Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024) • Hacker News Board

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#421

Post by leonidasrup » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #410

leonidasrup wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are now (in the year 2026) optimizing only for costs of producing electricity then you end with electric grid which has more or less structure of Chinese electric grid - big chunk produced with domestic fueled base-load fossil fuel power plants+nuclear power plants, as much hydro as you can build, little bit variable renewables. If for example Germany would optimize for costs of producing electricity then they…

I love the framing. "Little bit of renewables" when in China they are literally 5x in size of the nuclear production. Nuclear power in China peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant. The problem I am mentioning has nothing to do with ARENH, and the protectionism isn't the ARENH. It is not building more renewables and dragging their feet on interconnects.

Electricity in People's Republic of China in 2025

58% fossil fuels 14% hydropower 11% solar 11% wind 4.6% nuclear

https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/People%27s_Republic_of_Chi...

For France, it doesn't make economic sense to build more wind and solar and build more interconnects.

It will be interesting to see how wind and solar will evolve in Germany after changes in EEG subsidies.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-econ-min-conside...

https://montel.energy/resources/blog/future-of-german-eeg-su...

https://www.taylorwessing.com/en/insights-and-events/insight...

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#422

Post by tialaramex » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

jondea wrote: post #328

hunterpayne wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend, renewables only have a capacity factor of .1 (10%). That means those "gas plants" (really coal, and the worst quality coal on the planet too) are running 90% of the time. There is a reason why France's grid makes 7x the power for the same CO2 emissions as Germany.

A single energy source having a capacity factor of 10% does not imply that gas plants will have to run 90% of the time. It ignores storage, over-provisioning, aggregation of uncorrelated sources etc. Not to mention that wind typically has a much higher capacity factor than 10%. I don't know what the true number is, but I think this is a low effort take.

Wind turbines across a whole region you'd be looking at 30% maybe 35% or even 40% if they're off-shore. Off-shore the winds aren't slowed by all the random structures humans build but also the turbines are much taller and as your elevation increases the reliability of the wind increases.

PV it varies by how far you are from the equator, 10% is realistic for a Northern country like the UK or Germany whereas in Africa you might see 25% or even 30%

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#423

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #388

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about war, what does more damage to the surroundings - dropping a nuke on a solar plant, or dropping a nuke on a nuclear plant?

Dropping a nuke on a city where nuclear plants aren't … And it's not even close. That'd be exactly like the difference between the sole victim of the Fukushima nuclear accident vs the 19 000 dead from the tsunami that caused the accident. If nukes get involved, all bets are off no matter what, millions of people would die and the consequences of a subsequent reactor meltdown would be negligible compared to the mess y…

> the sole victim of the Fukushima nuclear accident

This is a misrepresentation. There is a single person who the courts have established was (to their satisfaction) killed by nuclear exposure from Fukushima, although even that is quite debatable.

But that doesn't mean there weren't any victims, just that they could not (or could not yet) be identified. The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be lost in a sea of cancers from other causes. This doesn't mean they can be, or should be, ignored. Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regulate it.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#424

Post by XorNot » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #402

hunterpayne wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each way you move the energy costs you 50% in efficiency. Which is why pumped hydro has to have a 4x different in the price of energy in vs energy out to make it economically viable. That's why PG&E almost never uses their pumped storage. Only on days where the mid day price of power is very low does it make sense. And keep in mind that California is the ideal place for pumped storage. I seriously doubt that NZ has a…

It's nowhere close to 50%. Round-trip (so that's after both ways) efficiency is about 70-80% for a pumped storage scheme. Buy 10MW to pump the water, and get back 7-8MW when you release it. Contrast that with a reality here in the UK where the gas dominated spot price this morning when I woke up was about £180 per MWh, yet yesterday afternoon solar and wind had it down to £25 per MWh, so you could buy 100MWh of energ…

For the cost and expense of building a pumped hydro plant though, you could just deploy batteries which will do the same thing for a much lower capital and management investment and vastly simplified engineering. And a higher round-trip efficiency.

LiFePO4 works to demand shift on a daily cycle just fine and scales better to solar input (where you need much higher power handling so you can charge it on limited sunlight - a pumped hydro system is limited to charging at about half its discharge rate).

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#425

Post by mpweiher » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #407

mpweiher wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered. "distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be. Inter…

> because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation It does it if your interconnects make the grid scale large enough, and it does if you consider distributed generation and storage as part of the overall system. Sure if you take a grid designed for centralised on-demand generation, and apply that to renewable generation then you'll have problems. However I'm not suggesting that. I'm also not suggesti…

> grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones,

"Night" reaches across more time-zones than you can build your grid across.

Never mind "winter".

> nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.

Define "often".

They are actually a lot more reliably than you seem to think: the capacity factor of the US fleet, for example, was >90% for the last decade(s). And that Nuclear power plants are incredibly reliable.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#426

Post by _ph_ » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #214

About 80% of global primary energy consumption comes from fossil fuels [1]. With renewables growing at 10x the rate of demand growth, we’re moving in the right direction. But it’s dishonest to frame it as a “tipping point.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

The comparison with "primary energy" misses the inefficiency of the usage of fossil fuels. If you electrify the main uses of fossil energy, the efficency goes up by like a factor of 3 - electric cars vs. ICE, heat pumps vs. burning fuels.

Yes, it is a long journey until the whole energy consumption is moved to renewables, but running the electric grid of a country like Germany to way over 60% on renewables is an important point on the way there.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#427

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #386

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to do things that aren't power plants then aren't you going to get renewables in trouble for needing more raw materials per unit of generation from dangerous environmentally hazardous mining operations?

We definitely should look at the entire supply chain for all of them, assuming the goal is maximum benefit for minimum suffering.

> maximum benefit

If we do that, we need to assign a value to a statistical human life. This is usually taken to be something like $12M (adjusted for age).

And having done that, we discover the contribution of lost lives to the cost of solar and wind (and nuclear, without accidents) is lost in the noise. So the problem ends up choosing the source that is directly cheaper; differences in deaths per TWh can be ignored.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#428

Post by donkyrf » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #339

donkyrf wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sri Lanka has only one coal power plant (construction began 2006), and the later coal project was canceled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Sri_...

You are correct its only one but its gone from zero in 2010 to about half of what hydro produces now, and the proportion from renewables has gone down quite considerably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sri_Lank...

It is bizarre that you are citing a project that was planned in the 90s, broke ground in 2006 and ended in 2015 as a recent development.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#429

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

direwolf20 wrote: post #350

jdlshore wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re misunderstanding the economics at a fairly basic level. The cost to build is funded through debt that’s paid off over time. The construction costs aren’t in the past; they’re in the present, and in the future, in the form of debt payments. Think of it this way: if you buy a house, the “operating cost” is fairly small: upkeep and painting, mostly. Does that mean you can buy a house, move out of your apa…

What happens if the operating company can't pay the debt? The bank repossesses the facility. Now what does the bank do with a solar facility? Does it (A) let it rot, losing massive value, (B) run a bulldozer through it, destroying massive value or (C) find a way to operate it, receiving profit from doing so?

The bond covenants usually tie it to revenue and external factors. With a solar facility, it's pretty cut and dry -- the if the operator fucks up, they default, the bondholders take a haircut and someone buy the asset at auction.

With a nuclear facility, the capital costs are ridiculously high and the facilities are too big to fail and too impactful to close. So the ratepayers and taxpayers get stuck with it. In New York, the state is providing $33B in subsidies to keep 4 nuclear plants that are hemorrhaging money online.

That's why my opinion is that they should just be public assets. Let the state or federal government make some revenue instead of sending billions of mid-cycle capital to Constellation energy.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#430

Post by imadhiskenderbe » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #219

phtrivier wrote: post #27

> 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…

> 22,67% of electricity consumed by Albania is imported from Greece, which generates 22% of its electricity from gas. Interestingly, Albania exports about as much to Montenegro as it imports from Greece. There is solar on my roof. It makes about 125% what we use, but we import power from the grid every day, usually early am before the sun is up, or most days in winter. In summer we are fully charged and exporting fro…

It is similar but not because of the sun. It produces around 99% from hydro which means that sometimes during the year it overproduces and sells it and when there is less water they have to buy some.