In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels • Hacker News Board

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#261

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #66

mschuster91 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Europe is a big customer for Chinese exports, and Russia is antagonizing, it seems like China would have an incentive to put pressure on Russia. China wants Russia to at least keep the Ukraine war going, if not eventually win the darn thing. Russia winning (or getting away with an armistice that lets them keep Crimea and Donbas) means a precedence China has for a land-grab of its own - obviously Taiwan, but othe…

Donbas is mostly wheat fields, Taiwan is mostly SOTA semiconductor fabs that currently are the sole pillar holding up the AI (and compute in general) zeitgeist. The global response would not be the same, even remotely. And what would China get from it? A tiny island of rubble and an ego boost, while losing enormous global favor? The cost of that island may well be a few trillion for China, just so they can say they d…

> Donbas is mostly wheat fields

... which nevertheless are very important worldwide. Early in the war, there was a lot of effort to make sure grain exports could run smoothly because otherwise Africa would have been in serious trouble.

> The global response would not be the same, even remotely.

We're already at a stage where Trump doesn't give a single fuck about NATO and some of his advisors would rather have it disbanded yesterday in favor of isolationism, or even outright march into territory to annex it. I have absolutely zero faith that Trump would intervene on Taiwan's favor - an intervention does not fit into Trump's and especially Miller's world view wherein the world is to be divided into areas of influence for the super powers to act with impunity.

> And what would China get from it? A tiny island of rubble and an ego boost, while losing enormous global favor?

Never underestimate nationalist idiocy. Putin invaded Ukraine because of his dream to restore "Great Russia", it is entirely possible that the CCP wants the same for the ego of their leadership to be the ones "bringing the lost areas home". They already did so with Hongkong, and not reacting to China violating the treaty with the UK was the biggest mistake the Western nations have ever done.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#262

Post by abhinavk » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

jeorb wrote: post #184

testing22321 wrote: post #4

Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians. Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan. It makes 7.72Mwh per year, worth $1000. Tight valley, tons of snow. We put that on the loan for 8 years, then get $1000 per year free money for 20 years or so. Biggest no brainer of all time. Dad in Victoria Australia just got 1…

The quotes for solar on my home in the US ranged between $40,000 (local company) and $120,000 (Tesla). How did you get solar installed for only $13,000?

They are in Canada.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#263

Post by mrweasel » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

altern8 wrote: post #235

mrweasel wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, OK--but at what cost? It costs less? The Danish organisation for green energy interest (biased I known) has calculations that shows a 5 billion DKK saving per year for the Danish consumers. So about €0.02 per kWh. I also think you're wrong about prices. I think most will pay more, if they get clean energy. Not a lot more, but if it's only a few cents, I think many/most will pay that, perhaps not happily, but…

I'm not sure, prices here in Poland have skyrocketed because of the EU green initiative and we started exporting and prices went up 3-4 times. I'm good with protecting the environment. Here, though, we're making European companies less competitive. They shut down, and Chinese companies fill the gap, flooding us with products that are worse for the environments because they have no laws, bad for workers because they h…

Arguing that European business should be allowed to pollute the environment more, because that's what China does is a little backwards I think. In my mind we should enforce the rules on a per product basis, rather than per country. Where a product is made shouldn't matter, a product should be taxed based on the pollution it has generated, shipping included.

Want to sell to the EU: Workers can only work e.g. 40 hours a week, must have five weeks of vacation per year and here are the tax rates for various types of pollution.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#264

Post by _aavaa_ » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #191

_aavaa_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads? Yes, and people should be annoyed by this given the underfunding, poor urban planning, and outright hostility by many local governments against anything that dares encroach on the sanctity of car culture.

>Yes, and people should be annoyed by this So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the…

> So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads.

"Yet you participate in society, curious!"

> In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included

There's nothing capitalist about that. Driving around and polluting the environment is currently done for free. That should be taxed. Highways and streets are by and large (in NA) used as a publicly subsidized private good at the expense of everyone else. Subsidized to the detriment of all because it pulls funding away from public transit that would move more people, prioritizing convenience of drivers over the safety of everyone else (to say nothing of it creating dead spaces with nothing but parking as far as the eye can see).

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#265

Post by eigenspace » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

owenversteeg wrote: post #246

kokey wrote: post #47

Every time, over the years, that there has been some kind of headline saying renewables have overtaken fossil fuels, when you look at it a bit more closely there is always a big 'but'. For example, it was compared to coal (not taking into account electricity from gas), or it was for one day, or it was a percentage of new installations, or it excludes winter, includes nuclear etc. This time, however, it looks like it'…

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe. For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc. Y…

It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage.

Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).

Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating.

So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies.

______

If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#266

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

SamPatt wrote: post #229

embedding-shape wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however. What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there. I'm a…

>I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. That's because you're rich like most people on HN. Environmental protection is a luxury good. This has been proven time and time again. A great reason to prioritize growth and wealth creation. Poor countries don't make those tradeoffs, they're worried about survival not what percentage of their ene…

Great job of indirectly implying that there must be a tradeoff. Funny thing though: those poor countries? They're not building nuclear, or oil fired, or coal fired, or natural gas plants. They're installing solar. Not necessarily because they care about what percentage of their energy usage is renewable, but because there is no tradeoff.

Further, environmental protection is not a luxury good, it's a long term investment. Ask me more in another 30-50 years when the larger impacts of climate change are happening. Or ask someone else about how much we've spent on superfund cleanup sites.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#267

Post by coryrc » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #220

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting? There's an alternative, and almost certainly cheaper per watt with cost of scale, where your tax dollars go to a n…

Why not both? One works better for people not living in cities, and the other one better for high-density areas.

Because you get far higher ROI for the large-scale installations. In case you weren't familiar, Canada has a lot of other things which need the money than paying 5x per watt to subsidize panels on your roof instead of on the ground.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#268

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

SamPatt wrote: post #253

youngtaff wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A great reason to prioritize growth and wealth creation. Poor countries don't make those tradeoffs, they're worried about survival not what percentage of their energy usage is renewable. Tell that to places like Pakistan where solar is allowing people to have cheaper electricity without connecting to the grid

That's exactly my point. They're making decisions based on their economic reality not sacrificing for environmental principles like the above commenter. Solar is great. It can stand on its own without subsidies.

> They're making decisions based on their economic reality not sacrificing for environmental principles

You don't know this, and to some degree likely cannot know this.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#269

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #209

embedding-shape wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however. What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there. I'm a…

>I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting? There's an alternative, and almost certainly cheaper per watt with cost of scale, where your tax dollars go to a n…

What's the difference between a new solar farm and new solar panels on roofs (or the ground) ?

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#270

Post by danny_codes » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

mekdoonggi wrote: post #213

pranavj wrote: post #113

The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the exact window where solar critics have long argued renewables fall short. If this trend accelerates (and battery prices are dropping faster than most models predicted), the "intermittency problem" starts looking more like a solvable engineering challenge than a f…

I looked into sodium-ion batteries for which factories are coming online in China. The theoretical manufacturing cost of those is very very low, which will make solar + batteries very cheap. I suspect China will reach those costs ahead of schedule.

IMO this is a classic case of underestimating how far manufacturing improvements can get you on the cost scale. You see a promising technology in the lab and it’s hard to imagine a 1 million x reduction in price, yet we see that time and time again as tech gets scaled out.

What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself