alt.hn

4/20/2026 at 7:19:27 AM

IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

 https://electrek.co/2026/04/19/iea-solar-overtakes-all-energy-sources-in-a-major-global-first/

by Klaster_1

4/20/2026 at 9:34:23 AM

Very misleading title: it should be "Solar leads global energy growth for the first time".

Still good news, but a long, long way from solar becoming the world's primary source of energy.

by decimalenough

4/20/2026 at 2:04:03 PM

Yes, from the source report, for total generation capacity, solar is in a distant sixth:

Coal: 10858 TWh

Natural Gas: 6822 TWh

Hydro: 4470 TWh

Nuclear: 2859 TWh

Wind: 2723 TWh

Solar: 2653 TWh

Decent growth, but still a long way to go.

by kube-system

4/20/2026 at 3:16:02 PM

The energy system has investment cycles counted in decades.

Looking at TWh of renewables added each year we will have grids entirely dominated by them in 10-15 years. That is lightning speed for the energy system, and we’re still speeding up.

by ViewTrick1002

4/20/2026 at 10:39:42 AM

> 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

by iso1631

4/20/2026 at 11:11:14 AM

You 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-c...

by leonidasrup

4/20/2026 at 3:52:07 PM

You can.

Oil consumption is about 4,000 TWh per year, or about 10^19 Joules.

The Earth receives about 170,000 TWh per year of Solar energy.

by iso1631

4/20/2026 at 12:06:34 PM

What about nuclear?

by ilogik

4/20/2026 at 12:41:06 PM

Fuel was created by the explosion of supernovae, still solar but not our sun.

by guepe

4/20/2026 at 1:19:28 PM

By that logic, all of the Earth and the moon were once parts of stars, so tidal and geothermal are also solar.

When people say "solar energy", they are usually referring to first order solar energy, directly from photons, not second or third order solar energy after it has been trapped into other sources of potential energy.

by Lambdanaut

4/20/2026 at 1:16:52 PM

If it's not our sun then it isn't solar.

by philipallstar

4/20/2026 at 1:45:12 PM

Pedantry I can get behind. Cheers

by triceratops

4/20/2026 at 12:50:06 PM

Probably neutron star collisions, actually.

by pfdietz

4/20/2026 at 1:11:46 PM

tiny insignificant amounts

by iso1631

4/20/2026 at 11:05:49 AM

Should it be ‘solar leading energy subsidy growth’.

by eucryphia

4/20/2026 at 11:22:57 AM

No chance, fossil fuels are subsidized more. A large share of solar growth is from countries like Pakistan who have had some subsidies but total dollar amount of them is trivial.

by deaux

4/20/2026 at 11:28:16 AM

Got source?

China only ended solar panel export subsidy this month.

by dzhiurgis

4/20/2026 at 1:01:22 PM

Pricing fossil fuel pollution at zero is the biggest subsidy in the world bar none. Contrast this with for example nuclear power, where potential pollution risks as well as storage of its spent resources are some of the biggest costs. If they were subsidized equally to fossil fuels, the costs of those would be very low, with the public simply paying the price for any negative health effects.

Oil is directly subsidized in most oil producing countries. Go look at what fuel costs in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, vs what they could sell it for on international markets. That's a subsidy.

Jet fuel is universally exempt from tax. Try finding any other energy source that is.

by deaux

4/20/2026 at 11:50:24 AM

The US oil subsidy currently is projected to increase the Pentagon budget from one trillion to one and half. I bet one could build a lot of solar panels for 500 billion dollars, and you can use them more than once, too.

by actionfromafar

4/20/2026 at 11:41:32 AM

[dead]

by RALaBarge

4/20/2026 at 11:24:22 AM

Solar subsidies still pale in comparison to oil and gas subsidies worldwide

by Aboutplants

4/20/2026 at 1:27:52 PM

Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022

Plus, add the entire defense budget of US + western countries, which only exists to protect oil interests.

by thelastgallon

4/20/2026 at 4:24:12 PM

In the "unpaid cost of climate change and air pollution as a result of burning fossil fuels" etc. sense, not in a cash given to fossil fuel folk sense.

by tim333

4/20/2026 at 12:44:06 PM

These 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

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.

by gregwebs

4/20/2026 at 2:26:47 PM

Comparing primary energy is VERY misleading. From Marc Jacobson:

The use of primary energy on the vertical axis is an old trick by the fossil fuel industry to mislead people into thinking that one unit of fossils = one unit of renewables. In fact, one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity is the equivalent of three units of fossil fuel electricity.

Another trick is to pretend we need all those fossils if we switched to renewables. In fact, if we switch to renewables, 12% of the fossil fuel energy disappears because that is how much energy is used to mine-transport-refine fossil fuels+uranium for energy, and we wouldn't need to do that anymore

A third trick is to pretend we need so much energy if we go to all electricity powered by renewables. In that case, because EVs use 75% less energy than gasoline/diesel vehicles, heat pumps use 75% less energy than combustion heating, etc., energy demand goes down another 42%.

In sum, this plot illustrates the real story of where we are and where we need to go. The proper metric is end-use energy, not primary energy.

https://lnkd.in/gYw9mB3x

and here's the paper

https://lnkd.in/gTcqkyG5

by standeven

4/20/2026 at 4:51:51 PM

Much of heating and cooling buildings can be replaced with heat pumps, but many energy uses can't be replaced with heat pumps - high temperature applications, chemical processes driven by heat like cement production.

"The energy devoted to heating and cooling buildings accounts for around 35% of all energy consumption, the largest share attributable to any end use. "

https://www.energy.gov/cmei/buildings/heating-ventilation-ai...

There are electric replacements of fossil fuels for many applications where heat pumps can't by used, but usually they don't use 75% less energy than combustion heating. Usually they use more energy...

by leonidasrup

4/20/2026 at 4:08:32 PM

Making one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity equivalent to three units of fossil fuel electricity is an old trick of renewable energy advocates to argue that in future we will need less primary energy.

They base this on the efficiency of older gasoline engines, which is about 25%. They ignore future improvement in fuel efficiency and disregard all current combustion engines with higher efficiency.

High-tech gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of more than 50%.

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/how-f1-technology...

Very fuel efficient diesel engines have been developed for large ships because fuel costs are large part of operating costs of big ships. Low speed diesel engines like the MAN S80ME-C7 have achieved an overall energy conversion efficiency of 54.4%, which is the highest conversion of fuel into power by any single-cycle internal or external combustion engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Diesel_engin...

Renewable energy advocates also like to disregard efficiency of gas turbines. Latest generation gas turbine engines have achieved an efficiency of 46% in simple cycle and 61% when used in combined cycle. And still some of the waste heat can also be used for cogeneration.

Another trick is to pretend that renewables need almost no mining-transportation-refining. According to International Energy Agency.

"The special report, part of the IEA’s flagship World Energy Outlook series, underscores that the mineral requirements of an energy system powered by clean energy technologies differ profoundly from one that runs on fossil fuels. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a similarly sized gas-fired power plant."

https://www.iea.org/news/clean-energy-demand-for-critical-mi...

by leonidasrup

4/20/2026 at 4:48:37 PM

It's quite impressive how badly we've done in cutting fossil fuel use in that. Gas+Oil+Coal has gone up 71% since the first IPCC report in 1990 to the amount for 2024.

by tim333

4/20/2026 at 1:24:12 PM

Yea, the article struck me immediately as a lot of spin in that it’s hyping the growth rate of solar versus the growth rate of other tech. Solar is newer and is still a relatively small slice of the overall pie compared to oil and gas. It’s relatively easy to rapidly grow a small pie wedge than a large one given the overall growth rate of the pie. And growth rates inevitably slow down as pie wedges get larger, because they have to. So, as you say, good news, but still over-hyped, IMO.

by drob518

4/20/2026 at 12:57:41 PM

While 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.

by locallost

4/20/2026 at 1:16:01 PM

> 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.

by philipallstar

4/20/2026 at 1:43:48 PM

Then you also have to account for losses in drilling oil, shipping it to a refinery, refining it into gasoline or diesel, shipping it to a distribution hub, then to a gas station. And all the electricity consumed in doing that. And the navy and coast guard ships that need to patrol all the oceans to keep the oil tankers safe. And...

by triceratops

4/20/2026 at 2:36:22 PM

Yes, and the same for building and fuelling the power station I suppose. That's why I'm saying you need to pick a sensible point to compare efficiency at.

by philipallstar

4/20/2026 at 2:39:02 PM

Building power stations is a one-time cost. If the power station is solar or wind, same thing, only no fuel. Not the case for fossil fuels.

Solar panels or windmills are like oil drills. They aren't oil.

by triceratops

4/20/2026 at 4:00:47 PM

There are no losses in generating from solar which is the topic of the article. There is no loss since there is no fuel. There is a loss in transmission but not enough to offset the roughly 4x reduction in energy use. As the other person also pointed out, there is the same loss in transmission for e.g. combustion engines. You don't pour the gasoline that came out of your back yard. It's extracted and processed for most of the world somewhere very far away and then transported. If anything, the losses in electricity are less than the energy required to transport these huge amounts of fossil fuels.

by locallost

4/20/2026 at 1:38:46 PM

I think 2) is a lot more complicated to the point statements like that are misleading.

Take a look Graph of energy consumption of China which is about double the US: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

The energy consumption of the United States has flat lined: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption by de-indusrializing and having China produce all the energy (largely with coal!) to manufacture their goods instead of manufacturing it themselves.

1) Is a lot more complicated as well. A simple ICE vs EV comparison ignores electric grid generation efficiency and transmission losses as well as the massive energy cost of manufacturing the battery.

by gregwebs

4/20/2026 at 3:06:13 PM

> One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption

The US has not "maintained a low energy consumption". US total energy consumption is the second highest in the world, at 2x third (India), 3x fourth (Russia), 5x fifth (Japan), and 6x sixth (India). It was first until China overtook it in 2008. Here's a line graph from 1965-2024 of those 6 countries [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-cons?tab=l...

by tzs

4/20/2026 at 1:42:19 PM

> A simple ICE vs EV comparison ignores electric grid generation efficiency and transmission losses as well as the massive energy cost of manufacturing the battery

Does it take into account the "massive energy cost" of manufacturing the ICE vehicle then?

by triceratops

4/20/2026 at 2:38:46 PM

Or the gasoline generation efficiency and transmission losses? Or the economic impacts of oil pollution? Getting oil from the ground to the pump isn't free either.

by ahhhhnoooo

4/20/2026 at 4:31:48 PM

The ecological impact of mining and refining of rare earths, used for permanent magnets in EV motors or in electric generators - wind turbines, is quite large.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine#...

Because of ecology, refining of U.S. mined rare earths was outsourced for a very long time to China. Outsourcing of ecological damage...

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/mp-materials-sto...

by leonidasrup

4/20/2026 at 4:56:49 PM

> The ecological impact of mining and refining of rare earths... is quite large

There's obviously no ecological impact of mining and refining fossil fuel. The Deepwater Horizon actually reduced the amount of oil in the ocean.

And unlike batteries, which are non-recyclable and always have been. It's common to throw the lead-acid battery from ICE vehicles into the nearest body of water, for example. It's definitely not the case that 99% of them are recycled today. Whereas recycling coal and oil is trivial and done all the time. /s

by triceratops

4/20/2026 at 2:40:36 PM

100 percent

by triceratops

4/20/2026 at 9:27:16 AM

"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).

by pingou

4/20/2026 at 11:39:13 AM

Read it carefully. The growth in renewables exceeded the growth in electricity demand. The 60% figure is all forms of energy.

Stated another way, we could (hypothetically) stop building coal and gas fired electrial generation and we'd still have enough renewable growth to cover electrical needs.

There's certainly room to start offsetting non-electrical power usage, but that's a different ball game entirely. I'd be pretty happy if we got to a point where only transportation ran on oil. To do that, we need enough renewables to both offset growth (done) and to start shutting down non-renewable generation. Even if we did nothing, those plants have a usable service life of < 100 years so we're within a human lifetime of not needing them anymore.

by matttttttttttt

4/20/2026 at 11:51:53 AM

> The 60% figure is all forms of energy.

It's even better than this appears, because normally a Joule of electrified work replaces 2 to 4 Joules of fossil fuel. And electrification tends to happen on the less efficient processes first.

by marcosdumay

4/20/2026 at 9:54:32 AM

In deed. We are really late in ramping down fossils usage and emissions, and the death toll is higher than the other bad things in the news headlines.

by fulafel

4/20/2026 at 10:55:40 AM

The problem is also, that solar infrastructure is vulnerable to some of the attack vectors of climate change. The torrent downpours we see now in the us and in Europe - especially in mountainous regions are endangering the traditional valley cities in the hinterlands- the biggest consumer of solar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(2...

by 21asdffdsa12

4/20/2026 at 9:36:34 AM

Cost is the barrier

by KumaBear

4/20/2026 at 10:23:48 AM

Cost is no longer the barrier as today even the upfront cost of solar is competitive against upfront cost for building coal or gas power plant. While there is no cost of fuel for solar. In China and India even solar + battery is cheaper than new coal power plants.

by xbmcuser

4/20/2026 at 10:34:44 AM

New electricity generation has been 90% clean for a few years now and solar the biggest part of it for 3 or 4 years. This new landmark is about energy.

That's good progress but it does raise some new cost barriers to get over for each new thing we electrify.

EVs are over this hump, heat pumps replacing boilers are just about there. Some industrial uses are getting there.

Notably, in electricity renewables went through being cheaper than new build and reduced further in cost to being cheaper than running existing plants.

We're not quite at that stage for many electrification use cases, though for growing nations without lots of existing assets that's not as relevant.

by ZeroGravitas

4/20/2026 at 11:33:26 AM

A 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/S036054422...

by red75prime

4/20/2026 at 1:01:15 PM

I presume that this paper assumes some form of stable costs for natural gas... what happens when that stability is soundly invalidated?

by dv_dt

4/20/2026 at 5:12:54 PM

Then there's 30% costlier option: offshore wind power (84%), solar PV (13%) and biomethane CCGT (3%).

by red75prime

4/20/2026 at 9:05:45 AM

Maybe "accidentally killing fossil fuels" will be DT's singular good deed

by meibo

4/20/2026 at 11:31:09 AM

Just 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.

by Tade0

4/20/2026 at 11:58:41 AM

The 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...

by marcosdumay

4/20/2026 at 12:52:20 PM

He'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.

by pfdietz

4/20/2026 at 9:25:57 AM

In a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.

by citrin_ru

4/20/2026 at 9:54:18 AM

A substitution of coal for oil, or more likely natural gas, isn't that big a shift of emissions in the short run if it's a stopgap for massive solar and wind investments. Solar and wind install quick.

by dv_dt

4/20/2026 at 10:41:03 AM

The world's most effective ecoterrorist.

Greenpeace should name their next ship after him.

by iso1631

4/20/2026 at 9:11:10 AM

You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 10:14:51 AM

i think that's why they used the word "accidentally"

by fxwin

4/20/2026 at 10:16:21 AM

Let me rephrase: You can't really attribute to someone something they did accidentally while trying to do the opposite.

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 12:53:33 PM

We can, but ironically.

by pfdietz

4/20/2026 at 9:32:27 AM

I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on.

If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?

by boxed

4/20/2026 at 9:37:17 AM

If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake.

Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 9:56:35 AM

Mao's campaign to kill sparrows was a result of a belief that they were a net loss for harvests.

Stalin's support of Lysenko was a result of thinking Lysenko was actually able to drive agricultural growth.

Both mistakes led to mass deaths.

We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.

Both of them also killed a lot of people maliciously and intentionally, but a large proportion of their death toll as a side-effect of their oppression, not the goal of it.

by vidarh

4/20/2026 at 10:03:39 AM

> 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.

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 10:30:08 AM

Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened. The problem is that it hasn't.

by decimalenough

4/20/2026 at 11:25:32 AM

> 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!".

by deaux

4/20/2026 at 12:39:03 PM

> previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative

Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea. Potentially Venezuela, mostly because we constrained our objectives.

I also don’t think it’s fair to constrain OP’s statement to “the people in those countries.” Regional impacts matter, too. An Iran that isn’t funding terrorist proxies everywhere could still be a net positive even if the average Iranian is no better off afterwards. (To be clear, I’m in no way supporting this stupid war.)

by JumpCrisscross

4/20/2026 at 12:50:19 PM

> Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea.

To even hint at those being in the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Congo is really desperate. Come on now. Not comparable and irrelevant.

by deaux

4/20/2026 at 12:53:51 PM

> the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq

…why are Japan and Germany not comparable to Iraq? We’re talking methods and outcomes, not motivations. All involved a wholesale invasion, occupation and supervised restructuring followed by disarmament.

by JumpCrisscross

4/20/2026 at 10:48:46 AM

This is off topic for what we're discussing (whether his accidental positive changes can be attributed to him), and agrees with my general point.

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 11:00:21 AM

No, it doesn't, because you're asserting he is "trying to create negative ones".

by decimalenough

4/20/2026 at 11:02:19 AM

We 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?

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 12:06:00 PM

> It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes

For whom?

by xorcist

4/20/2026 at 2:59:55 PM

> 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.

by boxed

4/20/2026 at 3:22:23 PM

I'm not trying to make a distinction. I'm saying that they didn't kill millions of people accidentally.

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 3:47:44 PM

Accidental 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.

by rexpop

4/20/2026 at 9:57:03 AM

> 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.

by childintime

4/20/2026 at 3:03:37 PM

> they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back

Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%.

> solar would have made far fewer emissions

Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar.

> 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

True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it.

> 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.

I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019689040...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

by ziotom78

4/20/2026 at 11:30:53 AM

Solar 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.

by XorNot

4/20/2026 at 12:55:41 PM

I expect in a post-fossil age we'll get organic chemical feedstocks from biomass, and non-biomass solar will help with that by providing hydrogen for hydrodeoxygenation. That will roughly double the hydrocarbons one can get from a given quantity of carbohydrate. Biomass here will also include waste stream organic matter.

by pfdietz

4/20/2026 at 12:08:21 PM

Of 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.

by marcosdumay

4/20/2026 at 1:47:46 PM

> Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.

"Predictions are hard, especially about the future".

by triceratops

4/20/2026 at 11:54:49 AM

With 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.

by quote

4/20/2026 at 9:45:39 AM

> 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-...

;-)

by internet_points

4/20/2026 at 10:42:57 AM

1279 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.

by jve

4/20/2026 at 10:57:29 AM

More importantly, for the first time ever we generate more electricity from renewables than coal!

by zipy124

4/20/2026 at 1:17:30 PM

This 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.

by carefree-bob

4/20/2026 at 9:38:39 AM

> 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.)

by internet_points

4/20/2026 at 9:41:04 AM

No, you are comparing watthours to watts. At 90% used factor 12GW would be ~95 TWh.

by Ekaros

4/20/2026 at 1:44:09 PM

More 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.

by mayama

4/20/2026 at 9:47:39 AM

ooh, of course, thank you

by internet_points

4/20/2026 at 10:27:47 AM

No you're wrong, the nuclear "started construction" and so solar added infinitely more generation than the zero they will generate this year/decade.

The world did add 3GW of nuclear generation in 2025 but it also closed 3GW.

by ZeroGravitas

4/20/2026 at 10:49:14 AM

I 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!

by azath92

4/20/2026 at 7:31:50 AM

Sooooo....you're telling me there's a chance! Solar FTW!

by onchainintel

4/20/2026 at 10:45:46 AM

I 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.

by spwa4

4/20/2026 at 10:59:41 AM

Just 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

by jahnu

4/20/2026 at 11:39:28 AM

A 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.

by SiempreViernes