> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
Which is quite surprising, because on an irradiance map[0] The Netherlands and Germany have some of the worst per-year solar output in the world - an installation in the Mojave Desert would produce literally twice the amount of power with the same panels! And especially The Netherlands doesn't exactly have a lot of empty land either.
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
Netherlands is mostly rooftop solar, which is easy and cheap to install there. No permitting required, previous net metering policies gave a very predictable ROI and cost is very reasonable: say 3k eur for 8 panels including installation, that would get you like 3000kwh/year. Panels would be just over 2k, the crew to get it done like 600-800 euros. Electricity ain't electricity cheap there to the point the ROI would be just a couple years with the net metering. You'd be stupid not to get it at that point and a few thousand bucks is a very feasible investment for most people without having to resort to financing.
I live in Texas now where there's a lot more sun and a lot more electricity usage (though it's cheaper per kwh). Panels and inverters are a significant percentage more expensive due to tariffs and stuff, but that's not even the biggest cost driver. It's the permitting and installation costs that make it so so so much more expensive. If I could get a bunch of panels on my roof for $5k, they'd be there already. But typical costs I'm seeing is low five figures which is well beyond my appetite or electricity costs.
A big part of it is that The Netherlands has quite generous subsidies for roof solar panels on your home: you may subtract total power delivered to the grid from total power consumed when calculating your yearly electricity bill. This effectively means you can use excess solar generated during summer months to reduce your winter electricity bill, nullifying one of the biggest downsides of PV (intermittent generation).
The subsidy is set to expire next year, however. Although it was extremely successful in getting People to install roof solar, it is a severe adverse incentive for home battery systems (why store your generated power in a battery when you can give it to the grid and get it 100% back for free whenever), and it is making electricity more expensive for those who cannot install solar.
Looking at yearly solar irradiation actually underplays the disadvantage we have in northern Europe in terms of PV. If all we had to do is built twice the capacity that would be one thing but our winters are quite dark, making PV energy generation almost negible around the winter solstice. Whatever generation capacity we can displace in the summer we still have to keep around to make up the shortfall in December. I love when I see solar panels here but rationally speaking Germany and the Netherlands should be among the late adopters.
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
The main issue is that China is really big (emits around three times as much total CO2 as the US), so "38 reactors" sounds like a lot but meanwhile they're operating >1000 coal power plants.
China is also a Command Economy. The Party has decided that it will run more coal plants more intermittently, allowing it to decarbonize at low risk.
500GW of power at 40% utilisation gets you the same amount of energy as 250GW of power at 80% utilisation, and [roughly] the same CO2 emissions. But 500GW of Solar PV is shadowed effectively by the former where it would not be possible with the latter (without ludicrous amounts of storage). You couldn't choose that in the US or Europe without some kind of sophisticated compensation scheme because it's not profitable, but China does not need to care whether it is profitable only whether it can be done.
I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.
And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.
Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
> The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
The answer is obviously that it delivers when they don't.
Every power plant has to hit a certain average price per kWh, and the ones with a variable operating cost (fossil fuels) also need a minimum price in order to generate right now, since the cost of fuel is a significant part of their costs.
What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low.
> We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants.
This is just putting a battery storage unit at the site of an existing power plant because it already has a stout grid connection.
> Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
Pushing the bottom up during the times when other generation methods have low output does help with the hard part.
> Except turning off when prices are too low for too long
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
That’s for new nuclear. Existing nuclear reactors operate on the whim of the markets.
For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar
Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.
> Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
>
The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Electric generation is a business and existing sites will be prime locations for new panels (likely straightforward to permit, connection to the grid, etc.).
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).
The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime.
That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game. And all of that is made even worse because of the whole "nuclear" part, with plenty of critical parts becoming irradiated and essentially impossible to touch unless you let it rest for a couple of decades. On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.
Hopefully, small modular reactors (SMRs) bring down construction costs and build times significantly. The economics would be better than 2010s fossil fuel prices if companies like NuScale and TerraPower deliver on their ambitious, but attainable promises.
Suburban America is dying because it is operating like a Ponzi scheme: the property taxes aren't high enough to pay for the long-term maintenance and replacement of infra, and for the past handful of decades it has compensated by filling the budget holes with one-off windfalls due to taxes on new development.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
In order for renewables like solar and wind energy to truly take the burden off a grid, we have to have large capacity energy storage solutions that balance the grid over a 8+ hour period. That way we can handle peak demand of the grid during high load which often happens when there's little light and on hot days when the wind doesn't generate nearly as much electricity.
Transmission lines can act like storage when there is PV to the east or west of you. This doesn’t remove the need for storage, but can dramatically reduce it.
It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Idea, which unfortunately won't be feasible until MAGA dies:
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
There have often been private deals between renewables and big energy customers but the finances don't always work out how you might expect. Renewable projects are built using debt with interest rates largely based on the likelihood of generating revenue by selling electricity. And because of the long time scale interest can snowball to form a substantial part of the cost. Having a guaranteed customer in the form of a data centre is balanced by the risk that they might go out of business. You are basically coupling the risk of the generator to the risk of the consumer. That is why CfD style schemes are often favoured because it is just a safer source of revenue. Obviously hyper scalers have access to very cheap credit, but they may end up paying more for the electricity.
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
It is a shame that nuclear power has stagnated - we could have been moving towards fossil fuel free grid half a century ago. We've lost decades of progress there. But it's a good thing that solar power is coming into its own more and more.
Where we lost decades of progress was governments pouring enormous amounts of R&D money into nuclear instead of renewables. We got a nuclear a head start that turned out to be a dead end. We could have gotten solar, wind and storage cost competitive with fossils decades earlier. And as a side effect kept the west competitive in energy tech.
Yeah, nuclear is fine. It just at this point it can’t really compete with solar+battery for how quickly you can bring things online. The 10 or 15 years required to build a nuclear plant is pretty devastating for it when you can build up solar in 1-2 years instead.
It also can't compete on cost. Nuclear is crazy expensive and prone to cost overruns, so no market party is willing to build it without the government taking on all of the financial risks. And with the rapidly evolving power landscape the long payback time only makes things worse.
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
That's not fire. We might colloquially call it fire, but that's not what it is.
Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.
There needs to be more general understanding of energy density and scalability, which is why I don't think we'll get away from fossil fuels without nuclear or fusion.
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
> Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
I've been forced to use Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 at my job for the past 4 years, and the longer I use it, the more it makes me wish I was using OpenBSD w/ xfce.
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
Your four year old paper shows wind+solar costs as on par with nuclear in the final (LFSCOE95) model in the ERCOT market before factoring in dropping battery farm costs.
Other papers exist with a different opinion (eg: Australia's more recent CSIRO energy report finds nuclear not providing bang for the buck in the Australian market)
Further, despite claiming Level Full System Costs, there's no factoring in for externalities - eg: climate costs of dragging out fossil fuels while waiting for nuclear to come online, political costs of being steadily reliant on outside countries for fuel and supply (cost of gas to non gas nations, etc).
There are other issues - it's a paper with an opinion - not the foundational rock you want to base strong assertions on, as you did.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
This oft quoted idea that nukes are only expensive because of incompetent regulations, and if they just got out of poor nuclear a way it would be affordable, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
Are we burning the battery materials into gases and sending the results into the atmosphere? No, then we are unlikely to run out of materials on a primary or secondary, recycled, basis. Not to mention the diversity of choices available for chemistries and storage
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
After its commercial span is over, over 90% solar and battery materials can be recycled to make new panels and batteries. Compare that with nuclear where we need to stow away basically-forever-radioactive spent material.
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
> I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments
Idk, when you because of that implementation, for 20 years pay for the energy 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy, that seems pretty fanatical by me.
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
If China has decided to save the world from climate change as a second order effect from keeping their deflationary manufacturing system operating and for national energy security reasons, I have no complaints. I do not care why, it is immaterial, just keep the solar, wind, batteries, and EVs printing as fast as possible to the world. We have to get to net zero as fast as possible, and then sequester all of the carbon emissions emitted as climate carbon debt since the Industrial Revolution started. That’s a lot of work left to go.
- Official curtailment figures — effectively, the share of renewable energy that could have been generated but was never sent out into the world, because of insufficient grid capacity or demand — suggest about 9% of wind and solar energy was wasted in the first half of this year. That almost certainly underestimates the problem, given the scale of green production.
- China could have generated an extra 401 terawatt-hours of power in the first six months alone, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a nonprofit supporting efforts to curb pollution — nearly as much as Spain and the Philippines’ combined annual generation. [My note: !!!]
Ember Energy: China Energy Transition Review 2026:
China’s energy transition is moving toward “building while breaking,” as its clean energy system begins assuming functions long performed by fossil fuels - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi... - September 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> If China maintains expansion at the 430-gigawatt-per-year level, installed wind and solar capacity would reach roughly 2,700 gigawatts by 2027. That would be more than five times the entire wind and solar capacity in the EU. Whether this value is realistic depends mainly on two factors: expansion of high-voltage transmission lines connecting generation and consumption regions, and political will to actually decommission the coal power plant fleet.
Every year renewables consume another ~10% of fossil generation in China, and should push out almost all fossil generation in the next 5-10 years, at current deployment rates. China is relying on coal for peaking until their battery deployment rates catch up to negate the need for coal generators.
- "As the power system integrates more renewables, the true value of batteries to China’s energy transition is becoming undeniable," Yang said. China added a record amount of new battery storage facilities in 2025, ending the year with more than half of global capacity. Growth has continued this year, with installed lithium-ion battery storage reaching almost 150 gigawatts by the end of the first quarter, according to Ember. The country is targeting 300 gigawatts of battery storage capacity by 2030, up from 136 at the end of 2025, in addition to expanding its fleet of longer-duration pumped hydro storage to around 160 gigawatts from 66.
- The government ended co-location requirements last year and most new battery storage projects are now standalone systems that can earn revenue through a variety of ways, such as by purchasing electricity when prices are low and selling it when they rise.
- Still, China can do more to improve utilization as its systems still fall short of the internationally recognized benchmark of about 350 cycles a year, Yang said. If they had reached that level last year, they could have captured and stored an additional 23 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity, enough to power Singapore for about five months.
- BNEF analysts attribute China’s lead in the sector largely to policy support. Beijing identified LDES as a crucial component of its net-zero roadmap in 2023. The following year, China’s energy regulator launched 56 pilot projects, which helped launch the current boom. The country has built a massive lead in other climate tech sectors as well, from solar panels to hydrogen.
I am mostly pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
The Sun is #1 die nukes die!
very happy now.
had some issues with my off grid solar powered house and shop last week, but bounced back quickly and ran a small welder
as part of the system verification test,
still running massivly outdated gear, holding out till I can integrate car charging in a bigger upgrade.
saw a smaller farm last week that paved a small padock out by the road with 30~50 kw grid tie array , ground mount to concrete blocks, drop it and run, zero out the powerbill.
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
With this being said, Australia, Netherlands and Germany are leading in solar capacity per capita according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
[0]: https://globalsolaratlas.info/
I live in Texas now where there's a lot more sun and a lot more electricity usage (though it's cheaper per kwh). Panels and inverters are a significant percentage more expensive due to tariffs and stuff, but that's not even the biggest cost driver. It's the permitting and installation costs that make it so so so much more expensive. If I could get a bunch of panels on my roof for $5k, they'd be there already. But typical costs I'm seeing is low five figures which is well beyond my appetite or electricity costs.
The subsidy is set to expire next year, however. Although it was extremely successful in getting People to install roof solar, it is a severe adverse incentive for home battery systems (why store your generated power in a battery when you can give it to the grid and get it 100% back for free whenever), and it is making electricity more expensive for those who cannot install solar.
They will probably end up less dependent on oil which is a good thing for them, considering the conflicts this causes
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Denmark had peak coal early (2003) due to early investments in wind power. Coal is now practically gone.
We might see China get the same shift in electricity source as Denmark had over the past 20 years, just much faster.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
500GW of power at 40% utilisation gets you the same amount of energy as 250GW of power at 80% utilisation, and [roughly] the same CO2 emissions. But 500GW of Solar PV is shadowed effectively by the former where it would not be possible with the latter (without ludicrous amounts of storage). You couldn't choose that in the US or Europe without some kind of sophisticated compensation scheme because it's not profitable, but China does not need to care whether it is profitable only whether it can be done.
I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.
And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.
Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
The answer is obviously that it delivers when they don't.
Every power plant has to hit a certain average price per kWh, and the ones with a variable operating cost (fossil fuels) also need a minimum price in order to generate right now, since the cost of fuel is a significant part of their costs.
What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low.
> We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants.
This is just putting a battery storage unit at the site of an existing power plant because it already has a stout grid connection.
> Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
Pushing the bottom up during the times when other generation methods have low output does help with the hard part.
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar
Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.
https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
> The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).
At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
Late is better than never.
What a time to be alive.
Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB4hB9QJX8
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
https://www.statista.com/chart/33754/countries-with-the-larg...
https://www.techpolicy.press/us-critical-mineral-aggression-...
Battery storage is only a solution if you can actually generate a surplus of energy that can be stored, which is not a given.
We absolutely need to move off of fossil fuels but thinking that renewables are the only solution seems very short-sighted to me.
Other papers exist with a different opinion (eg: Australia's more recent CSIRO energy report finds nuclear not providing bang for the buck in the Australian market)
Further, despite claiming Level Full System Costs, there's no factoring in for externalities - eg: climate costs of dragging out fossil fuels while waiting for nuclear to come online, political costs of being steadily reliant on outside countries for fuel and supply (cost of gas to non gas nations, etc).
There are other issues - it's a paper with an opinion - not the foundational rock you want to base strong assertions on, as you did.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.
There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
Would be interesting to know how much nuclear vs solar they are building per year domestically.
we literally already have salt battery
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
Whenever there is a discussion about nuclear I always remember this XKCD https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Idk, when you because of that implementation, for 20 years pay for the energy 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy, that seems pretty fanatical by me.
Not supported by the stats in TFA:
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
and this: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/His...
China’s AI Dominance Rests on Harnessing Excess Energy - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-china-ai-energy-futu... | https://archive.today/6dq8B - October 8th, 2026
- Official curtailment figures — effectively, the share of renewable energy that could have been generated but was never sent out into the world, because of insufficient grid capacity or demand — suggest about 9% of wind and solar energy was wasted in the first half of this year. That almost certainly underestimates the problem, given the scale of green production.
- China could have generated an extra 401 terawatt-hours of power in the first six months alone, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a nonprofit supporting efforts to curb pollution — nearly as much as Spain and the Philippines’ combined annual generation. [My note: !!!]
Ember Energy: China Energy Transition Review 2026: China’s energy transition is moving toward “building while breaking,” as its clean energy system begins assuming functions long performed by fossil fuels - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi... - September 2026
Bloomberg: Solar Surpasses Coal as China’s Top Source of Power Capacity - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-01/solar-sur... | https://archive.today/i3TSe - August 31st, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
China: Renewables now top 60 percent of capacity - https://denkstrom.org/en/goodnews/china-renewables-500-gw-ca... - June 1st, 2026
> If China maintains expansion at the 430-gigawatt-per-year level, installed wind and solar capacity would reach roughly 2,700 gigawatts by 2027. That would be more than five times the entire wind and solar capacity in the EU. Whether this value is realistic depends mainly on two factors: expansion of high-voltage transmission lines connecting generation and consumption regions, and political will to actually decommission the coal power plant fleet.
Every year renewables consume another ~10% of fossil generation in China, and should push out almost all fossil generation in the next 5-10 years, at current deployment rates. China is relying on coal for peaking until their battery deployment rates catch up to negate the need for coal generators.
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
- "As the power system integrates more renewables, the true value of batteries to China’s energy transition is becoming undeniable," Yang said. China added a record amount of new battery storage facilities in 2025, ending the year with more than half of global capacity. Growth has continued this year, with installed lithium-ion battery storage reaching almost 150 gigawatts by the end of the first quarter, according to Ember. The country is targeting 300 gigawatts of battery storage capacity by 2030, up from 136 at the end of 2025, in addition to expanding its fleet of longer-duration pumped hydro storage to around 160 gigawatts from 66.
- The government ended co-location requirements last year and most new battery storage projects are now standalone systems that can earn revenue through a variety of ways, such as by purchasing electricity when prices are low and selling it when they rise.
- Still, China can do more to improve utilization as its systems still fall short of the internationally recognized benchmark of about 350 cycles a year, Yang said. If they had reached that level last year, they could have captured and stored an additional 23 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity, enough to power Singapore for about five months.
How China Built a Big Lead in Global Race for Batteries That Last for Days - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-03/china-s-b... | https://archive.today/i7n3B - March 3rd, 2026 (Control -F "China Leads on Batteries That Can Store Power for Days" graphic)
- BNEF analysts attribute China’s lead in the sector largely to policy support. Beijing identified LDES as a crucial component of its net-zero roadmap in 2023. The following year, China’s energy regulator launched 56 pilot projects, which helped launch the current boom. The country has built a massive lead in other climate tech sectors as well, from solar panels to hydrogen.
("China speed")
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Two different tools for different things.
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
The Great Solar Wall: China doubles down on its ambitious effort to tame deserts - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3363108/grea...
Triple win: solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00516-8
Swathes of Earth are turning into desert — but the degradation can be stopped - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03621-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
What is your note, precisely?