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IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first
- onchainintel 6mo agoSooooo....you're telling me there's a chance! Solar FTW!
- meibo 6mo agoMaybe "accidentally killing fossil fuels" will be DT's singular good deed
- stavros 6mo agoYou can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.
- boxed 6mo agoI 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?
- stavros 6mo agoIf 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?
- vidarh 6mo agoMao'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.
- stavros 6mo 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.
- decimalenough 6mo agoTrump'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.
- stavros 6mo agoThis is off topic for what we're discussing (whether his accidental positive changes can be attributed to him), and agrees with my general point.
- decimalenough 6mo agoNo, it doesn't, because you're asserting he is "trying to create negative ones".
- stavros 6mo agoWe were clearly talking about the context of energy sources, where he's trying to push something he calls "clean coal". What's the positive outcome there?
- deaux 6mo ago> 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!".
- boxed 6mo ago> 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? His belief that the jews were the problem was the issue. But Germany has still not recovered scientifically or technologically. He was just as wrong about jews as Mao was about sparrows, or Stalin about wheat. I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Millions died in all three cases.
- rexpop 6mo agoAccidental evil? No. Fascism is fundamentally driven by a realized nihilism where pure destruction is the actual goal, rather than an accident. From the very beginning, the Nazi party explicitly promised the German people wedding bells and death, including their own deaths and the death of the Germans. The population reportedly cheered for this not because they misunderstood the message, but because they actively desired to wager their own destruction against the death of others. According to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler operated in a world "in which even success makes no sense,"[0] meaning the movement prioritized an "intense line of pure destruction and abolition"[1] over any constructive political goals. This intentional drive toward self-destruction culminated at the end of World War II. In his 1945 Telegram 71, Hitler declared, "if the war is lost, may the nation perish". Instead of trying to protect his country in defeat, Hitler actively joined forces with his enemies to complete the destruction of his own people by ordering the obliteration of Germany's remaining civil reserves, water, and fuel. The devastation of Germany was therefore not an accidental failure to achieve greatness, but the logical, intended conclusion of the "suicidal state" fulfilling its death drive. 0. Joachim Fest, Hitler and The Face of the Third Reich 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
- fxwin 6mo agoi think that's why they used the word "accidentally"
- stavros 6mo agoLet me rephrase: You can't really attribute to someone something they did accidentally while trying to do the opposite.
- citrin_ru 6mo agoIn a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.
- dv_dt 6mo agoA 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.
- iso1631 6mo agoThe world's most effective ecoterrorist. Greenpeace should name their next ship after him.
- Tade0 6mo agoJust 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.
- marcosdumay 6mo agoThe 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...
- pfdietz 6mo agoHe'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.
- ElectronCharge 6mo agoIllegal orders?
- pingou 6mo 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).
- KumaBear 6mo agoCost is the barrier
- xbmcuser 6mo agoCost 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.
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoNew 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.
- red75prime 6mo agoA 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/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
- decimalenough 6mo agoVery 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.
- iso1631 6mo 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
- leonidasrup 6mo agoYou 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-climate-change https://www.nsf.gov/news/volcanic-coal-burning-siberia-led-c...
- ilogik 6mo agoWhat about nuclear?
- 6mo ago
- internet_points 6mo 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.)
- Ekaros 6mo agoNo, you are comparing watthours to watts. At 90% used factor 12GW would be ~95 TWh.
- internet_points 6mo agoooh, of course, thank you
- mayama 6mo agoMore over that 12GW is start of construction. New commissioned nuclear is 2.7GW in 2025 and 7.4GW in 2024. 2024 is probably an anomaly.
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoNo 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.
- azath92 6mo agoI made the same gut assumption, and it points to either poor writing, or deliberately misreading writing that they mix units like that in the same paragraph, where presumably the idea is that we get a feel for growth in both? Its probably nitpick correct, because the 12GW is planned capacity, while the solar might be measured use? but simple assumptins or conversions, as another comment points out, get you comparable numbers. taking the title into account, the whole article is a little bit smoke and mirrors on clear communication, despite having plenty of numbers. Thats a shame because it sounds like even unvarnished its good results!
- internet_points 6mo 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-q4-sales-inflated/ https://electrek.co/2026/04/16/tesla-cybertruck-spacex-1279-... ;-)
- jve 6mo ago1279 units vs total 20'000'000 units or 0,006% doesn't make a difference What is interesting is that tesla had 1'636'129 deliveries in 2025 which accounts for 8,1% of that number. That means other vendors are healthy and it is a good thing for EV market.
- childintime 6mo 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.
- XorNot 6mo agoSolar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical. Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter right now. I am literally paying that at the pump. I will actually happily pay more then that if the diesel were actually renewable, but instead it doesn't exist.
- triceratops 6mo ago> Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical. "Predictions are hard, especially about the future".
- marcosdumay 6mo agoOf course they are. We aren't going to be able to take hydrocarbons out of the ground forever. You won't burn them in your truck, though. That's an almost certainty. But whatever use they still get when we end transitioning to solar will be met by synthetic hydrocarbons, there's no point on keeping the entire oil production and distribution industries when you can just make a bit of it near the point of use.
- pfdietz 6mo ago
- spwa4 6mo agoI wonder what political and trade consequences can be expected when oil actually does start seeing real decreased usage. I mean one obvious thing has already started: governments taxing the sun (well, solar panels) pretty heavily (meaning above VAT), which I imagine will increase, and what the result will be. It's weird to say this, but solar panel smuggling is actually already a thing now. I used to have a Louis XIV painting somewhere ... Oil appears to be 33% of total energy usage, and if you count all fossil fuels (oil, coal, nat. gas) it's 81%. What happens when that starts dropping.
- jahnu 6mo agoJust to add to your point; The final energy demand is much less than the primary energy we produce due to the energy costs of extraction, refining, transportation, and inefficient end use. According to Kingsmill Bond (great name btw) on Dave Roberts' Volts podcast if we magically could replace all fossil energy with renewables today the final energy use would only be ~30% of today's final energy use. "We’re pouring, from our calculations, two thirds of the primary energy into the air and wasting it." - Kingsmill Bond https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable https://www.volts.wtf/p/clean-electrification-is-inevitable
- jabl 6mo agoSee also Kingsmill Bond's slidedeck at https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-revolution/#full-slidedeck https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...
- SiempreViernes 6mo agoA pretty big one is the hollowing out of the international power oil producers have over the life of fossil importers; the middle east becomes pretty irrelevant for Latin America if you don't need their oil, and maybe Lebanon will avoid an US invasion if the newly discovered gas cannot find buyers anyway.
- quote 6mo agoI'd argue that the decreased usage of oil has -to some degree- already started, e.g. Chinas crude imports have dropped the last two years in a row and yet they're still adding ever more EVs at a spectacular rate. There's practically no way but down for those numbers. It's mostly similar for the EU, though they're not as aggressive re EVs.
- zipy124 6mo agoMore importantly, for the first time ever we generate more electricity from renewables than coal!
- quote 6mo agoWith PV being the absolutely cheapest form to get energy in most regions of the world already or soon-ish (and even highly useful electric energy at that), I fully expect our capital machines to pour ever more resources into its deployment. This will go on until we have plastered some percentage of the earths surface with PV, there's fundamentally no real constraint to doing so. Along the way, over the next 10-30 years we will have replaced most major fossil burning things - the only way you will be able to compete with PV power is if you're sitting right on top of a gas field in a location with little sunlight and no grid connection. Incidentally, with ever-falling battery storage costs, I'd assume the need for large interconnect buildout to be diminishing, but there's lots of inertia in that system so societies might end up with some underused assets. Still better than all the stranded assets I suppose, but still.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- gregwebs 6mo agoThese 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 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.
- locallost 6mo agoWhile 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.
- philipallstar 6mo 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.
- triceratops 6mo ago
- carefree-bob 6mo agoThis is a very misleading title. What they mean is that solar capacity contributes more to energy growth than any other factor. In terms of actual energy generation, solar remains far below coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear and wind. It is basically at the bottom, above only "biofuels" as a source of energy. But the derivative with respect to time of solar was higher over a one year period.
- anon291 6mo agoFree limitless energy from the sky with super cheap components. Literal no brainer