
This comment is always so strange to me - do you really, seriously believe that the people setting up the grids never thought about dunkelflaute? And I don't mean that in an attacking way, I'm genuinely curious about your thoughts there.
Like, yes, we're aware. At least in the german south we have the opposite problem right now. We are getting negative electricity prices (you get paid for taking some) more often because we have more electricity than we can use due to solar, at least during the day. Proper power storage is being built at this very moment all over the country.
Aside from dunkelflaute, the wind is statistically stronger when solar power generation is low, so at night and when it's super cloudy. And dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year. (german perspective, don't know enough about the other countries' grids)
Regarding that problem in portugal, you misunderstood something there. The big 2025 power outage wasn't caused by clouds, it was an combination of localized blackouts and a sudden power _surge_ which caused a cascading failure which couldn't be stabilized by the conventional power plants even though on paper they had the capacity. How did you get the idea it had anything to do with "cloudy" weather?
RE "... dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year..." My guess is its VERY expensive to build the needed storage so the supply reliability matches the current reliability 99.99%? ? ( in my area there has never been any unintended power outages for several years ) Which is why its never been done? Then again maybe people will be more tolerant of the situation. I've always though smart meters could always have a "mode" to reduce everyone's max demand to a small amount ...like a few hundred watts ...too help handle extended periods of dunkelflaute
People setting up the grids answer to politicians. They do what they can within the constraints given by public policy. If public policy is completely idiotic, like the one in germany, there's no much they can do other than try to duct tape whatever they can.
Electricity demand is elastic, and electricity is dynamically priced. Plenty of industries are able and willing to reduce their consumption to avoid paying 100x more than usual, or even get paid to reduce their consumption.
A data center with backup generators can easily switch from grid power to generator power. If you're installing those generators for redundancy reasons anyway, why not make some extra bucks by signing a first-load-to-shed contract with the power company?
> Electricity demand is elastic,
This is complete bullshit for the vast majority of industrial use cases.
Yes, but not for the vast majority of industrial energy consumption, because of the outsized consumption of electric arc furnaces and a few other things like that.
Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU
From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy.
Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.
That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.
Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing
The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost.
It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.
Then you store that energy or find a way to use it. Melt ore when its abundant, then make metal when it is abundant, then dig holes when it is abundant, then use the metal to turn the hole into a reservoir when it is abundant and eventually use the reservoir to pump in and out water as a way to store the abundant energy for use when its not.
We’re working on it!
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/09/10/new-alliance-aims-to-unl...
All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.
Not saying we should continue using fossil fuels forever, but being unrealistic about how hard the transition to intermittent renewables will be isn't sensible
Having more generation capacity also makes renewables less intermittent though, becuase for example with enough solar capacity then even on a cloudy day they may produce enough energy to cover demand.
It doesn't solve the problem completely, but it surely helps.
> All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.
There’s quite a bit of complexity leading to the “simply storing in a tank” step.
On the other hand, the additional solar capacity during overcast days might still be worth the additional investment.
Electricity might become free on sunny days, but you'll still have to pay serious money for it during cloudy windless days. Even a solar panel operating at 10% capacity becomes worth the effort.
It's a little easier to read if you translate different types of production to CO2 per kWh:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.
Using more energy is not itself "wasteful". For example, the US spends a bunch of extra energy on air conditioning, and as a result less older people die of heat deaths in the summer compared to Europe (and of course the population at large is generally more comfortable).
> But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If I find myself finding obvious "errors" in other people's plans and easy solutions they "just" have to implement then I'm usually missing something.
Europe's strategy to tie themselves economically to Russia for the purpose of peace didn't work out but a lot of the infrastructure and energy investments were made when that was the strategy. The other thing is that you're talking about electricity, fossil fuels have thousands of uses so you can't "drop everything".
Europe didn't tie themselves to Russian fossil fuels for the purpose of peace. They bought the cheapest energy available to them, and this was the basis of their economy. You can't just compete with oil and gas coming out of a pipeline, regardless what a computer programmer may believe about energy policy and electrical grids.
You must have some other sources than that site. Downloaded the CSV, and at the risk of misinterpreting the columns here is some simple filtering:
% of total energy generation
Largest generation source This ofc only says something about generation and not consumptionOne of the biggest thing a lot of people are missing is that from this year Solar + battery became cheaper than coal in China. And avg annual price decline for solar and battery is still around 8-10% ie if you don't go to solar and electric machinery you will not be able to compete with China as they are about to reach the point in the next 10 year where electricity/energy is practically free.
It is weird to me that nobody wants to import Chinese electric cars. If Chinese investors and politicians are really subsidizing the production of electric cars, importing them would be basically having the new grid subsidized by a foreign government!
The usual argument is that this kills the domestic car industry, leaving us fully dependant on Chinese cars: what's going to happen when they hike their prices by 1000%, or threaten to stop all exports?
Then at least all the rare earths inside the cars we've already imported are inside or borders ;-)
Pretty sure it's because a domestic auto industry is considered strategically important to maintain in case of war. Also, the supply chain employs a lot of people and maintains industrially important skills.
CH? I don't think Switzerland is majority coal. Maybe you meant ZH or CN?
But EU + US's total power generation only added up to 70% of CN's total in 2024 according to this graph.
Look at the absolute values, your kettle doesn't run of fractions it runs on absolute power and EU&US are about the same. USA has fractionally lower renewables because they have very large fossil production. EU is making up for its lack of fossils through high efficiency policies.
I'm also loving projects like these [1] popping up all over the place. Looks like they are installing Tesla Megapacks with LFP cells. [2]
[1] https://vcrenewables.com/medway-grid-energy-storage-system/
[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-greenli...
> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
They might've just started the war 4 years earlier, then.
In 2014 Russia decided to attack Ukraine because its political ambitions had been thwarted.
A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine.
Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010.
Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.
There were not much disruption though, EU has payed Russia over €214 billions since the start of the war
Europe has plenty of coal that can be used as a good backup for renewable energy production.
Ugh, can we stop with the negativity every time anything environmental or energy related comes up.
Regardless of how fast anything was progressing there will always be someone saying NOT FAST ENOUGH, you're not adding anything here.
If you're not the fastest, it means that you're not doing good enough.
[dead]
If they hadn't shut down most nuclear reactors, some even after the war had already started, this wouldn't have happened.
EU did not shut down most of their reactors, Germany shut down a few.
Fair enough, Germany isn't all of Europe, though of course it's part of it. Still, Germany, which completed its nuclear phase-out by permanently closing its last three reactors in by 2023 even while energy prices were sky-high. I know this firsthand as I was living there, and our energy bill jumped from around 100 to 250. Belgium followed a similar path, shutting down one reactor in September 2022 and another in February 2025.
I heard a few years ago that China was building up to two new coal power plants every week causing huge amounts of pollution. Looks like they still do. Yes they scale up renewable energy but what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate. At least with the EU and the US you can see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.
> what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate
It doesn't scale at the same rate though. Renewables are accelerating which means in China especially you see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.
The fossil thing about China is kind of understandable because don't forget that pretty much everything we all consume is made in China.
They were building new coal plants that were far more efficient, while also closing down extremely old inefficient and dirty coal plants. So overall it was a net gain.
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If this is not happening without government's help then it's not profitable. Which means a forced transition to solar requires to "drop everything" quite literally.
AFAIK its more complex than that. It requires high capEx at first, it needs the grid to match it and affects previous investments. The solar got cheap fast, wind didn't as much but it has its own advantages like it works when solar doesn't etc. A lot of government coordination is needed to work.
The governments can be very effective with that through providing long term visibility and reducing the risks.
You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining.
There is an interesting in-depth analysis by Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... (see page 25, for example).
Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
PS: I built a low-energy house, heat it with a heat pump, and have PV on my roof.
The problem is that nuclear had a fixed cost per year, not per unit produced. A reactor sitting idle costs about the same as a reactor running at 100% capacity.
This makes them fundamentally flawed as backup generation. Nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity when operating at full capacity, having it run only 5% of the time makes it completely unaffordable as it'll cost 20x as much.
When used traditionally, nuclear costs about $175/MWh. Solar and wind costs about $50/MWh. Use nuclear as backup and it'll cost $3500/MWh. Orrr, you've suddenly got a $3450/MWh budget to spend on storage for renewable energy...
There is another under discussed alternative UHV power transmission, e.g. south to north: Morocco has great conditions for solar. Or East to West, the sun rises and sets at different times.
We still need more storage and generation, but a better grid would help a lot.
No need to obsess with solar if it doesn't work for you, its just that solar is so good. It uses manufactured devices that you just point to the sky and makes your machine run. For stability of course you need something like nuclear or storage.
Industrialized countries generally need stability when it comes to electricity. People also want to watch TV whenever they like and take a hot shower whenever they feel like it.
Some things need reliable, dispatchable, energy. But a lot of demand could (and probably should) be shifted to when energy is abundant.
In an industrialized country like Germany - not really. You’d be surprised how little day/night affect our electricity consumption…
The hot shower thing is an interesting example, since the tanked ones generally have a lot of flexibility in when they heat the water.
Storage helps even out spikes.
In Germany: probably not so much when wind and PV aren’t busy for a month straight and we still need to keep our industry up and running.
We’ll, I’ll take that back - we probably solved all that by running our economy into the ground
Pursuing an industrial strategy predicated on eternal cheap Russian gas (a strategy no doubt encouraged by Russian influence post-GDR) left Germany vulnerable to this situation. It is indeed admirable that they are willing to give it up now for principals, unlike Orban and Hungary.
Yeah, well, it was also very much “get rid of nuclear” that accelerated this path.
> In Germany: probably not so much when wind and PV aren’t busy for a month straight and we still need to keep our industry up and running.
Please do go ahead and show some data on when we had a month long solar eclipse without wind.
https://www.tech-for-future.de/dunkelflaute/
A couple of weeks happen from time to time
Yes that's what nuclear and storage helps with
If solar or wind are cheaper than the fuel for gas plants you can save money by deploying them.
Here a blog with an interactive website to explore that:
https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...
> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.
You factored in a new grid and backup nuclear plants/gas power plants requiring >100B investments in Germany or Tesla Megapacks in excess of 100 metric tons? Take a look at what is needed to make Germany “green” by a reputable and independent institute: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.
What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight? I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.
> And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day
You can't generate excess electricity because you don't have enough land or rooftop (I mean maybe you do, I'm talking about the typical homeowner). Utilities can overbuild panels because they're extremely cheap.
LFP batteries have a self-discharge rate of 2-5% per month. Once they're cheap enough, over-building batteries to move summer sunshine into the winter months also becomes an option*. At $100/kwh, you could power Sweden 6 months a year for about $60bn (EDIT: $6tn, sorry) in batteries (yes labor and everything else will probably double that cost). And that doesn't even account for recent advances in sodium batteries, which reportedly bring that price down to $20/kwh
* (Any battery experts know why this might be wrong? I'm using basic arithmetic, not physics. That tells me a battery charged to 100% in July or August will still have > 70% charge left in December)
Germany would require a ballpark of 100 MILLION tons of Teslas Megapack grade batteries to run on battery for 2 weeks - which is even shorter than what we had to endure due to “Dunkelflauten”.
Why would Germany need to run solely on battery for 2 weeks? Do you expect 2 weeks with 0 sun and wind all over continental Europe?
In any case, at $100/kwh, it would cost $250bn (EDIT: $25tn sorry) in batteries and maybe the same in installation costs to power Germany for 6 months a year. At the lower $20/kwh price tag it would be more like $5tn, compared to Germany's ~$4.5tn GDP. Over 10 years it could be done.
(And 6 months' storage is maybe too much anyway)
Because historically we had periods of a couple of days or weeks in a row where wind and solar were essentially non-existent:
https://www.tech-for-future.de/dunkelflaute/
I mean not the whole Europe and this is obviously geography-dependent, but those "dark periods" are fairly common for Germany, as in there are weeks-long periods where Germany itself produces basically no electricity from wind or solar. In the most extreme case some years back, that "dark period" lasted almost two months.
This isn't to say they can't import it from elsewhere, they just can't make any of their own. Adding more capacity wouldn't do anything, it would take an incredible amount of batteries to handle the more extreme end of those "dark periods".
But that's my point. It would cost 1 year's worth of German GDP in batteries to power Germany on batteries for 6 months. No one would ever need that much battery backup. And while it's a huge number, it's not an unfathomably huge number.
So, just jack up the debt from 60% of GDP to 160% for battery packs?
Yes, we had these scenarios of 2+ weeks w/o sufficient renewable energy source MULTIPLE times: Google “Dunkelflaute”.
Gas? Which you then only use 5-10% of the time.
At least that's what I hear people saying.
Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need (read up on Fraunhofer on the thinking: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... ) . But that infrastructure will sit there idle most of the time. That’s not driving down electricity prices. And you’ll still end up with higher carbon emissions than France.
> Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need
Paying for the plant but not having to pay for it to run most of the time is probably cheaper than having it running most of the time.
Maybe there's opportunities for net metering for customers with backup generators. At the right price per kWH, I would run my generator and feed into the grid... personally, my fuel cost is likely too high for that to make sense very often, but I think there's likely some hidden capacity there with the right incentives.
Take a look at this study: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Germany will require 100-150 GW capacity which cost about 1000 EUR/kW and would require an investment of 100+B EUR.
Electricity prices already skyrocketed in Germany and no end in sight.
Listen: I invested in PV, in low energy houses, in heat pumps - but the PV/wind strategy doesn’t work the way people would like them to in their ideology and Germany has proven that.
I think I'm more or less agreeing with you. You've got to build the gas plants (or something), for the dark and windless days of winter, right? That's going to be expensive, but PV/wind won't solve it, so you have to build it.
Now that you've built those plants, would you rather pay to operate them year round, or only when needed?
PV/wind won't help you reduce capex for winter, but it should reduce opex on gas. And that's something.
Spending capex on interconnections may reduce the total dispatchable capacity needed; if it's done carefully. Having more time zones in one grid helps because peaks correspond with time of day; having more latitude helps because day lengths and cloud cover varies. Having more of both helps because still air tends to be geographically bounded. But long distance transmission is expensive.
I’d rather build nuclear plants and not keep them entirely idle but forego the investment into additional PV and wind. Don’t get me wrong: when the sun shines and the wind blows we cover 100% of our need essentially. That’s great. But we can stop now. Because we produce too much on some days and put our grid at risk and we produce too little to often on others and put our grid at risk
Solar panels are cheap enough that it pays to have gas plants that never run.
Batteries are definitely an option for day -> night shifting. If not today, then soon, and without requiring and technological advances.
Seasonal or month-long periods of low-generation are another matter, and as-yet an unsolved problem. It may be that synthesizing fuels ends up being a sensible option here.
One complements batteries with hydrogen (burned in turbines) or long term thermal storage.
Germany has plenty of salt formations for very cheap hydrogen storage, and there are no geographical constraints on thermal storage.
Tell the Fraunhofer about that.
I don't need to -- we can just look in that report you linked earlier (thanks!), on pages 5 and 6. They already know. They knew five years ago.
> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
Because solar is ~5x cheaper and 1000x more deployable
Is solar, in terms of pure amortized cost, given the actual solar power collected, really 5x cheaper?
I'm not doubting you, but we know that in some countries solar will have a power ceiling (cloud cover, etc)
It mystifies me that more people dont get this.
5x cheaper means you can add the cost of storage on top and it's still cheaper than nuclear power.
Because it’s not correct.
You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).
I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.
>You need either nuclear or gas
This is straight up misinformation. Nuclear power is not a peaker.
Gas is, batteries are. Nuclear power provides baseload and must be paired with a peaker too - almost always gas (France uses epic amounts of gas when its nuke plants are down for maintenance).
The reason why we have gas as a peaker instead of batteries? Gas is cheaper, and batteries dont get lavished with subsidies like nuclear power does.
>I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up
We look at real models based upon real data, for example:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
FUD and misinformation is a bad way to approach any scientific topic, whether vaccines or energy policy. Id recommend not doing that.
Dude, France has a fraction of our carbon emissions even of we continue to expand our renewable energy strategy - take a look at
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
I’m not saying “no gas”. I’ saying: no more PV or wind because we already stress our grid with too much electricity on some days and we have periods of days or week where we need to essentially generate 100% without any PV or wind.
> either you build gas power plants and keep them idle
Given that we already have a bunch of Gas plants, do we need to build new ones, or could we just maintain the ones we have?
Not all gas plants are made equally. There's a huge difference operation-wise between "able to scale at any moment from 0% to 100% within 15 minutes" and "can start going online within 30 days".
Most current plants are either designed to run basically all the time, or only run a couple of hours multiple times a day.
A renewable grid needs generation which is fully shut down for months, but can scale up to 100% within days when weather forecasts predict it'll be needed. The current plants might work as a stop-gap measure, but long-term we'll need to build something designed specifically for this application.
> You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
Which does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
Why waste money on horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power? Who looks at Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C and friends and draw the conclusion that they want some more?!?
> Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
The regime can just make it illegal to do rooftop solar or home batteries. In a functioning country this is easy enough to push through as a safety measure (lithium battery fires are legit scary, at least in videos). In the U.S. you can just start a campaign to get people fired for endangering their neighbors with dangerous woke energy, no legislation needed at all.
Solar , wind and batteries are easier to add piecemeal though. Nuclear for countries that don't already have it is a huge investment.
> You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
I'm not aware of that, because it's a lie. Storage is another alternative.
Read up the Fraunhofer study on how Germany can become renewable: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Hint: we’ll still end up producing more carbon emissions than France. Storage doesn’t exist in the magnitude needed.
That report is from 2020. Costs have fallen greatly since then, particularly for battery storage. And even so, that report doesn't say fossil fuels are needed (although the "net zero" solution still is allowed to burn some, I'm guessing because CO2 absorbed into the oceans isn't being counted?) It even says explicitly that hydrogen would be used for long term storage! See pages 5 and 6.
With hydrogen available renewables can straightforwardly get to 100%. Germany has plenty of geology for hydrogen storage. As I mentioned elsewhere, long term thermal storage is also a possibility, with recent developments there suggesting very competitive capex.
Now lets understand how the French grid works.
France generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because France's nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
When people talk about countries having "energy independence", isn't moving to renewables the right move? (Since you reduce your demand for fuel inputs to 0, assuming a 100% transition)
Australia's reticence in embracing renewables has always seemed obviously corrupt to me given the abundant natural sunlight resources Australia is blessed with, combined with the 100% reliance on importing of oil-based fossil fuels.
Australia is self-sufficient in keeping the lights on, due to large coal reserves, but wouldn't be able to transport anything if petrol dried up (and I think Australia only has twelve days of petrol reserve storage). Just imagine the chaos... To the point I would think it would be a National Security priority to electrify transport and build whatever is needed to support that electrification.
There was a Turnbull era report that suggested they could have energy security AND water security, long term, by building 70 - 120 pumped hydro dams. Pumped Hydro would give them heaps of energy storage, and the dams could be tapped in severe droughts.
We got Snowy 2.0 out of that process, and a few state governments have some fast tracked private pumped hydro dams, but ultimately there isnt enough political spine in the whole country to tackle it.
We cant really scale renewables without storage, and battery storage at scale would probably suck up the worlds supply of lithium. The big battery in SA is great for market arbitration, and smoothing out the frequency, but if it was tapped to supply baseload, would not give you very long. The demand for these batteries would be huge if its left to them.
As it is we will move slowly in kinda the right direction, and probably get very lucky. Thats how Australia works usually, just a country of people gambling constantly on remaining relatively lucky.
We could do coal liquefaction if it came to it. But I'm unsure on how fast we could get it up and running, and how much fuel we could get. Might be just enough to allow for just enough transportation for food so no one starves.
> Just imagine the chaos.
The oil shortage in australia in the 70s inspired Mad Max.
For many countries, pure renewables plus batteries only works with an international grid. In a different thread here, Germany was coming up quite a bit during the dunkelflaute, and the only way to go pure renewable is to import energy from, say, Morocco.
It does achieve potential independence from current adversaries, but only by introducing dependence on other nations instead.
Countries like the US have it a little better independence-wise, except we need (a) significant buildouts of batteries that don't rely on rare earths, because we can't mine them here for environmental reasons, and (b) massive buildouts of solar panels in regions across the country.
The upper midwest has something similar to Germany's dunkelflaute- it gets cold enough windmills may even be net negative to keep their turbines ice free, and we can go weeks under total cloud coverage.
Supporting all of that is possible, but requires overbuilding the grid to such an extent that the carbon cost of the cement and metals added to the grid would extend the payoff period quite a bit. It's definitely not a free lunch, though probably better to start now than hope for miracle cold fusion or something equally silly.
I had to look up "dunkelflaute":
"A period of time in which little to no energy can be generated with the use of wind and solar power."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
Isn't there a sweet spot where solar is too much of your energy mix -- due to its intermittency? I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )
If you're in the Atacama Desert, I doubt it's 40%, but not really relevant.
This is ALL renewables, not just Solar - the article states that Solar is ~20% now in the EU.
Wind typically counts for ~15%, and Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.
So most places can pretty easily get to ~40% solar, ~15% wind, ~15% hydro = ~70% renewable.
Throw in ~20% Nuclear (basically all of Europe before Germany sh*t the bed), and you're at ~90% - with limited need for storage - a large portion of which could come from infra that already exists for pumped hydro and regular overnight solar storage.
We're quite a ways away from diminishing returns.
We're ~8 years away from a global ~40% of electricity coming from solar EVEN IF it continues to grow at ~30% YoY.
> Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.
Why or when wouldn't one consider hydropower a renewable energy source?
Look at the Hoover dam
You mean low water levels? Isn’t it caused by agriculture water use? A dam allows to use more water (for agriculture) but one can choose not to use more.
Given the development of battery prices (and especially LFP and sodium ion) most new solar capacity will he solar+battery.
With some software tweaks, these are not only base load compatible, but can even take on grid frequency stabilisation.
Check out recent episodes of Tue Volts podcast. It's actually a bit crazy.
>I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
You can get pretty high before the economics get sketchy. Below analysis concluded that for many sunny places that point is in the 90%+. Most of EU will be lower than said sunny places, but point is it's not 40%. And the sprinkling of wind, nuclear, geo, hydro means there is a fair bit of room to still push.
Plus both solar and storage tech is still moving rapidly
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/Ember-24-Hour-S...
I don't know of any specific thresholds, but it's worth mentioning that 54% of Q2 was renewable, and solar peaks in Q2. Solar was also only 36.8% of that renewable generation (just under 20% of Q2's total), so there's a long way to go before solar is 40% of the total energy mix.
If there is an important threshold when solar reaches 40% of the full year's production, then solar will need to almost quadruple before that's a concern. For all of 2024, solar was 22.4% of renewables, and renewables were 47% of the total[1], meaning that solar was 10.5% of total electricity over the full year.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/...
I hope not. More times when electricity prices go negative is hopefully going to open up new market opportunities (outside crypto mining).
Generating chemical feedstocks from CO2, intermittent desalination, whatever process which is predicated on cheap energy.
The issue is not sorely about negative price. It’s about keeping base capacity profitable so the grid doesn’t collapse.
The energy strategy of the EU was hopeless for a long time and is only marginally better now. It’s not as braindead as the monetary union but close. Germany was actively sabotaging France for a long time while having to restart coal power plants and investing in gas fuelled capacity.
Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left.
>Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left
Don't worry, you'll join again eventually.
I’m French. Unless something major changes, I hope we will be out before the UK comes back. I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.
I’m not too surprised about my original comment being downvoted while being entirely factually true. It was a bit much from me to expect people to understand the underside of running too much intermittent energy sources and how this is currently dealt with (the braindead part). I invite the champions of solar to explain to me the current plan of the EU for actually running the whole grid past 2050 while phasing out the coal and gas (hint: there is none).
Anyway I invite everyone to take a look at what the EU used to do nuclear, how it was purposefully omitted from the definition of clean energy for years, how they used to fine France despite its energy being clean, how it forces the French energy operator to sell at a loss, how it impedes France properly managing its dams and then look at who actually pushed for these policies while buying Russian gas and burning coal. The whole thing is a complete joke. At least they apparently saw the light on nuclear. That’s a start.
> I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.
My understanding is that this was mostly a problem for eurozone countries and with the shared use of the Euro as a currency, rather than with the EU.
Funny you would mention the Greek debt crisis, because the next debt crisis looks to be in France.
Different situation. France has only itself to blame for the current situation and has plenty of things it can still do to avoid a crisis. Plus the debt holders are very diversified.
The Greek crisis is very different because the debt was mostly held by German banks - the German did to do something of all these excess savings and the Greek economy suffered a lot from the euro. Reforms were needed but the way the whole thing was handled is a disgrace.
Wouldn't leaving the EU be far worse economically than any of these penalties you mentioned?
Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.
That’s a risky bet but I personally prefer that to the current situation. I would honestly be ok with staying in the union if we could exit the euro while staying but I don’t think it’s possible.
>Better ruined than a colony.
Not sure what you're referring to here?
It’s me being dramatic for useless flair. I edited it out a minute after posting because it adds nothing to the discussion but you read it before I did.
Pray tell, why is the monetary union braindead? Asking for a friend stockpiling lire for collection value
It’s a monetary union with no common fiscal policies and no mechanism to correct disparity between members. Complete train wreck since it has been put in place.
Germany has been abusing it from the start running huge trade surplus, compressing salaries, using its excess savings to buy foreign debts instead of investing and being shielded from monetary appreciation by the consumption and investments of other countries. The euro is basically Germany robbing blind the other members while pretending to be virtuous and blocking most of what could have improved the situation.
> and no mechanism to correct disparity between members
AFAIK, they created some mechanisms after the 2008 crisis. Every country there now effectively prints money in differing rates, and the EU only regulates some limits.
https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/outlooks/european-...
Six-fold increase in battery capacity in Europe predicted by 2029.
Some numbers:
During winter, France uses ~50% more electricity per day than during summer. And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
If you don't have month-long battery storage, in order to be fully solar based France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer.
> France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer
So, it's ~15 years away at current growth rates?
But they'll probably just get months-long storage at some point.
> And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
This doesn't matter. If you look at the monthly stats, solar panels in France produce ~3x more in the summer than the winter at a month by month view. As such, you only need 3x extra overall, and some day to day storage.
Or just balance the mix with some on-shore and off-shore wind which is anti-cyclical with solar.
> in order to be fully solar based
I don't think anyone is suggesting that.
France has 70% of their power provided by Nuclear.
Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology. Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) or long term thermal storage.
For the latter, see standard-thermal.com
> Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology
I've heard this before but can you explain why? A cursory web search tells me batteries hold charge pretty well for 6 months. And the new sodium batteries from CATL are certainly cheap enough.
The problem with batteries for long-term storage is the capacity. You would need an ENORMOUS amount of them to store months worth of energy.
For long term storage, capex is king, not round trip efficiency. The capex of batteries ($ per kWh of storage) is much too high. There aren't enough charge/discharge cycles to amortize that capex. This is unlike with diurnal storage, where there are many thousands of cycles over which to spread that cost.
Thank you that makes a lot of sense.
not really. At this point, solar is basically free, and having extra free energy has all sorts of benefits. For the EU, in particular, it greatly reduces their dependence on Russian oil and gas. if all you do with extra solar is replace 2 extra hours a day of natural gas consumption, you effectively make yourself have 12% more storage, which decreases Russian leverage.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
in EU: gas, oil is still 60% of usage. You are not going to heat you home during winter with electricity anytime soon, same like we are not all gonna drive electric cars this decade.
Plenty of people are heating their homes with electricity already, that's what heat pumps are for.
North of the Alps, using solar to heat your home in the winter is unrealistic.
In Czechia, winter is already dark enough to make solar in the coldest months a rounding error.
Further north, uh.
Heat pumps account for 2/3 of new heating installations in Germany [1]. Modern buildings with effective insulation seem to make them quite viable, but that hinges on the availability of attractive electricity prices.
The second factor is that carbon-based fuels may become more expensive over time, so perhaps electricity costs “just” needs to remain stable to become attractive.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...
You forgot to mention the subsidies on Heat pumps
Those are primarily needed for retrofitting existing poorly-insulated housing. They say nothing about the suitability of heat pumps in general.
Neubauförderung KfW 297/298. And Gemeinden and Bundesländer also offer subsidies.
I'm sorry but this thread does not talk about using PV to heat your home in the winter. But it is absolutely possible to use electricity to heat homes, it's widely used in northern countries. And the nice thing about electricity is that it can be generated in one place and used in another.
This thread is talking about reduction of dependence on oil&gas supplied by various nefarious regimes, though. Still quite a challenge in the winter, with barely any sun out there.
"it can be generated in one place and used in another."
It can, but we are far from having such a robust grid all across the continent. I am not even sure if we are getting closer. Both economic and political aspects come into play, which might be harder to address than the purely technical ones.
For example, France really does not want cheap Spanish solar energy to flood the French market, hence the inadequate connection over the Pyrenees.
Everyone knows that, including the European Commission, but France is one of the two really big continental players who can do anything they want and cannot be effectively punished. The "everyone is equal, but some are more equal" principle.
Yes, there are and will be issues. We should have started much sooner. But we absolutely have to do this.
"But we absolutely have to do this."
This = what precisely?
If you mean getting rid of oil and gas on a short scale, there won't be majority for that. By 2040 or 2050 maybe, with some significant exceptions (I don't believe in large electric jets; small aircraft maybe).
2055, if we manage to replace most of heating, transport and industrial use, the rest is manageable. But it's still lots of work for 30 years.
[dead]
The better way to think about the grids energy mix is some matrix of reliability, predictability, and rotational mass.
Solar and wind have no rotational mass, are unreliable and unpredictable
Solar and wind are extremely reliable, because they are distributed. Unlike large-scalec fossil or nuclear, a single plant going offline isn't a big deal.
Solar and wind are quite predictable - it's just weather forecasting. We have a pretty good idea what it is going to produce 7 days from now - we just can't control it.
Solar and wind can provide rotational mass. Existing installations just aren't engineered for it, because grid following makes more sense in a fossil-heavy grid. If extra inertia is needed, batteries are the perfect source for it, as it can instantly scale from -100 to +100 to soak up excess or fill in shortages. Or we can just install a bunch of flywheels, no big deal.
Just solar without wind is a terrible idea. Which is why no one's doing it.
It's quite feasible in some places, like India.
Is that why electricity in EU is so expensive? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...
Yes, its because it is still short of %100 renewables and EU is importing its fossil fuels. When Russia invaded Ukraine it caused a spike in prices, now its coming down. Prices will go down as renewables proliferate, probably we will pay some fixed amount as equipment maintenance fee once its %100.
Our electricity was a lot cheaper when we had more nuclear.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that dismantling functional nuclear power plants, like they did in Germany and Sweden, has been detrimental for Europe.
Now the same people who were opposing nuclear are saying we should pursue wind and solar. Give me a break.
It's just Germany that shut down a few reactors, their internal politics and has nothing to do with EU or people who want renewables due to climate, ecology or political reasons.
Probably more to do with taxes etc. Better would be to look at cost of production and not cost to consumer with taxes and fees. Then you arent comparing the production but rather different models of socity
It's not taxes; German electricity costs increased over 3x since pre-covid, and taxes certainly didn't go up that much.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Only when it’s dark, overcast, winter or really cold. Otherwise it’s mainly due to the extreme overcapacity required to handle distributed unreliable energy sources as well as an increasing fleet of electric cars, stressing every last kilometer of the grid. And windmills, a reliance on methane gas as gap-filling and a few other issues. (Sorry, I know snarking is frowned upon on HN - but we choose this collective delusion over the hellish, yet stable, Cherenkov light of nuclear)
How will you make the electricity cheaper when nuclear power requires above 20 cents/kWh excluding transmission costs and everything else to get built in 2025?
You also do know that said nuclear plants won't deliver a new kWh to the grid until the 2040s?
What problem are you even solving?
Yes, large scale infrastructure projects takes time. 15 years is not really that long.
I would rather we started rebuilding our energy infrastructure today than later…
Fucking Germany though with insistence on coal, Russian gas and no nuclear. I'm so suck of literally paying for their mistakes. I wish we could just disconnect them from our grid until they take some responsibility. Also stop dragging your feet sending weapons to Ukraine.
It's because of stupid tribalism and hysterical non-thinking. When I was there 10 years ago it was really common to see the 'Atomkraft? - Nein Danke' stickers in public places. I guess when the position is held by a majority, that created an environment where people, especially policy makers, did not want to challenge it for they'll get excluded for wrong-think.
It is only changing because an even stronger fear (Putin) took hold.
without going full conspiracy, how much of the AI hype is driven by entities highly invested in the emerging surplus power from gas and coal, or who think they can make bank on a small nuke SMR play if they get the correct contracts with a Datacenter?
If we stopped doing insane things with GPUs then what's left is a viable business with CDNs and cloud computing for purposeful activity.
Burning coal 24/7 to make dali-m images is silly. But, if I was long on SMR I would totally play up how much power they need and if need be, co-fund the GPU farm to buy my power.
Is that not just the electricity version of the GPU maker taking a position in the AI sector as long as the money comes back to buy GPU (which btw, just happened bigly)
Checking in from Spain, looking forward to our next national blackout (compulsory Earth Day).
Spain is actually one of the countries with the most solar power generation in the EU
It's also the country with the highest solar power potential
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_European_...
Some months ago in Spain the price of solar energy became negative and minutes later there was a blackout.
Some people like gred say is because too much solar energy is a problem.
In my, uneducated, opinion it was a market failure.
for an entire year?
Literally the first sentence: More than half of the European Union’s (EU) electricity came from renewables in the second quarter of 2025, and solar is leading from the front.
during the night
I really hate this kind of article. Because they do twist numbers to serve a narrative (on renewable energy) instead of showing the complete picture fairly.
> June 2025 was a milestone month: Solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time ever.
Yes June was a record for Solar power production due to an amazing weather.... But it was a pure disaster for Solar power profitability with an all time low.
The peak was too large for the grid to consume and the price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours.
That should bring serious questions on the ROI of any future investment in solar capacity and about Europe electricity storage capacity.
The article ignores that entirely.
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche#
> Some countries are already nearly 100% renewable. Denmark led with an impressive 94.7% share of renewables in net electricity generated
This is also miss-leading. Production does not mean Consumption.
Denmark is very far from 94% consumption based on renewable. It rely heavily on import from German grid (Coal and Gaz powered) almost every night and this is a disaster in term of CO2 emission.
That leads to emissions over ~140CO2g/kwh in average, meaning way over what other Scandinavians countries are able to do (e.g Sweden < 15gCO2/kwh)
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/3mo/daily
> In total, 15 EU countries saw their share of renewable generation rise year-over-year.
Yes but that does not mean CO2 emissions are falling (which should be the only thing that matter).
Belgium is closing perfectly working nuclear powerplants recently that are providing around 30% of the country consumption.
Meaning the country CO2 emission are expected to increase significantly this year due to that and this is just plain stupid. Spain might follow a similar track and this is disastrous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Belgium
In short, please stop this kind of article.
- Renewable are good but what Europe need is massive investment in energy storage through battery and/or pump hydro. And this is nowhere here. Blind praise in solar capacity is counterproductive.
- If we do not carefully control our current capacity of non-controllable renewable in Europe, we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come. And this is the taxpayer will have to sponge all this mess financially speaking.
- What matters is CO2 emission and CO2 reduction, not renewable capacity. This kind of article favors wrong political decisions by putting first and foremost renewable capacity as the only metric that matters. The Belgian nuclear situation is one of these terrible decisions.
To provide some numbers on the storage side of things. On European battery storage [1]:
* 2024 - 21.9 GWh installed.
* 2025 - 29.7 GWh predicted to be installed.
* 2029 - Between 66.6 GWh and 183 GWh to be installed for 2029. Total capacity estimated to be 400 GWh.
The UK also recently received applications for 52.6 GW of storage Long Duration Energy Storage cap and floor scheme [2]. LDES in this context is classed as 8hrs or greater. Seasonal storage is not included.
I don't know if this sufficiently plugs the gaps, but it does show a large increase in installed battery storage, which appears to be accelerating.
Edit: Include total capacity in 2029 figure.
1. https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-e...
2. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/LDES%20...
Solar capacity is over 400GW now in Europe and projected to be over 700GW in Europe in 2028.
So, considering that. The battery storage estimate you give is still one order of magnitude under of what would be needed. Even considering the optimistic numbers.
Apologies, the 2029 figure was the annual install amount. Total estimated installed amount is 400 GWh. Solar Power Europe says "780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition".
From the page[1]:
> By 2029, the report anticipates a sixfold increase to nearly 120 GWh, driving total capacity to 400 GWh (EU-27: 334 GWh). However, this remains far below the levels required to meet flexibility needs in a renewable-driven energy system. According to our Mission Solar 2040 study, EU-27 BESS capacity must reach 780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition.
This is also only up to 2029. Battery prices are dropping and the amount of batteries being manufactured is increasing, so I don't agree the continued installation of solar is a big problem.
1. https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-e...
> Apologies, the 2029 figure was the annual install amount. Total estimated installed amount is 400 GWh. Solar Power Europe says "780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition".
It is still nowhere enough. It is barely the capacity to support few hours of consumption of the European grid.
Most of the solar production will go wasted.
That means that the price of the solar production will tank and go negative during most of the spring-summer period.
And that is terrible as far as ROI on the production systems are concerned.
> It is still nowhere enough. It is barely the capacity to support few hours of consumption of the European grid.
You just need to move the excess to times of high demand.
> Most of the solar production will go wasted.
Germany saw renewable curtailments (including wind) of 3.5% in 2024. I can only find reports it will reach 10% by 2030 in Germany and 10% in the EU. I would define "Most" as 50%+.
> That means that the price of the solar production will tank and go negative during most of the spring-summer period. And that is terrible as far as ROI on the production systems are concerned.
This depends on the market. The UK guarantees a price for renewables that have a Contract for Difference (CfD), so they're unaffected. I don't know much about the other European markets, so this might happen.
Any developer will account for this though, so money will flow out of renewables and into storage if there are serious issues around over capacity - unless you have schemes like the UK's CfD.
Finally, I disagree with your prediction
> we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come
You have plenty of price signals in energy markets so I can't see a scenario where there's a complete misallocation of resources into renewablews and not storage. In addition investment predictions for renewables and storage are healthy and not of an industry in distress.
> price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours
Sounds like a great investment opportunity for storage providers?
Isn't this how it's going to work itself out just due to pure economics? Solar panels become so cheap to build and install that people keep doing it just to eke out more power during the more expensive duck curve hours/cloudy days. This causes even more overproduction during the daylight hours, which makes storage more attractive to build
> during the solar hours.
My understanding is that most new solar being built today is being paired with batteries for this reason. Then they can sell the energy at night when the price is better.
Add to that cost of electricity routinely rising in EU. The practice shows that with the current technology intermittent renewable generation above a certain threshold in the total generation mix results in a sharply higher cost of electricity for consumers when accounted for all additional expenses (storage, more robust grids, "smart" grid controls, etc.). And we got this with massive EU subsidies on top of dirt cheap solar panels subsidized by the Chinese government.
gold comment
Not everybody seems to think so when I see the number of downvotes on this post.
Sadly, any criticism on renewables, even constructive, is often straight downvoted without any comments nor justifications on Hackernews.
Voting on every site is an emotional response, and bad news + convincing arguments against currently held beliefs produces a strong negative one.
I appreciate that you gave more insight into electricity markets today.
TBH your first phrase is how every bad comment starts so I can understand reflex downvotes, BUT, your actual content after that is fantastic, and it took me a while to mentally go to "oh wait they make sense here"
Yeah, and you can even consider yourself lucky if it's just downvotes, sometimes your messages just get flagged, like when I called renewables being a major reason for the Iberian blackout with citations from the official report.
OK and did they increase not renewables by 54%? You can't really increase overall capacity from solar, wind etc. Look at what happened in Portugal when it gets cloudy.