> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
Which is quite surprising, because on an irradiance map[0] The Netherlands and Germany have some of the worst per-year solar output in the world - an installation in the Mojave Desert would produce literally twice the amount of power with the same panels! And especially The Netherlands doesn't exactly have a lot of empty land either.
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
> Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
>
The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime.
It is a shame that nuclear power has stagnated - we could have been moving towards fossil fuel free grid half a century ago. We've lost decades of progress there. But it's a good thing that solar power is coming into its own more and more.
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Idea, which unfortunately won't be feasible until MAGA dies:
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
> Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
Are we burning the battery materials into gases and sending the results into the atmosphere? No, then we are unlikely to run out of materials on a primary or secondary, recycled, basis. Not to mention the diversity of choices available for chemistries and storage
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
If China has decided to save the world from climate change as a second order effect from keeping their deflationary manufacturing system operating and for national energy security reasons, I have no complaints. I do not care why, it is immaterial, just keep the solar, wind, batteries, and EVs printing as fast as possible to the world. We have to get to net zero as fast as possible, and then sequester all of the carbon emissions emitted as climate carbon debt since the Industrial Revolution started. That’s a lot of work left to go.
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> If China maintains expansion at the 430-gigawatt-per-year level, installed wind and solar capacity would reach roughly 2,700 gigawatts by 2027. That would be more than five times the entire wind and solar capacity in the EU. Whether this value is realistic depends mainly on two factors: expansion of high-voltage transmission lines connecting generation and consumption regions, and political will to actually decommission the coal power plant fleet.
Every year renewables consume another ~10% of fossil generation in China, and should push out almost all fossil generation in the next 5-10 years, at current deployment rates. China is relying on coal for peaking until their battery deployment rates catch up to negate the need for coal generators.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
I am mostly pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
The Sun is #1 die nukes die!
very happy now.
had some issues with my off grid solar powered house and shop last week, but bounced back quickly and ran a small welder
as part of the system verification test,
still running massivly outdated gear, holding out till I can integrate car charging in a bigger upgrade.
saw a smaller farm last week that paved a small padock out by the road with 30~50 kw grid tie array , ground mount to concrete blocks, drop it and run, zero out the powerbill.
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
After its commercial span is over, over 90% solar and battery materials can be recycled to make new panels and batteries. Compare that with nuclear where we need to stow away basically-forever-radioactive spent material.
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
China is around half that capacity. Asia represents 3/4 of new capacity.
With this being said, Australia, Netherlands and Germany are leading in solar capacity per capita according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
Which is quite surprising, because on an irradiance map[0] The Netherlands and Germany have some of the worst per-year solar output in the world - an installation in the Mojave Desert would produce literally twice the amount of power with the same panels! And especially The Netherlands doesn't exactly have a lot of empty land either.
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
[0]: https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Wow almost a tripling of solar output in less than 4 years. That’s incredible!
An interesting fact is that China has passed "peak coal" in 2024 while still growing with about 5% in a year.
Denmark had peak coal early (2003) due to early investments in wind power. Coal is now practically gone.
We might see China get the same shift in electricity source as Denmark had over the past 20 years, just much faster.
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
If Sweden can build nuclear, why can't China?
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
> Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
> The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
Well, that will certainly be an issue for nuclear power capacity in the future.
The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime.
Much easier to do upgrades piecemeal though with solar and wind.
It is a shame that nuclear power has stagnated - we could have been moving towards fossil fuel free grid half a century ago. We've lost decades of progress there. But it's a good thing that solar power is coming into its own more and more.
Late is better than never.
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Idea, which unfortunately won't be feasible until MAGA dies:
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
80% of global energy consumption is still fossil fuels (oil/coal/gas), however.
That's primary energy, of which about half is wasted as heat. Electrification will bring this down by a lot.
Is this the year of the Linux desktop ?
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
We're getting to a point where we can stop boiling water for electricity.
What a time to be alive.
“How did humanity solve climate change? We taught sand to move electrons with photons.”
That's why I hope Helion Fusion does well. The system they are developing sends power to a device that captures power directly no boiling water.
wasn't there recently papers claiming helion fusion's design is literally incapable of producing energy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB4hB9QJX8
Well, if we want more drinking water we might start boiling salt water with electricity.
Or as Bill Mckibben observed "for 10's of thousands of years, humanity has burned things to produce energy. The period of fire is coming to an end".
I think fire is still involved in the creation of solar energy though... Just not man-made fire.
Except for solar collection that boils water to generate power.
99+ missed calls from millimeter wave bored geothermal
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y94yV7WUwGY is a short lecture by someone from BloombergNEF that speaks to some of your questions.
The answer is batteries (why it hasn’t seen the adoption and also what is about to enable it)
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
The geopolitics don't go away because the resources needed to switch to renewables aren't evenly distributed geographically:
https://www.statista.com/chart/33754/countries-with-the-larg...
https://www.techpolicy.press/us-critical-mineral-aggression-...
Battery storage is only a solution if you can actually generate a surplus of energy that can be stored, which is not a given.
We absolutely need to move off of fossil fuels but thinking that renewables are the only solution seems very short-sighted to me.
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
> Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
Now that PV panels are less expensive than cabinet grade plywood, it makes a lot of sense to get some independence through local generation.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
> more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel.
supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
I wonder if we will run out of battery materials in a hundred years, then what?
green gas or flow batteries
Impossible as there are so many chemistries, but hopefully we don't run out of water for pumped hydro.
1. Sodium batteries 2. Kinetic Batteries
we might end up switching to sodium batteries for the grid, they’re heavier so not great for cars, but otherwise they’re fine
Global scale HVDC networks could eliminate a significant part of the storage requirement.
Are we burning the battery materials into gases and sending the results into the atmosphere? No, then we are unlikely to run out of materials on a primary or secondary, recycled, basis. Not to mention the diversity of choices available for chemistries and storage
If we run out of Saltwater then we have very different problems at our hand.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
Well technically it is nuclear power, just a free fusion reactor we don't have to maintain. :)
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
> China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying.
Would be interesting to know how much nuclear vs solar they are building per year domestically.
"We still haven't solved cheap battery storage."
we literally already have salt battery
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Whenever there is a discussion about nuclear I always remember this XKCD https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Two different tools for different things.
> fanatical implementation
Not supported by the stats in TFA:
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
Most of it has been installed in the last 4-5 years, and we are still accelerating.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
If China has decided to save the world from climate change as a second order effect from keeping their deflationary manufacturing system operating and for national energy security reasons, I have no complaints. I do not care why, it is immaterial, just keep the solar, wind, batteries, and EVs printing as fast as possible to the world. We have to get to net zero as fast as possible, and then sequester all of the carbon emissions emitted as climate carbon debt since the Industrial Revolution started. That’s a lot of work left to go.
It’s a noble thought but the reality is this: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Chi...
and this: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/His...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
Bloomberg: Solar Surpasses Coal as China’s Top Source of Power Capacity - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-01/solar-sur... | https://archive.today/i3TSe - August 31st, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
China: Renewables now top 60 percent of capacity - https://denkstrom.org/en/goodnews/china-renewables-500-gw-ca... - June 1st, 2026
> If China maintains expansion at the 430-gigawatt-per-year level, installed wind and solar capacity would reach roughly 2,700 gigawatts by 2027. That would be more than five times the entire wind and solar capacity in the EU. Whether this value is realistic depends mainly on two factors: expansion of high-voltage transmission lines connecting generation and consumption regions, and political will to actually decommission the coal power plant fleet.
Every year renewables consume another ~10% of fossil generation in China, and should push out almost all fossil generation in the next 5-10 years, at current deployment rates. China is relying on coal for peaking until their battery deployment rates catch up to negate the need for coal generators.
That’s awesome, and more evidence this hasn’t been “20 years” in the making.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
I am mostly pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
Good luck getting fission to work on any of the other materials.
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
It really is sad how ugly solar is. Miles and miles of beautiful, peaceful open desert are ruined. It's a bit of an environmental travesty.
You're aren't looking at all factors here. I look at solar and think its beautiful for what its displacing.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
The Great Solar Wall: China doubles down on its ambitious effort to tame deserts - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3363108/grea...
Triple win: solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00516-8
Swathes of Earth are turning into desert — but the degradation can be stopped - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03621-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
The Sun is #1 die nukes die! very happy now. had some issues with my off grid solar powered house and shop last week, but bounced back quickly and ran a small welder as part of the system verification test, still running massivly outdated gear, holding out till I can integrate car charging in a bigger upgrade. saw a smaller farm last week that paved a small padock out by the road with 30~50 kw grid tie array , ground mount to concrete blocks, drop it and run, zero out the powerbill.
Publication says that specialty of the publication is booming. Noted.
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
These are easily verified hard numbers that could be looked up anywhere. It's not an "opinion" or a subjective piece.
What is your note, precisely?
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Are you trying to claim solar has nastier end-of-life cleanup than nuclear? That is certainly one way to get people to discount everything you say.
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
After its commercial span is over, over 90% solar and battery materials can be recycled to make new panels and batteries. Compare that with nuclear where we need to stow away basically-forever-radioactive spent material.
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.