decimalenoughan hour ago
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.
iso1631a minute ago
> 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
pingouan hour ago
"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).
fulafelan hour ago
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.
KumaBearan hour ago
Cost is the barrier
xbmcuser17 minutes ago
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.
ZeroGravitas6 minutes ago
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.
meibo2 hours ago
Maybe "accidentally killing fossil fuels" will be DT's singular good deed
citrin_ruan hour ago
In a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.
dv_dtan hour ago
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.
stavrosan hour ago
You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.
fxwin26 minutes ago
i think that's why they used the word "accidentally"
stavros24 minutes ago
Let me rephrase: You can't really attribute to someone something they did accidentally while trying to do the opposite.
boxedan hour ago
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?
stavrosan hour ago
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?
vidarh44 minutes ago
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.
stavros37 minutes ago
> 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.
decimalenough10 minutes ago
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.
internet_pointsan hour ago
> Electric car sales jumped by more than 20% in 2025 to over 20 million vehicles, accounting for roughly 1 in 4 new car sales worldwide.
I wonder if included these numbers in that calculation https://electrek.co/2026/04/16/tesla-cybertruck-spacex-1279-... ;-)
internet_pointsan hour ago
> Solar added about 600 terawatt-hours of generation globally
> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025
Am I reading it right that growth in solar was 50000x that of growth in nuclear? (And those reactors of course won't be finished / online until some years into the future.)
ZeroGravitas13 minutes ago
No you're wrong, the nuclear "started construction" and so solar added infinitely more generation than the zero they will generate this year/decade.
The world did add 3GW of nuclear generation in 2025 but it also closed 3GW.
Ekarosan hour ago
No, you are comparing watthours to watts. At 90% used factor 12GW would be ~95 TWh.
internet_pointsan hour ago
ooh, of course, thank you
onchainintel3 hours ago
Sooooo....you're telling me there's a chance! Solar FTW!
childintime43 minutes ago
> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025
By the time they are ready they will have contributed so many carbon emissions, that they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back. But by the time they are commissioned (~2036), solar + battery + solar-made hydrocarbons will have made them uneconomic, and solar would have made far fewer emissions.
Furthermore, they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about. Investing in nuclear is like willingly tying a brick to your foot, severely limiting your investment options.
They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.