It's also been a great year for oil production which has reached new record highs in the US! [0]
0. https://www.energy.gov/state-american-energy-promises-made-p...
Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
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Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#22I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#23Related: Alec Watson’s recent, and excellent, Technology Connections YouTube piece on renewable energy. “You are being misled about renewable energy technology” https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=CJ_Tt9DnWSKH8eGC
I've had so many arguments with people that think replacing a continual supply of gasoline with solar panels and batteries means that we are just as dependent on the source of solar panels as we are on the source of gasoline.
It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.
Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.
The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.
Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#24It's also been a great year for oil production which has reached new record highs in the US! [0] 0. https://www.energy.gov/state-american-energy-promises-made-p...
There is global oil oversupply of ~2M-3.7M barrels/day. China destroys ~1M barrels/day of global oil demand for every 24 months of EV production. Iran needs $164/barrel to break even on their budget, $86/barrel for Saudi Arabia, ~$60 for US shale (per Bloomberg). China has already potentially hit peak oil and ~>50% of new vehicle sales are battery electric or plug in hybrids.
Oil is over, regardless of this admin's propaganda on the topic. If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices. No one will build new refineries due to stranded asset risk, so those that remain are on borrowed time.
Oil analysts say there is a supply glut — why that hasn't translated to lower prices this year - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s... - February 22nd, 2026 ("Coming into 2026, the consensus view among oil analysts was that the crude market was entering a period of deep oversupply, likely to keep depressing prices throughout the year. In 2025, oil prices fell by roughly 20% as the glut widened.")
US drillers cut oil rigs to lowest in four years, Baker Hughes says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-drillers-cut-oil-... | https://archive.today/84kwl - November 26th, 2025
China’s shrinking oil footprint: How electric vehicle adoption is shaping China’s oil consumption - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-shrinking-oil-footprin... - November 4th, 2025
North American Oil Refineries and Pipelines - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=5e7f84d84b...
(no current oil commodity exposure)
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#25Related: Alec Watson’s recent, and excellent, Technology Connections YouTube piece on renewable energy. “You are being misled about renewable energy technology” https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=CJ_Tt9DnWSKH8eGC
One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?) but it doesn’t matter at this point anyway. Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...…
Yea I wonder how that battery capacity graph will look like post January 2026, since Texas's SB388 specifically excludes batteries from it's dispatchable power generation requirements. That doesn't necessarily prevent batteries storage from being constructed, but it does tilt the field pretty heavily in favor of natural gas.
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#26I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…
> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry
Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#27I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…
> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.
That’s true today, it wasn’t true when Germany was heavily subsidizing solar to get economies of scale going.
Solar is historically a great example where public / private collaboration actually had a place. Even if today it’s time to let market forces work.
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#28Related: Alec Watson’s recent, and excellent, Technology Connections YouTube piece on renewable energy. “You are being misled about renewable energy technology” https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=CJ_Tt9DnWSKH8eGC
One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?) but it doesn’t matter at this point anyway. Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...…
> One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?)
No, the right isn't meant to be pro free-market. It's meant to protect the interests, longevity, and demand-capture of its donor industries, primarily fossil fuels extraction, processing, and distribution, but increasingly large technology companies in monopoly positions in their markets.
All the "free-market" to "culture-war" rhetoric are just political/religious strategies to achieve that end.
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#29I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
#30It's also been a great year for oil production which has reached new record highs in the US! [0] 0. https://www.energy.gov/state-american-energy-promises-made-p...
There is global oil oversupply of ~2M-3.7M barrels/day. China destroys ~1M barrels/day of global oil demand for every 24 months of EV production. Iran needs $164/barrel to break even on their budget, $86/barrel for Saudi Arabia, ~$60 for US shale (per Bloomberg). China has already potentially hit peak oil and ~>50% of new vehicle sales are battery electric or plug in hybrids. Oil is over, regardless of this admin's p…
Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings.
So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).