7 ms·

Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins: - California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar - Spain

by runako 6mo ago

Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins: - California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar - Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind - Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar - The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind - Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar There's real momentum happening.

KevinMS 6mo ago
Isn't that the list of high energy prices and blackouts?
- tialaramex 6mo ago
  Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple. Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...
  - philipallstar 6mo ago
    > Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense Can you cite this please?
    - tialaramex 6mo ago
      Specifically both the Tories and Reform pledge to eliminate the "Green levy" funding for renewables. But that funding doesn't just vanish in a puff of smoke after voters pay it, it's paying for us to have renewable energy generation. The very stupid part is that we spent a lot of money already and they can't reverse time's arrow, they can't unspend that money, they can only choose (and at least publicly are choosing) not to reap the reward. Edited: Ah, maybe you want a citation for the specific phrasing, in which case that's fair, I cannot cite a UK politician, on the right or anywhere else, who has said those exact words.
      - lpcvoid 6mo ago
        In the UK, Reform probably gets paid by russia to be anti-renewable, I highly doubt they believe that themselves.
        ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
        The anti-renewable policies would cost the UK a roughly similar amount to Brexit. Some random numbers: Renewables reduced UK energy costs by 100 Billion over the 2010-2023 period (despite just getting started and costs continuing to decline) The conservative "cut the green crap" changes around 2013 that are milder versions of what Farage would do, add a cost of about 5-15 billion a year (ongoing) in higher bills. EVs will be 30 to 70 Billion a year savings once you get to 33 million. He's also against grid batteries that will save about 5 to 15 billions per year once scaled. Brexit is about 100 billion a year according to Bloomberg.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago
  Are you referring to California? IIRC the prices are driven by several factors, including expensive payouts for wildfire damage, but there isn't anything suggesting that renewables is a major factor. And rolling blackouts haven't been a thing since 2020. That might have been arguably related to renewables since they were experiencing abnormally hot climate change related heat waves that were extending into the evening hours and driving high air conditioning load beyond the time solar was prepared to handle it. I believe that in the meantime they've installed quite a number of batteries, which is why it is not a problem now.
jacomoRodriguez 6mo ago
Where can I look up this numbers? (Just curious)
- arrosenberg 6mo ago
  For California, CAISO publishes a ton of data. Here is daily fuel mix - https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso You can also see Texas (ERCOT), New York and a few other operators.
- Tade0 6mo ago
  https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
  - marcocaccin 6mo ago
    This is a goldmine of data, how did you find out about it? Thank you so much for sharing
    - Tade0 6mo ago
      By accident really - I heard that electricity prices were decided in hourly auctions, started googling it and there it was. The project is (partly) open source and whenever some data provider changes their API, they welcome contributions to address that: https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib
vpribish 6mo ago
good hilights! but - and i mean this kindly - you are starting to talk like an AI: "overshadowing real wins" "There's real momentum happening".
onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading. It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels. Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at the best time of the year and not the full year? Or am I looking at sources that are >1 year out of date and in one year they've jumped from ~70% renewable to ~83%?
- lokar 6mo ago
  AIUI, there has been excess solar at peak, but batteries have growing very fast. That might have caused a big change even in a year.
- sesm 6mo ago
  Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.
  - ZeWaka 6mo ago
    Solar will no longer be renewable in 5 billion years as well.
    - zekrioca 6mo ago
      But it is today
  - krupan 6mo ago
    And wood, coal, and oil are renewable. It's funny that we have fixated on "renewable" when carbon in the atmosphere is the problem, isn't it?
    - micw 6mo ago
      No, coal and oil is not. Since we have micro organisms that can consume wood, coal and oil will never be produced again. > During the Carboniferous period, massive amounts of plant matter accumulated to form coal because microorganisms and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down lignin, a tough, aromatic polymer in woody plants.
bopjesvla 6mo ago
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  This is just goalpost moving. Only a couple of decades ago we were at a solid 0% everywhere.
  - bopjesvla 6mo ago
    > The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass. As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.
    - NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
      Nah about 5% of electricity is from biomass, not 33%. The 33% figure is regarding gross energy production, not electricity. Otherwise agreed.
  - 0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago
    hydro electric dams and wind turbines exist since, at least, the 1880s. [^1][^2] and if wasn't for ronald reagan, the united states might have achieved 20% solar power energy production before the year 2000. [^3] these are not new (two decade) technologies. [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#History [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#History [^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Development_and_deployment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Development_and_de...
- 6mo ago
dalyons 6mo ago
California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster 2022 - 48% gas power on grid 2025 - 25% gas power on grid What insane progress.
- mpweiher 6mo ago
  Most expensive electricity in the contiguous United States. By quite a margin. By contrast, Georgia, which has to pay for the "disastrous" Vogtle 3/4 nuclear construction project, pays less than half that. Remember: disastrous nuclear projects are significantly better than renewable successes.
  - hparadiz 6mo ago
    That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July. The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.
    - QuercusMax 6mo ago
      For peace of mind I'd like to be able to run my EV (24kwh battery) and spare fridge / freezer off home solar. Anything more than that is gravy, and I'd rather invest in things like Oregon Community Solar.
  - mrroper 6mo ago
    12 Billion in loan guarantees doesn't get paid in bills and isn't an accounting trick that costs nothing: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60682 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60682
    - Dylan16807 6mo ago
      That's a really big and generic article. What are you saying this loan guarantee cost?
offmycloud 6mo ago
California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors? 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- dalyons 6mo ago
  83 renewable isn’t right, but it’s up to 67% clean in 2025, which is still pretty impressive
- runako 6mo ago
  One thing about power generation stats like these is they are incredibly sensitive to examination dates given the rapid growth of (especially) solar. That EIA site cuts off in August. The same EIA report shows solar grew 17% from 2024-2025. You can plug in your own assumptions to the solar growth curve since then, as well as your assumptions about the natural gas curve given the ride natgas has been on since August. EIA also produces live status on the daily generation mix[1]. 69% today was wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro. 12% nuclear, so some of this is whether you consider nuclear renewable or not. CA's power generation may cost more, but the pricing (for raw power at least) should be a lot more predictable than those of us dependent on fossil fuels. Natural gas, for example, has undergone a ~100% price round-trip in the last 12 months. 1 - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_generation_mix/regional/REG-CAL https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_...
  - ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
    Behind the meter solar, on both homes and factories, is about 5% in California and that gets missed from these stats too.
NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures? I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable. For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc. Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.
rstuart4133 6mo ago
There is pushback here against the figures you are quoting. Here is something real. South Australia electricity production averaged 75% from renewables last year. Wikipedia (for 2023) put it at 70%: "70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources. This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia They averaged 75% in 2025. South Australia has no hydro to speak of. They have a some local gas, but no local coal. They do have good wind and solar resources. To me it looks like the transition was driven largely by immediate pragmatism concerns, as renewables are so much cheaper than gas. The politicians make a lot of noise about it of course, but I suspect if they had a local cheap source of coal the outcome would have been different. Their electricity prices are high by Australian standards - but they have to pay for the gas they import to cover the missing 25%, and gas is by far the most expensive form of generation in Australia. And they are paying for all the new equipment this transition requires.
dyauspitr 6mo ago
You’re a bit off on the California numbers. It’s off my about 10%. Either ways, what a state. It’s basically a country on its own.

by runako 6mo ago

KevinMS 6mo ago

Isn't that the list of high energy prices and blackouts?

tialaramex 6mo ago
Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple. Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...
- philipallstar 6mo ago
  > Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense Can you cite this please?
  - tialaramex 6mo ago
    Specifically both the Tories and Reform pledge to eliminate the "Green levy" funding for renewables. But that funding doesn't just vanish in a puff of smoke after voters pay it, it's paying for us to have renewable energy generation. The very stupid part is that we spent a lot of money already and they can't reverse time's arrow, they can't unspend that money, they can only choose (and at least publicly are choosing) not to reap the reward. Edited: Ah, maybe you want a citation for the specific phrasing, in which case that's fair, I cannot cite a UK politician, on the right or anywhere else, who has said those exact words.
    - lpcvoid 6mo ago
      In the UK, Reform probably gets paid by russia to be anti-renewable, I highly doubt they believe that themselves.
      - ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
        The anti-renewable policies would cost the UK a roughly similar amount to Brexit. Some random numbers: Renewables reduced UK energy costs by 100 Billion over the 2010-2023 period (despite just getting started and costs continuing to decline) The conservative "cut the green crap" changes around 2013 that are milder versions of what Farage would do, add a cost of about 5-15 billion a year (ongoing) in higher bills. EVs will be 30 to 70 Billion a year savings once you get to 33 million. He's also against grid batteries that will save about 5 to 15 billions per year once scaled. Brexit is about 100 billion a year according to Bloomberg.
rootusrootus 6mo ago
Are you referring to California? IIRC the prices are driven by several factors, including expensive payouts for wildfire damage, but there isn't anything suggesting that renewables is a major factor. And rolling blackouts haven't been a thing since 2020. That might have been arguably related to renewables since they were experiencing abnormally hot climate change related heat waves that were extending into the evening hours and driving high air conditioning load beyond the time solar was prepared to handle it. I believe that in the meantime they've installed quite a number of batteries, which is why it is not a problem now.

jacomoRodriguez 6mo ago

Where can I look up this numbers? (Just curious)

arrosenberg 6mo ago
For California, CAISO publishes a ton of data. Here is daily fuel mix - https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso You can also see Texas (ERCOT), New York and a few other operators.
Tade0 6mo ago
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
- marcocaccin 6mo ago
  This is a goldmine of data, how did you find out about it? Thank you so much for sharing
  - Tade0 6mo ago
    By accident really - I heard that electricity prices were decided in hourly auctions, started googling it and there it was. The project is (partly) open source and whenever some data provider changes their API, they welcome contributions to address that: https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib

vpribish 6mo ago

good hilights! but - and i mean this kindly - you are starting to talk like an AI: "overshadowing real wins" "There's real momentum happening".

onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago

> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading. It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels. Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at the best time of the year and not the full year? Or am I looking at sources that are >1 year out of date and in one year they've jumped from ~70% renewable to ~83%?

lokar 6mo ago
AIUI, there has been excess solar at peak, but batteries have growing very fast. That might have caused a big change even in a year.
sesm 6mo ago
Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.
- ZeWaka 6mo ago
  Solar will no longer be renewable in 5 billion years as well.
  - zekrioca 6mo ago
    But it is today
- krupan 6mo ago
  And wood, coal, and oil are renewable. It's funny that we have fixated on "renewable" when carbon in the atmosphere is the problem, isn't it?
  - micw 6mo ago
    No, coal and oil is not. Since we have micro organisms that can consume wood, coal and oil will never be produced again. > During the Carboniferous period, massive amounts of plant matter accumulated to form coal because microorganisms and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down lignin, a tough, aromatic polymer in woody plants.

bopjesvla 6mo ago

> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.

IshKebab 6mo ago
This is just goalpost moving. Only a couple of decades ago we were at a solid 0% everywhere.
- bopjesvla 6mo ago
  > The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass. As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.
  - NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
    Nah about 5% of electricity is from biomass, not 33%. The 33% figure is regarding gross energy production, not electricity. Otherwise agreed.
- 0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago
  hydro electric dams and wind turbines exist since, at least, the 1880s. [^1][^2] and if wasn't for ronald reagan, the united states might have achieved 20% solar power energy production before the year 2000. [^3] these are not new (two decade) technologies. [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#History [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#History [^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Development_and_deployment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Development_and_de...
6mo ago

dalyons 6mo ago

California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster 2022 - 48% gas power on grid 2025 - 25% gas power on grid What insane progress.

mpweiher 6mo ago
Most expensive electricity in the contiguous United States. By quite a margin. By contrast, Georgia, which has to pay for the "disastrous" Vogtle 3/4 nuclear construction project, pays less than half that. Remember: disastrous nuclear projects are significantly better than renewable successes.
- hparadiz 6mo ago
  That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July. The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.
  - QuercusMax 6mo ago
    For peace of mind I'd like to be able to run my EV (24kwh battery) and spare fridge / freezer off home solar. Anything more than that is gravy, and I'd rather invest in things like Oregon Community Solar.
- mrroper 6mo ago
  12 Billion in loan guarantees doesn't get paid in bills and isn't an accounting trick that costs nothing: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60682 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60682
  - Dylan16807 6mo ago
    That's a really big and generic article. What are you saying this loan guarantee cost?

offmycloud 6mo ago

California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors? 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
dalyons 6mo ago
83 renewable isn’t right, but it’s up to 67% clean in 2025, which is still pretty impressive
runako 6mo ago
One thing about power generation stats like these is they are incredibly sensitive to examination dates given the rapid growth of (especially) solar. That EIA site cuts off in August. The same EIA report shows solar grew 17% from 2024-2025. You can plug in your own assumptions to the solar growth curve since then, as well as your assumptions about the natural gas curve given the ride natgas has been on since August. EIA also produces live status on the daily generation mix[1]. 69% today was wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro. 12% nuclear, so some of this is whether you consider nuclear renewable or not. CA's power generation may cost more, but the pricing (for raw power at least) should be a lot more predictable than those of us dependent on fossil fuels. Natural gas, for example, has undergone a ~100% price round-trip in the last 12 months. 1 - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_generation_mix/regional/REG-CAL https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_...
- ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
  Behind the meter solar, on both homes and factories, is about 5% in California and that gets missed from these stats too.

NoLinkToMe 6mo ago

Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures? I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable. For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc. Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.

rstuart4133 6mo ago

There is pushback here against the figures you are quoting. Here is something real. South Australia electricity production averaged 75% from renewables last year. Wikipedia (for 2023) put it at 70%: "70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources. This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia They averaged 75% in 2025. South Australia has no hydro to speak of. They have a some local gas, but no local coal. They do have good wind and solar resources. To me it looks like the transition was driven largely by immediate pragmatism concerns, as renewables are so much cheaper than gas. The politicians make a lot of noise about it of course, but I suspect if they had a local cheap source of coal the outcome would have been different. Their electricity prices are high by Australian standards - but they have to pay for the gas they import to cover the missing 25%, and gas is by far the most expensive form of generation in Australia. And they are paying for all the new equipment this transition requires.

dyauspitr 6mo ago

You’re a bit off on the California numbers. It’s off my about 10%. Either ways, what a state. It’s basically a country on its own.