Article from 2024: still super impressive in 2024 yet I'd like more recent numbers to see the progress.
Worse, the summary article makes claims using 2022 data which is so out of date to be useless
Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
121–130 of 512 posts
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tbf, solar has gotten so much more effective/cost efficient in the last 12-24 months that it's beating pretty much everything aside from hydro in the cost efficiency department at this point - including (most of) northern Europe and Canada. Most data you find will be using data that's massively out of date and be off by at least 2x though... I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear ag…
Can batteries store enough energy for dunkelflaute in winter? I don't think it's possible with the current technology.
Batteries are not appropriate for dealing with Dunkelflauten. There's very little energy flowing through there, so what you want to do is trade lower round trip efficiency for lower capex. The high capex of batteries is best amortized over many charge/discharge cycles, for example for daily storage.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can batteries store enough energy for dunkelflaute in winter? I don't think it's possible with the current technology.
I mean, who cares? Fire up the gas plants in the one week a year you have weather anomalies. We’d still be 90+% carbon free which would be incredible. The last gap can be solved at a later point as technology evolves
And replacing the natural gas burned in those turbines with hydrogen won't be very expensive, since they will be used so infrequently. Storing energy as hydrogen is much cheaper than storing it in batteries, as measured by cost of storage of capacity.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#124Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins: - California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar - Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind - Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar - The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind - Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar There's real momentum happening.
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total ene…
This is just goalpost moving. Only a couple of decades ago we were at a solid 0% everywhere.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#125Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins: - California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar - Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind - Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar - The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind - Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar There's real momentum happening.
California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster
2022 - 48% gas power on grid
2025 - 25% gas power on grid
What insane progress.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess somewhat of a fun fact: Albania has rented(!) two floating(!) oil-powered power plants near the city of Vlöre that are there in case of emergency. The last time they were really needed was in 2022 (if I remember correctly), but these days they're not turned on any more than they need to be to make sure they're operating properly. That very expensive backup system is basically the only non-renewable source in…
Funny, TAP runs straight-thru Albania. They could just build a gas power station. Of course rented rigs line the pockets much better.
Why would they want to do that?
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#127Meanwhile the US is spending billions to cancel renewable energy. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas...
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Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#128Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#129> Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7 per cent of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power. Let's head to electricitymaps.com ! Albania ( https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AL/live/fifteen_min... ) - On 2026-04-12 16:45 GMT+2, 22,67% of electricity consumed by Albania is imported from Greece, which gen…
Makes me wonder why solar is not on the list.. I thought all gore said that was gonna solve all energy problems. (Of course not, he's a politician, but I'd have expected to at least see it with some relevant percentage in the African countries)
Or could it be that solar is distributed enough to not appear because it's set up directly by/with the consumer rather than the grid producer?
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is an expected problem with renewables that can be engineered around. It's unlikely the whole world has a drought at once during a calm night, so developing ways to transmit power long distances will be important.
Or just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.
Nuclear seems to be the worst option:
You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar.
It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.
It's dangerous. For millenia. Vulnerable to terrorism. Enabler of nuclear weapons.
It takes a long time to build and bring online.
It doesn't scale down.
Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?