Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year
theregister.com296 points by Growtika 3 days ago
296 points by Growtika 3 days ago
It takes time for statistical agencies to compile reports. I haven't yet found reports covering the growth in renewable generation (actual terawatt hours) for all of 2025. But this covers 3 quarters of the year:
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...
In the first three quarters of 2025, solar generation rose by 498 TWh (+31%) and already surpassed the total solar output in all of 2024. Wind generation grew by 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they added 635 TWh, outpacing the rise in global electricity demand of 603 TWh (+2.7%).
Ember is an absolute treasure. Often you'll see articles on HN from places like Elektrek which are blogspam linking back to Ember's original reporting.
Their electricity data explorer is to my knowledge the most complete on the open internet.
>At the global level, 2025 also saw a sharp rebound in non-renewable additions, which nearly doubled compared to 2024," IRENA noted. China led that drive, with 100 GW of non-renewable capacity added last year, most of which was coal.
Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.
Is it just the need for power when the sun is not shining? Or is it something else?
My understanding is that China is planning to build a coal-backed renewable grid. Renewables, including storage, will provide the majority of the electricity generation, and then coal will step in when renewables aren't available. This involves building modern coal plants that can be spun up and down as needed, and then paying them not to generate. This is why actual emissions have plateaued and dropped, even as new coal capacity comes online.
We are (or were) doing something similar in the US, just using natural gas as the fuel rather than coal.
- They need something to provide electricity when the sun is not shining, while they install enough batteries and more than enough solar to use during the day and charge those batteries.
- They need some backup in case the Sun is dimmed for a few days, while they install enough solar to not need this anymore.
- They need some backup in case they grow too fast and the solar installations don't keep up.
- They need some backup in case there's some natural catastrophe, or some stupid dictator somewhere decides to start a war or something and destroy some vital energy infrastructure.
Their government has explained this a few times, but not on those words. It probably helps that those are government projects, and failing to deliver government projects is a very rude attitude that can end people's careers. But the rationale is sound too.
"and the solar installations don't keep up.".
Whats the average time it takes to build a solar plant versus a coal one? I would assume solar is a lot faster to first production?
Probably better to ask how long it takes to build equivalent name plate capacity if both.
With a solar plant I assume they can turn it on before it's 100% done right? Harder to do phases with a coal boiler.
That's completely irrelevant to the issue, though.
It's not irrelevant to the comment I was replying to.
It's my comment.
The time it takes to build a coal plant is irrelevant to whether you can use your already built or close to finished plants in an emergency.
> Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.
Because reality is very different of propagandists and lobby reports.
Currently, not a single major country right now can afford to have energy storage capacity large enough to pass, even a single day, without sun if running exclusively on solar power.
Not even China, the biggest battery provider world wide.
Considering that to get a stable and reliable grid, the needed capacity would need to supply for weeks during Dunkelflautes, this is realisitically not going to happen before multiple decades.
China has an energy problem it need to solve now: The country is developing so its electricity consumption is growing, rapidly.
Their solution is the most pragmatic on short term: Building coal plants.
Their long term solution is also the most pragmatic on long term: Using Nuclear energy to support the baseload and a mix of hydro, solar, wind for the peaks.
Wondered if you were able to suggest what might be stopping large scale build out of sodium ion and redox flow batteries?
Mostly it's that solar doesn't work at night. That means you have to use batteries, which are impractical to store more than a certain amount of energy, after which you need another very large and stable energy source. So a nation-state that can't go dark must have a constant load source, such as nuclear, hydro, or coal. There's also limitations of geography, industry, production capacity, and other issues.
There's a recent AP article talking about this some (I don't know enough to know the quality of the article): https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...
Part of China's "new" coal capacity is modern, efficient coal plants with lower emissions being built to replace old, inefficient, highly polluting ones.
Not trying to be offensive or throw shade, but I wouldn't be surprised if the older plants were built fast and cheap and have issues; emissions, efficiency, maintenance, safety.
More than anything it's a supply limit. Solar is consistently scaling about as fast as any manufacturing industry scales. The TAM is just big.
Inertia I imagine. Planning cycles can be 10, 20 years, perhaps longer for big infrastructure projects.
Wait this is actually amazing, I had no idea it was that high. I can’t even believe what the US admin is doing, this is clearly the winning technology.
US is divesting from renewables because it planned to go to war with the rest of the world, which it depends on for renewables (rare earth materials). As a result it's forced to focus on oil and coal instead because it can produce that within the northwestern hemisphere. New strategic plan is likely to take over greenland, drill in arctic, expand rigs in gulf of mexico, spin up coal plants, and do deals with govt they install in Venezuela. This is the "America First" plan - reject globalism, completely control the home turf like Russia, build up warfighting apparatus, use that to go take over more countries and extract wealth there. (Guess who came up with the plan? US isn't a threat to Russia if US stays on its side of the ocean)
Do you have sources for this? Not asking for validation reasons, I'd genuinely like to read up on this dynamic.
- Brookings Institute testifies about how oil and gas both make us richer and more secure geopolitically (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/geopolitical-implications-of-u-s-oil-and-gas-in-the-global-market/)
- US and British officials talk about energy as a weapon (https://phys.org/news/2025-04-opposes-dangerous-anti-fossil-fuel.html)
- Trump wants to control Arctic shipping lanes (https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/10/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-authorizes-construction-of-arctic-security-cutters/)
- Trump opens Artic to oil and gas drilling (https://earthjustice.org/press/2025/trump-administration-opens-the-entire-coastal-plain-of-the-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-to-oil-and-gas-leasing)
- Trump wants Venezuelan oil (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/us/politics/trump-maduro-venezuela-oil-tanker.html)
- Trump plan makes domestic energy a part of National Security Strategy (https://evrimagaci.org/gpt/renewable-energy-surpasses-coal-amid-us-policy-clash-520629)
- Announcement of Greater North American Doctrine (https://openthemagazine.com/world/greater-north-america-pete-hegseth-unveils-new-security-doctrine-under-donald-trump)Build up a war fighting apparatus? They already have the strongest military in the world
The US military is quite weak compared to other developed nations. They don't have a large infantry, most of their modern warfighting vehicles are fragile and ridiculously expensive, the manufacturing base is tiny. They have a history of losing conflicts. The military is also corrupt, which leads to loss of morale and subversion. Since they're lead by politicians, they don't have the will to complete conflicts in an efficient way.
They're set up to fight brief invasions of weak countries, or thermonuclear war with other nuclear powers. They can't fight any other kind of war; guerrilla war, naval war, ground war. Their intelligence apparatus is weak too, as is their cyber capabilities. As a contrast, Israel, a tiny nation, is far more effective at intelligence and warfare on multiple fronts. They also have a stronger will and purpose, and have the support of their nation to commit war crimes and genocide.
The American military is the richest military in the world, but not remotely the strongest. They need more manufacturing, stronger and cheaper weapons/vehicles, a larger infantry, and better intelligence/counterintelligence/cyber. They can't do that with the current military industrial complex.
This comment must be a joke. It is not even remotely debatable that the US has the strongest military in the world.
Outside of nuclear MAD, if the US were in a total war scenario against any other country in the world, the US would win every time with the sole exception on maybe China.
It's like watching people invest in Blockbuster Video stores after you've used Netflix.
At the time, I stupidly thought Blockbuster would see what was coming and use their at the time larger size to pivot and do what Netflix had demonstrated would work. Kind of like when the Yellow Pages bought early Google. Oh wait...
Blockbuster did start offering mail in DVD rental subscriptions just like Netflix, in fact it was better because you could return it to a nearby store if you didn't want to wait for mail. But it was too late. (This was even before streaming.)
Funny thing is that it wasn't too late. Netflix was weeks away from running out of money because blockbuster was eating their lunch, but then blockbuster killed dvd by mail because a dumb exec thought physical stores were the future.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
(global solar PV deployment is just a bit below ~1TW/year at current deployment rates)
Installed capacity is a misleading number. If you assessed the trucking industry by simply sum-ing the rated capacity of all the hardware you'd be rightfully laughed and and called a liar on the basis of all the times the trucks are empty and all the trucks that run out of volume before weight. Renewables is a similar situation.
Some panel in a solar farm in Canada is not gonna see the conditions that let it produce rated capacity nearly as often as one in Arizona. So the guy in Canada installs more capacity to get the same power. Meanwhile the guy in Arizona doesn't have enough copper leading out of his site to handle the power he could produce at peak on the best days, because he over-provisioned too, in order to be able to produce a given amount earlier/later in the day. The actual generation hardware is so cheap that this is just the sensible way to deploy renewables, but it makes for stupid misleading numbers.
Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
Refer to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
The largest electricity consumers all have good places to put solar farms.
> Installed capacity is a misleading number. If you assessed the trucking industry by simply sum-ing the rated capacity of all the hardware you'd be rightfully laughed and and called a liar on the basis of all the times the trucks are empty and all the trucks that run out of volume before weight. Renewables is a similar situation.
OK, but what if someone looked at the rated capacity of all trucks and noted that in the last 5 years it went up by 24%, 22%, 28%, 54%, and 45%? That would strongly suggest that the amount trucks actually being used is growing rapidly because people aren't going to be buying new trucks unless they have to.
Yes, unless people had some incentives to show an increase in the trucking capacity in order to meet some metrics and get more funding etc. (not saying that's what's happening, but just as a counterpoint to your logic)
This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install. Current geopolitical events spiking LNG costs make the math even more favorable towards renewables.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/24-hour-solar-now-ec...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... ("104$/MWh: Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier.")
> Legacy power generation has much different numbers and isn't subject to the whims of the weather so installed capacity is a number that means something in that context.
Legacy power is ridiculously expensive in comparison. Who will invest in fossil gas generation when ~20% of LNG exports have been taken offline for the next 3-5 years?
https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-... (page 8)
Strikes on Qatar's LNG Ras Laffan plant Will Reshape the Future of Fossil Gas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484246 - March 2026
Fossil fuels are over, it's just how fast we get to "done." Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30-60 minutes to power humanity for a year. Solar PV and battery manufacturing continues to spool up, and year by year, more fossil generation is pushed out.
California is routinely operating at 80% renewables, 90% low carbon generation during daylight hours as they work towards installing battery storage to replace their fossil generation (~52GW target by 2045), for example, while having plans for 10s of GWs of additional solar to come online over the next decade.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/were-harvesting-t...
> This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install.
I looked it up because I was curious, according to Wikipedia average PV capacity factor is 25 % in USA, 10 % in the UK or Germany.
Nuclear has 88 % capacity factor worldwide. Meaning to replace 1 GW of nuclear installed capacity you need 8.8 GW of PV installed capacity in Germany or 3.5 GW of PV installed capacity in US.
Which might still be economically worth it, I don't know. But it is a number that surprised it.
It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar, the US ~4-5GW/month. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment.
Yes, the biggest advantage of solar and wind is that they can be built as many small projects, instead of few gigaprojects we seem to have lost the ability to execute in the West.
I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land.
> I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land
Money will eventually win the war. Depressing way to get there but this crisis will accelerate the change.
Why is this even a crises? Sure there's fossil fuel price shocks but watching mission control for Artemis and comparing it to the Apollo missions the difference in tech can't be understated. We've made massive progress in only 50 years as a civilization collectively. We used to basically waste energy powering giant displays. Now we use a fraction of the energy on far better ones. 50 years from now we're likely to have so much solar and batteries deployed that it might actually hit "almost free" levels.
> It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid
There is only one country on earth that can currently build a new nuke in 10 years. They are currently building more than the rest of the world combined.
For everyone else it’s 20 years at the absolute minimum.
Nuclear fills a base load role better than solar+battery though, imo.
A healthy power network will have a variety of generations sources available.
Modern grids favour flexibility over fixed baseload generation (like nuclear) though. When you turn off a nuclear power plant its operating costs basically stay the same, which is horrible when you could cover your whole consumption with basically free solar/wind.
actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is deadly to the economics of nuclear.
This is what France faces today.
France's EDF Warns Solar, Wind Surge Straining Nuclear Fleet Costs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839 - February 2026
I didn't say they weren't cheap. I said you were being misleading. I'm not rebutting your thesis. I'm rebutting your defense of it.
They're so cheap they get over-provisioned on purpose. Can you imagine some guy speci'ng switchgear and transmission lines for a coal or gas plant that can't handle the plant running full tilt? Yeah me either. But that's exactly how it's done for renewables because that's where the sweet spot of cost-benifit is.
A dozen 10mw turbines might be fed through 100mw of transmission hardware. They can never produce their rated 120mw because liquid copper would happen if they did. But they were intentionally provisioned that way so that based on weather patterns and whatnot they'd be able to expect say 80mw a certain number of days per year.
There are untold numbers of renewable installations out there that cannot supply their nameplate capacity to the grid in such a manner.
There is nothing wrong with over provisioning cheap renewable power generation when it is economically superior to building fossil assets that will end up stranded. As long as grid demand is met and it is cheaper to build renewables and batteries to do it, it will be done, and that is the path we're on.
If gas plants cannot economically compete, they will not be built or fired. And the evidence shows they cannot compete, regardless of their competing capacity factor and dispatchability.
> There is nothing wrong with over provisioning cheap renewable power generation when it is economically superior to building fossil assets that will end up stranded.
Solar cannibalises solar, so the price when the sun shines may tend to zero, but that does not ensure the price to the consumer of the electricity they need tends to zero, or even lower than it was.
Australia is currently giving away free power for the peak three hours of sunlight a day, due to solar overcapacity until battery uptake increases. They are also working on a market scheme to transition primary grid services from thermal generators to battery storage.
They only have 22GW of coal generation remaining to replace, which should take no longer than 5-10 years. These generators are already at the end of their life, so they have no other choice but to go forward with renewables and storage.
A glimpse into the future, as is Spain, as is California. Some are further on their journey than others. Those at the frontier will teach the rest of us how to solve for the hardest parts.
https://www.pv-tech.org/australia-mandates-three-hour-free-s...
https://openelectricity.org.au/analysis/40-renewable-and-ris...
Do you have some links to how someone scaled up storage? I know that scaling up solar is easy, but I don't know of any nation that build significant storage.
You are still arguing against a strawman. Cucumber3732842 is just saying that nameplate capacity is a systematically flawed metric when comparing renewable generation, because their capacity factor is consistently lower than for conventional plants.
A better metric would simply be annual production, where we're in the ~30% range globally (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...). Even that comparison portraits renewables very favorably, because dispatchable power is easier to handle than the same output from intermittent sources.
If you look beyond electricity (heating/total primary energy use) the picture gets even worse.
This is not an argument against renewables, this is against premature cheering and misleading use of numbers.
I think you misunderstand. We are cheering trajectories, not the point in time. Renewables and storage will continue to be deployed, fossil fuels will remain expensive, and build outs will continue over the next decade or two. If these trajectories hold, and growth rates continue to grow for clean energy deployments, what happens? The outcome is obvious, is it not?
The thesis is simply this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.
The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:
The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. We are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.
I am from the USA, and from the numbers it looks like China will save the planet.