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Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

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Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#271

Post by Kaliboy »

Aurornis wrote: post #46
erelong wrote: post #9

I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind (personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility) So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced? Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?

I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points. Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.

The main reason I could think of is when you consider the reality of our electric grid and how it remains stable.

Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.

So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.

This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.

It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.

One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.

With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.

So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.

That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.

I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#272

Post by epistasis »

verdverm wrote: post #224
bryanlarsen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. California has the cheapest wholesale electricity prices in the country. It's the only place in the country with a wholesale rate below $100 / MWh, and California is way below $100. https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole... Retail prices are of course super high in California, but that has nothing to do with generation.

Why is there such a disconnect?

Transmission and distribution costs: i.e. the grid.

California is a massive state, has very rugged terrain, and there's a ton of deferred maintenance on transmission lines that are more than 50 years old, that are at huge risk of causing massive wildfires that destroy entire towns.

This has been terribly mismanaged, because like most places with regulated monopoly utilities, the regulatory body is opaque and not very responsive to the needs of the public.

The utility doesn't make money on electricity generation costs, but it does get to take a fixed rate of profit from grid infrastructure costs. So the obvious game for a for-profit regulated monopoly utility is to jack up the grid costs as high as possible, try to snow the regulators to possible cheaper alternatives, and rake in more money.

I remember one case where PG&E got approval to charge for grid maintenance, spent hundreds of millions, had ~$100M leftover, then declared "oh we did it cheaper than we expected, executive bonuses all around the C-suite with the extra!" And then we had multi-billion dollar wildfires the following year.

Utilities are not normal businesses, they make more money by increasing their input costs. (See also the US healthcare system where incentives are similarly perverse... Insurance company profits are capped at a fixe percentage of health care expenditures, so the route to more profit is to increase health care expenditures.)

Of my decades in California, there's been a single gubernatorial candidate with deep knowledge of the grid and how to fix the regulatory structure, and it's the governor who actually appoints people to the regulatory board of the utilities, so the governor and their appointees have the power to fix this. That gubernatorial candidate was Tom Steyer, and he had/has fantastic plans, but I fear he just lost the primary:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/tom-steyer-wants-to-be-californias

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#273

Post by amluto »

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #96

I just upgraded the solar system at my family's off-grid cabin. It's incredible how much battery technology has improved over the last 10 years. Everyone is getting tired of me checking the panel to see how many watts we're bringing in. Next project, install a shunt and get a Raspberry Pi talking to it over USB. And then I'll be able to build a Grafana dashboard. :)

For most purposes, I would avoid the shunt and use a current transformer (for AC) or a DC current sensor (conceptually the same thing but with a Hall effect sensor or other mechanism that works for DC). This way you don’t need anything to touch the potentially rather large voltages on a solar array.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#274

Post by tootie »

tonymet wrote: post #235
tootie wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of it can be electrified. NYC has banned gas hookups in new residential buildings (I live in one and it's great). Industrial electrification will never be 100% but I've seen estimates as high as 90%. It will take time and money but it will happen.

how much time and money, and whether it’s worth the opportunity cost, is the entire question.

If you're considering the total cost then you have to factor in the entire reason to electrify which is the environmental cost of continuing to burn dead organic matter. In that case, electrification is absolute bargain.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#275

Post by miahi »

zahlman wrote: post #184
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.

> And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down. Why wouldn't "existing solar is cheaper than existing coal, and existing coal is not required to meet demand" result in coal plants shutting down?

You need a lot of batteries to store the energy needed overnight and you have to plan for (lots of) days without sun. At my latitude (45N) the difference in solar production between summer and winter is 5x. Even with batteries, you still need a backup for a week of bad weather; so you have to choose between increasing the solar production 20x to have enough power generated in cloudy days or have a backup coal/gas/something else plant.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#276

Post by foxyv »

eldaisfish wrote: post #266
foxyv wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically power is priced by Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) where you amortize the total cost of ownership across the total power generated to get a per kwh cost which is what most grid operators care about. After all, large scale investors and governments don't care if a plant costs a billion dollars if it produces 20 billion in electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity What you…

LCOE is a terrible metric for the power grid because it does not capture the cost of balancing the power grid. Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem. What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero. The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which…

That is not entirely correct. Typically you will see LCOE for Solar grouped with the LCOE of Solar and energy storage.

EG: > Solar photovoltaic $1,327 $1,333–2,743 $31–146 12–30% > Solar PV with storage $1,748 $2,044 $53–81 20–31%

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

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#277

Post by eldaisfish »

ted_dunning wrote: post #262
Neywiny wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost. That's why the monetary payoff time for installing solar is non-zero. Versus a backup generator you're paying 2-3x the cost upfront. And yes we know the running cost is almost 0, the maintenance is almost nothing, etc etc, but I could see that argument not holding as much water as we need it to.

The adoption rate in places like Australia and even Texas is what demonstrates that the argument holds water. People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.

How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?

This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.

Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#278

Post by two_handfuls »

Kaliboy wrote: post #271
Aurornis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points. Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.

The main reason I could think of is when you consider the reality of our electric grid and how it remains stable. Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz. So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants. This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause th…

Inertia was an issue, now it's solved with grid-forming batteries that can provide the same inertia a rotating flywheel did.

Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.

Here is a "Practical Engineering" video on the topic, mentioning that your concern is real: https://youtu.be/7G4ipM2qjfw?si=qfVymRpKFpuexQF_

And here is a more recent video about how Australia runs on a ton of solar with no issues thanks to grid-forming inverters: https://youtu.be/qavFbOpt4jA?si=dlkEEN4sZLCv2os5

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#279

Post by jphil529 »

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #244
jphil529 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really curious about the difficulty of doing a self install with Solar. I'm moderately handy (built a Sauna from no plans) and confident with electrical. Any gotchas?

It's fairly easy and there are a lot of forums around with knowledgeable people. My main issue was ensuring wire gauges were correct. One's intuition about dealing with house wiring @15A changes when you're dealing with 50A circuits. Also you need to pay attention to things like equal cable lengths between battery banks so you don't overcharge one battery in a series. However, I'm dealing with an off-grid cabin so I…

Very cool. Thanks for the tips!

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#280

Post by BobaFloutist »

Kaliboy wrote: post #263
colechristensen wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next step for people like you and things like nations: what do we do with this extra electricity we have laying around so often? What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace. Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something s…

I often daydream about electrolysing water to generate oxygen and hydrogen and store them to use for heating and like welding torches and stuff. To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.

>To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.

Or a hydrogen fuel cell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell

The round-trip efficiency is of course abysmal compared to batteries, but if the input energy is "free", the increased density could pay off.

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