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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

#261

Post by kieranmaine »

jimt1234 wrote: post #209
kieranmaine wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA get's it. Trump doesn't. Texas is a the leader in wind and solar in the US. Compare generation stats for yesterday between 2021 and 2026 on the Texas grid (ERCOT) * 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2021-06-03 * 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2026-06-03 Also, the Californian grid (CAISO) shows where everyone is headed with a huge deployment of batteries: * 2021 - https://www.g…

Does the USA really get it? I'd like to believe that, but honestly, I hear a lot of hatin' on anything related to renewable or 'green' energy, not just from Trump.

My earlier comment was too ambiguous. Those that spend money on generating capacity in the US get it.

> As of April 1, 2026, renewable energy’s share of total US utility-scale (>1 MW) generating capacity was 33.6%. EIA projects this to grow to 36.6% by March 31, 2027. Utility-scale solar will add 42,626.1 MW, expanding its share from 12.8% to 15.7%, while wind will grow by 14,157.4 MW (including 4,155.0 MW of offshore wind), increasing from 13.0% to 13.6%. The mix of other renewables (hydropower, biomass, and geothermal) will add 297.1 MW.

> The capacity of battery storage was 42 GW at the end of 2025 and is expected to double and reach 85 GW by the end of 2027.

In terms of the general population or politicians, some more than others. This is also with an administration that is irrationally hostile to renewables.

1. https://electrek.co/2026/05/26/renewables-installed-capacity...

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

#262

Post by ted_dunning »

Neywiny wrote: post #173
foxyv wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be d…

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.

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

#263

Post by Kaliboy »

colechristensen wrote: post #251
ravedave5 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar project, I'm so overpaneled I bought an electric heater so I could actually see how many watts I brought in during a nice summer day. The victron UIs have an excellent graph history.

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.

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

#264

Post by scope2093 »

jrmg wrote: post #254
scope2093 wrote: post #246

We installed roof solar (10kW panels + 8kW hybrid inverter + 32kWh battery + planning/execution) last October for 11k euro. After all the math, our "investment" would pay off in approx 8-10 years (at current electricity prices). That's without an electric car, which we plan to buy sometime in the next two years. All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteri…

Getting solar installed on our house, providing well over 100% of our energy needs overall (including car), has left me low-key kind of angry that we, as a society, are letting so much energy just uselessly fall onto structures and the ground when we could be harvesting and using it. Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we bu…

I agree. The momentum seems to be building up though, at least in (east) Europe, so there is a glimpse of hope.

Fun fact: we still don't have AC in our house (it's a new-ish building, built 4 years ago) because it's decently insulated (and we live near the mountains). As in your case, our solar produces way over 100% of what we need, so I'm considering just getting AC to use the sun to cool the house if needed :)

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

#265

Post by agumonkey »

jrmg wrote: post #254
scope2093 wrote: post #246

We installed roof solar (10kW panels + 8kW hybrid inverter + 32kWh battery + planning/execution) last October for 11k euro. After all the math, our "investment" would pay off in approx 8-10 years (at current electricity prices). That's without an electric car, which we plan to buy sometime in the next two years. All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteri…

Getting solar installed on our house, providing well over 100% of our energy needs overall (including car), has left me low-key kind of angry that we, as a society, are letting so much energy just uselessly fall onto structures and the ground when we could be harvesting and using it. Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we bu…

this is indeed a flaw in modern societies, we get lost in technological "progress" and become blind and dumb

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

#266

Post by eldaisfish »

foxyv wrote: post #243
Neywiny wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you said it's the cheapest by far but didn't say "after X years". Did I miss where you acknowledged there's a crossover point in cost?

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 is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.

Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.

The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.

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

#267

Post by Kon5ole »

antonvs wrote: post #253
Kon5ole wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points. One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source. I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling…

> I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc. This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.

>If power generation isn't profitable

Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.

Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.

Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.

I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.

The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.

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

#268

Post by cornstalks »

thrownthatway wrote: post #257
_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MPPT solar controller. MidNite has a sizing tool for this: https://www.midnitesolar.com/sizingTool/

So the most difficult part is using a calculator to determine the charge controller capacity.

No, you also need to calculate the voltage drop over your distance to show to minimum wire sizing, and the voltage and power levels at the ASHRAE minimum temperature, the current level at 156.25% over the wiring at the ASHRAE max temperature to compute the temperature adjusted resistance and show that your wiring meets minimum spec, etc.

It’s not too hard to actually do the computations. But there is a ton to learn. I installed my own 14.85 kW system last year, with batteries, and I spent hundreds of hours just researching everything. I know I went overkill, but the hardest part of the project was just getting up to speed on all the requirements to meet code.

Someday I’ll write up my entire experience and share my site plan I used for permitting in the hopes it will help someone else. But doing solar right is a nontrivial investment for a newbie (like me).

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

#269

Post by miahi »

didgetmaster wrote: post #258

On the graph, you can clearly see the seasonal demand for power during the summer months as air conditioning kicks in. The electricity production for gas mimics this as well each year. But the solar output does not seem to have a spike each summer. Why is that? You would think that solar output would be significantly higher when the summer months are here.

It's global data, "here" is not US, and it's solar+wind, not only solar. Summer months have a different definition depending on hemisphere and solar production maximums depend heavily on latitude.

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

#270

Post by lstodd »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #255
lstodd wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if Germany did not phase out nuclear, EU would not have relied on russian LNG for so long. But we live in an imperfect world.

Prematurely phasing out 10GW of nuclear electricity is a drop in the bucket compared to LNG usage. A mistake, but a minor one.

Axing the whole nuclear generation was a disaster.How many GW were not even planned, not to mention built in all those years? And don't try to slide out on "nuclear build-out takes too much time". It does not if there is a will.
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