IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first
electrek.co136 points by Klaster_1 8 hours ago
136 points by Klaster_1 8 hours ago
These reports are inferring a lot from 1 year trends that are often changing only around 1%. Certainly it is great if new energy is coming mostly from cleaner sources, but the idea that we are actually getting rid of the non clean sources is something we should be skeptical of.
This graph shows all energy usage over time: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy
New energy sources have always been additive. We have never gotten rid of an energy source unless we exhausted the resource or it got prohibitively expensive (whale blubber having a population collapse). Coal is far more polluting then any other fuel source and globally we aren't reducing its usage. This graph is not updated for 2026, but I doubt the message will change much.
As we now undergo a worldwide population decline things might change. But at the same time we are also introducing energy intensive technologies: AI and robots, so there is no clear end in sight to increased energy consumption yet.
Comparing primary energy is VERY misleading. From Marc Jacobson:
The use of primary energy on the vertical axis is an old trick by the fossil fuel industry to mislead people into thinking that one unit of fossils = one unit of renewables. In fact, one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity is the equivalent of three units of fossil fuel electricity.
Another trick is to pretend we need all those fossils if we switched to renewables. In fact, if we switch to renewables, 12% of the fossil fuel energy disappears because that is how much energy is used to mine-transport-refine fossil fuels+uranium for energy, and we wouldn't need to do that anymore
A third trick is to pretend we need so much energy if we go to all electricity powered by renewables. In that case, because EVs use 75% less energy than gasoline/diesel vehicles, heat pumps use 75% less energy than combustion heating, etc., energy demand goes down another 42%.
In sum, this plot illustrates the real story of where we are and where we need to go. The proper metric is end-use energy, not primary energy.
and here's the paper
Yea, the article struck me immediately as a lot of spin in that it’s hyping the growth rate of solar versus the growth rate of other tech. Solar is newer and is still a relatively small slice of the overall pie compared to oil and gas. It’s relatively easy to rapidly grow a small pie wedge than a large one given the overall growth rate of the pie. And growth rates inevitably slow down as pie wedges get larger, because they have to. So, as you say, good news, but still over-hyped, IMO.
While your statement is true your graph is misleading for two reasons.
1) comparison of spent energy for fossil fuels vs electricity is not a good way to do it because electric motors use less for the same output. Compare kWh per 100km for an ICE car and EV. Electrification will lead to a drop simply because of this
2) the graph is global, we have seen energy consumption go down in the developed world. E.g. the EU now uses less electricity than 20 years ago.
> comparison of spent energy for fossil fuels vs electricity is not a good way to do it because electric motors use less for the same output. Compare kWh per 100km for an ICE car and EV. Electrification will lead to a drop simply because of this
Yes but there are losses in generating electricity, and in transmitting it as well. If you only measure from energy in your car's battery to motion you're right, but I don't think that's a useful measure.
Then you also have to account for losses in drilling oil, shipping it to a refinery, refining it into gasoline or diesel, shipping it to a distribution hub, then to a gas station. And all the electricity consumed in doing that. And the navy and coast guard ships that need to patrol all the oceans to keep the oil tankers safe. And...
Yes, and the same for building and fuelling the power station I suppose. That's why I'm saying you need to pick a sensible point to compare efficiency at.
Building power stations is a one-time cost. If the power station is solar or wind, same thing, only no fuel. Not the case for fossil fuels.
Solar panels or windmills are like oil drills. They aren't oil.
I think 2) is a lot more complicated to the point statements like that are misleading.
Take a look Graph of energy consumption of China which is about double the US: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
The energy consumption of the United States has flat lined: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption by de-indusrializing and having China produce all the energy (largely with coal!) to manufacture their goods instead of manufacturing it themselves.
1) Is a lot more complicated as well. A simple ICE vs EV comparison ignores electric grid generation efficiency and transmission losses as well as the massive energy cost of manufacturing the battery.
> One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption
The US has not "maintained a low energy consumption". US total energy consumption is the second highest in the world, at 2x third (India), 3x fourth (Russia), 5x fifth (Japan), and 6x sixth (India). It was first until China overtook it in 2008. Here's a line graph from 1965-2024 of those 6 countries [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-cons?tab=l...
> A simple ICE vs EV comparison ignores electric grid generation efficiency and transmission losses as well as the massive energy cost of manufacturing the battery
Does it take into account the "massive energy cost" of manufacturing the ICE vehicle then?
Or the gasoline generation efficiency and transmission losses? Or the economic impacts of oil pollution? Getting oil from the ground to the pump isn't free either.
Very misleading title: it should be "Solar leads global energy growth for the first time".
Still good news, but a long, long way from solar becoming the world's primary source of energy.
Yes, from the source report, for total generation capacity, solar is in a distant sixth:
Coal: 10858 TWh
Natural Gas: 6822 TWh
Hydro: 4470 TWh
Nuclear: 2859 TWh
Wind: 2723 TWh
Solar: 2653 TWh
Decent growth, but still a long way to go.
The energy system has investment cycles counted in decades.
Looking at TWh of renewables added each year we will have grids entirely dominated by them in 10-15 years. That is lightning speed for the energy system, and we’re still speeding up.
> solar becoming the world's primary source of energy
Solar has always been the primary source of energy, Something like 99.95%, with geothermal taking 90% of the rest and tidal being basically zero
You can look at coal, oil, gas as form of compressed solar energy, because all of them have biological source, stored millions of year ago. It's just burning coal, oil, gas has nasty side effects.
" Volcanic coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 252 million years ago.
Extensive burning in Siberia was a cause of the Permo-Triassic extinction " https://www.nsf.gov/news/volcanic-coal-burning-siberia-led-c...
What about nuclear?
Fuel was created by the explosion of supernovae, still solar but not our sun.
By that logic, all of the Earth and the moon were once parts of stars, so tidal and geothermal are also solar.
When people say "solar energy", they are usually referring to first order solar energy, directly from photons, not second or third order solar energy after it has been trapped into other sources of potential energy.
Should it be ‘solar leading energy subsidy growth’.
No chance, fossil fuels are subsidized more. A large share of solar growth is from countries like Pakistan who have had some subsidies but total dollar amount of them is trivial.
Got source?
China only ended solar panel export subsidy this month.
Pricing fossil fuel pollution at zero is the biggest subsidy in the world bar none. Contrast this with for example nuclear power, where potential pollution risks as well as storage of its spent resources are some of the biggest costs. If they were subsidized equally to fossil fuels, the costs of those would be very low, with the public simply paying the price for any negative health effects.
Oil is directly subsidized in most oil producing countries. Go look at what fuel costs in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, vs what they could sell it for on international markets. That's a subsidy.
Jet fuel is universally exempt from tax. Try finding any other energy source that is.
The US oil subsidy currently is projected to increase the Pentagon budget from one trillion to one and half. I bet one could build a lot of solar panels for 500 billion dollars, and you can use them more than once, too.
Solar subsidies still pale in comparison to oil and gas subsidies worldwide
Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
Plus, add the entire defense budget of US + western countries, which only exists to protect oil interests.
"Overall, renewables and nuclear together met nearly 60% of the growth in energy demand".
That's not enough. It's obvious this is going in the right direction but adoption is still too slow, considering how cheap renewables are now (and will be).
Read it carefully. The growth in renewables exceeded the growth in electricity demand. The 60% figure is all forms of energy.
Stated another way, we could (hypothetically) stop building coal and gas fired electrial generation and we'd still have enough renewable growth to cover electrical needs.
There's certainly room to start offsetting non-electrical power usage, but that's a different ball game entirely. I'd be pretty happy if we got to a point where only transportation ran on oil. To do that, we need enough renewables to both offset growth (done) and to start shutting down non-renewable generation. Even if we did nothing, those plants have a usable service life of < 100 years so we're within a human lifetime of not needing them anymore.
> The 60% figure is all forms of energy.
It's even better than this appears, because normally a Joule of electrified work replaces 2 to 4 Joules of fossil fuel. And electrification tends to happen on the less efficient processes first.
In deed. We are really late in ramping down fossils usage and emissions, and the death toll is higher than the other bad things in the news headlines.
The problem is also, that solar infrastructure is vulnerable to some of the attack vectors of climate change. The torrent downpours we see now in the us and in Europe - especially in mountainous regions are endangering the traditional valley cities in the hinterlands- the biggest consumer of solar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(2...
Cost is the barrier
Cost is no longer the barrier as today even the upfront cost of solar is competitive against upfront cost for building coal or gas power plant. While there is no cost of fuel for solar. In China and India even solar + battery is cheaper than new coal power plants.
New electricity generation has been 90% clean for a few years now and solar the biggest part of it for 3 or 4 years. This new landmark is about energy.
That's good progress but it does raise some new cost barriers to get over for each new thing we electrify.
EVs are over this hump, heat pumps replacing boilers are just about there. Some industrial uses are getting there.
Notably, in electricity renewables went through being cheaper than new build and reduced further in cost to being cheaper than running existing plants.
We're not quite at that stage for many electrification use cases, though for growing nations without lots of existing assets that's not as relevant.
A recent Danish research[1] found that the cheapest energy mix (that includes system costs like energy storage) right now for them is offshore wind power (66%), natural gas CCGT (26%), and solar PV (8%). Solar panels are cheap, but their system cost is the highest.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
I presume that this paper assumes some form of stable costs for natural gas... what happens when that stability is soundly invalidated?
Maybe "accidentally killing fossil fuels" will be DT's singular good deed
Just Stop Oil announced the cessation of all activities in my country.
Officially it's because reportedly they've achieved their goals locally, but I can't help but think that it was really because the POTUS Just Stopped way more Oil than they ever imagined they could.
The man is an overachiever.
He is in the process of killing the rise of neonazism, exposing those religious extremists that want constant wars on the Middle East, creating a multipolar world commerce chamber, turning the EU into a federation, popularizing socialism (and even outright communism) in the US, dismantling the US's foreign government overthrowing apparatus, creating actual diplomatic relations between the Eastern Asia governments...
He's also making the case for radical downsizing of the US military, since he's shown the military's take that it won't obey illegal orders was a sham.
In a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.
A substitution of coal for oil, or more likely natural gas, isn't that big a shift of emissions in the short run if it's a stopgap for massive solar and wind investments. Solar and wind install quick.
The world's most effective ecoterrorist.
Greenpeace should name their next ship after him.
You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.
i think that's why they used the word "accidentally"
Let me rephrase: You can't really attribute to someone something they did accidentally while trying to do the opposite.
I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on.
If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?
If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake.
Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?
Mao's campaign to kill sparrows was a result of a belief that they were a net loss for harvests.
Stalin's support of Lysenko was a result of thinking Lysenko was actually able to drive agricultural growth.
Both mistakes led to mass deaths.
We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.
Both of them also killed a lot of people maliciously and intentionally, but a large proportion of their death toll as a side-effect of their oppression, not the goal of it.
> We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.
What is the analogue here for attributing the rise of alternative energy sources to Trump? Being too incompetent to avoid harm isn't the same as being too incompetent to avoid benefit, because your job is to create benefit.
It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes. If he creates positive outcomes by accident while trying to create negative ones, he should get panned for trying to create negative outcomes.
Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened. The problem is that it hasn't.
> Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened
The number of Americans still believing this is baffling and saya everything about their history education.
"The previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative for the people in those countries, but surely this time it would've been different!".
> previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative
Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea. Potentially Venezuela, mostly because we constrained our objectives.
I also don’t think it’s fair to constrain OP’s statement to “the people in those countries.” Regional impacts matter, too. An Iran that isn’t funding terrorist proxies everywhere could still be a net positive even if the average Iranian is no better off afterwards. (To be clear, I’m in no way supporting this stupid war.)