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Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year

• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• toomuchtodo 6mo ago
  Report: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capacity-statistics-2026 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
• Ancalagon 6mo ago
  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.
  • toomuchtodo 6mo ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c... https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-fast-track-where-china-built-on-coal-india-is-building-on-sun/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-... (global solar PV deployment is just a bit below ~1TW/year at current deployment rates)
    • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
      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.
      • toomuchtodo 6mo ago
        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-economically-viable-for-the-worlds-sunniest-regions/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/24-hour-solar-now-ec... https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/ 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-2025.pdf 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 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/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi... https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/california-energy-storage-system-survey https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/were-harvesting-the-sun-solar-project-california https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/were-harvesting-t...
        • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
  • jeffbee 6mo ago
    The Trump administration is secretly the head of a renewable energy accelerationist front, or at least that's the effect in practice.
    • pepperoni_pizza 6mo ago
      > The Trump administration is secretly the head of a renewable energy accelerationist front "accelerationist" yes, not sure about the other parts.
    • HerbManic 6mo ago
      Trump could become an accidental environmental ally in the same way the 2008 credit crisis and Covid did. Just blunders in and in the wreckage might be something ok.
  • recursive 6mo ago
    Well see, we're sick of winning.
  • matthewdgreen 6mo ago
    It's like watching people invest in Blockbuster Video stores after you've used Netflix.
    • RRWagner 6mo ago
      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...
      • zadikian 6mo ago
        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.)
        • falcojr 6mo ago
          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.
  • 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
    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)
    • Rooster61 6mo ago
      Do you have sources for this? Not asking for validation reasons, I'd genuinely like to read up on this dynamic.
      • 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
        - 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)
    • jaapz 6mo ago
      Build up a war fighting apparatus? They already have the strongest military in the world
• Night_Thastus 6mo ago
  Makes sense - solar especially. It's just more financially smart to buy something that will generate electricity for 20-30 years with little to no maintenance than a plant that requires constant fuel, and is fairly complex mechanically with fluids and heat exchangers and turbines and so on. Panel efficiency keeps going up and prices keep going down, it's a snowball at this point.
  • joe_mamba 6mo ago
    >it's a snowball at this point. That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker. Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
    • kibwen 6mo ago
      China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.
      • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
        > The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone. China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.
        • 6mo ago
• lifty 6mo ago
  Solar capacity is always misleading because it’s intermittent. Capacity of a gas power plant can’t be compared to capacity of a solar power plant, even though it sounds like you are comparing the same thing. Would love to know total kWh generated.
  • adrithmetiqa 6mo ago
    Yep. The key difference is that a gas power plant can be cut off completely at any time. For example if a trigger happy leader decided to cause military mayhem in an unpredictable region supplying a large proportion of the world’s gas. The sun, however, keeps on shining.
    • lifty 6mo ago
      I didn’t mean to compare them, implying that gas or anything else is better. I’m a big fan of renewables, especially solar, but just wanted to bring this aspect up. It’s confusing to me because I get excited when I see these numbers only to later deflate when I figure out the total generated kWh quantity. It would be great if there would be a “synthetic” calculation which takes into account the estimated generation and smoothing out using batteries, which would also take into account the extra cost of batteries. That would be a more apples to apples comparison both in terms of net generation and cost.
  • _aavaa_ 6mo ago
    I understand why people are downvoting you, but we still have a bit to go before renewables make up 50% of yearly electricity generation. Not as far as you’d think though. According to [0] in 2024 it was 6.9% solar, 8.1% wind, and 14.3% hydro, I.e. 29% renewables. Given the trajectory I wouldn’t be surprised if that total was ~33% in 2025. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
    • rendang 6mo ago
      By your definition/chart, we were 0% solar, 0% wind, and 20% hydro in 1985 for 20% total renewables. So, 20% -> 29% in 4 decades
• cbmuser 6mo ago
  Capacity doesn’t matter, generation does.
  • boringg 6mo ago
    True but having capacity allows for generation - doesn't work the other way around. AKA the forward march of progress.
    • butvacuum 6mo ago
      We can also time shift many of the things we do. Does your fridge need to run between 3-5pm in the heat of summer? or can it make sure its a little cooler to avoid running then? (trivial example, probably not a good one)
      • Rebelgecko 6mo ago
        Batteries are also getting cheaper and cheaper
        • zekica 6mo ago
          And they are the only real solution. Demand fitting production is never going to work unless we give up all the autonomy.
          • uecker 6mo ago
            It will be a mix. There is certainly still a lot which can be done on the demand side, e.g. when to cool a cool storage house during the day, or when to run certain production lines.
        • AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
          This is why a major part of the solution is electric vehicles. Why put batteries in a warehouse and then run vehicles on petroleum when you can put batteries in a vehicle, install twice as many renewables because you now have more demand for electricity, and then charge the vehicles when generation is a large percentage of rated capacity and still have enough to run the rest of the grid when it's a smaller percentage?
• mentalgear 6mo ago
  This is far higher than I expected: a much needed, remarkably good reason to be cheerful about the future after all !
  • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    A lot of people who are cheering right now are going to be screaming bloody murder in 10-20yr when the "below this population density generation and storage makes more sense than grid" threshold creeps up into the lower end of suburban population densities and some industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities. Energy independence is a two way street. This is essentially a domestic internal soft power lever that is going to go away or be nerf'd.
    • JuniperMesos 6mo ago
      Why is it bad if some industrial users of electricity buy fields around their factories and set up their own power generation there instead of hooking up to the power grid?
    • myrmidon 6mo ago
      I honestly don't see a big problem with that. First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities). Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
      • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
• ashutoshmishr88 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• philipkglass 6mo 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-growth-meets-all-new-electricity-demand-in-the-first-three-quarters-of-2025/ 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%).
  • reitzensteinm 6mo ago
    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.
• pzo 6mo ago
  worth to keep in mind electricity usage != energy usage. We are far away from replacing oil, lpg.
  • marcosdumay 6mo ago
    If you discount the inefficiencies inherent to fossil fuels, all energy usage in the world is around 3 times the electricity usage. And we are already in the process to replace non-electricity energy.
• PunchyHamster 6mo ago
  And all we got to show up for it are higher electricity prices
  • etiennebausson 6mo ago
    Of course, huge investment need to be paid for somehow. Still a worthwhile investment in most case.
• didgetmaster 6mo ago
  >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?
  • danny_codes 6mo ago
    Inertia I imagine. Planning cycles can be 10, 20 years, perhaps longer for big infrastructure projects.
  • matthewdgreen 6mo ago
    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.
  • tdb7893 6mo ago
    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-emissions-242abe76eb69f5a362e977de74ff3254 https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...
  • lenkite 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • marcosdumay 6mo ago
    - 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.
• ww520 6mo ago
  The problem is in power transmission. Transmission fee is a big part of the cost. Anything helping for at home generation should be encouraged. Right now plug in solar is starting to appear. It is big in Germany. Utah has passed a law to cut the red tapes to allow home owners to install plug in solar themselves. More states should follow.
  • cptskippy 6mo ago
    The rub is that people don't want transmission networks to go away. They just don't want to pay for the maintenance. In many US municipalities the cost of infrastructure is rolled into the per unit fee meaning high consumers pay more. This works fine until folks adopt solar and their consumption goes negative. The right answer is a connection fee based on the cost to maintain your hookup to the grid.
    • chris1993 6mo ago
      As is the case in Australia. We personally pay around AU$2/day grid connect fee
• deIeted 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• JoeAltmaier 6mo ago
  Used to be this was almost entirely explained by hydro. Not a lot of new dams going in, and they take a long time. The solar component is usually with caveats: the majority of growth. Because growth is slow otherwise. Solar is what part of renewables now? I couldn't easily see that stat in the noise.
  • KylerAce 6mo ago
    50% https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-grew-almost-50-global-electricity-capacity-2025-after-solar-boost-2026-03-31/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-grew-almo...
    • JoeAltmaier 6mo ago
      Again, that's total renewables, not solar. I believe a large part of that is hydro, decades old.
• layoric 6mo ago
  Worked on the software side of increasing the rate of solar penetration in electricity networks between 2016-2020 via global solar radiation forecasting. The uptake of the software was slow the first year but then rapid once more electricity networks were struggling with knowing how much solar was in the network. Once it is easier to predict, the network becomes easier to manage, and more can be safely added, and make it economically profitable. Sucks this was a commercial operation, but excited to see all the hard work across various industries is solving problems to get more renewable energy into networks.