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IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

electrek.co

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Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#91

Post by boxed »

stavros wrote: post #10
boxed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on. If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?

If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake. Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

> Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

His belief that the jews were the problem was the issue. But Germany has still not recovered scientifically or technologically. He was just as wrong about jews as Mao was about sparrows, or Stalin about wheat.

I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Millions died in all three cases.

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#92

Post by ziotom78 »

childintime wrote: post #18

> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025 By the time they are ready they will have contributed so many carbon emissions, that they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back. But by the time they are commissioned (~2036), solar + battery + solar-made hydrocarbons will have made them uneconomic, and solar would have made far fewer emissions…

> they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back

Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%.

> solar would have made far fewer emissions

Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar.

> they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about

True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it.

> They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.

I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019689040...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#93

Post by tzs »

gregwebs wrote: post #78
locallost wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your statement is true your graph is misleading for two reasons. 1) comparison of spent energy for fossil fuels vs electricity is not a good way to do it because electric motors use less for the same output. Compare kWh per 100km for an ICE car and EV. Electrification will lead to a drop simply because of this 2) the graph is global, we have seen energy consumption go down in the developed world. E.g. the EU no…

I think 2) is a lot more complicated to the point statements like that are misleading. Take a look Graph of energy consumption of China which is about double the US: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china The energy consumption of the United States has flat lined: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption by de-indusr…

> One can argue that the US and Europe have maintained a low energy consumption

The US has not "maintained a low energy consumption". US total energy consumption is the second highest in the world, at 2x third (India), 3x fourth (Russia), 5x fifth (Japan), and 6x sixth (India). It was first until China overtook it in 2008. Here's a line graph from 1965-2024 of those 6 countries [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-cons?tab=l...

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#94

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

kube-system wrote: post #84
decimalenough wrote: post #8

Very misleading title: it should be "Solar leads global energy growth for the first time". Still good news, but a long, long way from solar becoming the world's primary source of energy.

Yes, from the source report, for total generation capacity, solar is in a distant sixth: Coal: 10858 TWh Natural Gas: 6822 TWh Hydro: 4470 TWh Nuclear: 2859 TWh Wind: 2723 TWh Solar: 2653 TWh Decent growth, but still a long way to go.

The energy system has investment cycles counted in decades.

Looking at TWh of renewables added each year we will have grids entirely dominated by them in 10-15 years. That is lightning speed for the energy system, and we’re still speeding up.

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#95

Post by stavros »

boxed wrote: post #91
stavros wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake. Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?

> Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental? His belief that the jews were the problem was the issue. But Germany has still not recovered scientifically or technologically. He was just as wrong about jews as Mao was about sparrows, or Stalin about wheat. I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Milli…

I'm not trying to make a distinction. I'm saying that they didn't kill millions of people accidentally.

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#96

Post by rexpop »

boxed wrote: post #7
stavros wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.

I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on. If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?

Accidental evil? No.

Fascism is fundamentally driven by a realized nihilism where pure destruction is the actual goal, rather than an accident. From the very beginning, the Nazi party explicitly promised the German people wedding bells and death, including their own deaths and the death of the Germans. The population reportedly cheered for this not because they misunderstood the message, but because they actively desired to wager their own destruction against the death of others.

According to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler operated in a world "in which even success makes no sense,"[0] meaning the movement prioritized an "intense line of pure destruction and abolition"[1] over any constructive political goals.

This intentional drive toward self-destruction culminated at the end of World War II. In his 1945 Telegram 71, Hitler declared, "if the war is lost, may the nation perish". Instead of trying to protect his country in defeat, Hitler actively joined forces with his enemies to complete the destruction of his own people by ordering the obliteration of Germany's remaining civil reserves, water, and fuel. The devastation of Germany was therefore not an accidental failure to achieve greatness, but the logical, intended conclusion of the "suicidal state" fulfilling its death drive.

0. Joachim Fest, Hitler and The Face of the Third Reich

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#97

Post by iso1631 »

leonidasrup wrote: post #38
iso1631 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solar becoming the world's primary source of energy Solar has always been the primary source of energy, Something like 99.95%, with geothermal taking 90% of the rest and tidal being basically zero

You can look at coal, oil, gas as form of compressed solar energy, because all of them have biological source, stored millions of year ago. It's just burning coal, oil, gas has nasty side effects. " Volcanic coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 252 million years ago. Extensive burning in Siberia was a cause of the Permo-Triassic extinction " https://www.nsf.gov/news/volcanic-coal-burning-siberia-led-c...

You can.

Oil consumption is about 4,000 TWh per year, or about 10^19 Joules.

The Earth receives about 170,000 TWh per year of Solar energy.

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#98

Post by locallost »

philipallstar wrote: post #87
triceratops wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you also have to account for losses in drilling oil, shipping it to a refinery, refining it into gasoline or diesel, shipping it to a distribution hub, then to a gas station. And all the electricity consumed in doing that. And the navy and coast guard ships that need to patrol all the oceans to keep the oil tankers safe. And...

Yes, and the same for building and fuelling the power station I suppose. That's why I'm saying you need to pick a sensible point to compare efficiency at.

There are no losses in generating from solar which is the topic of the article. There is no loss since there is no fuel. There is a loss in transmission but not enough to offset the roughly 4x reduction in energy use. As the other person also pointed out, there is the same loss in transmission for e.g. combustion engines. You don't pour the gasoline that came out of your back yard. It's extracted and processed for most of the world somewhere very far away and then transported. If anything, the losses in electricity are less than the energy required to transport these huge amounts of fossil fuels.

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#99

Post by leonidasrup »

standeven wrote: post #85
gregwebs wrote: post #61

These reports are inferring a lot from 1 year trends that are often changing only around 1%. Certainly it is great if new energy is coming mostly from cleaner sources, but the idea that we are actually getting rid of the non clean sources is something we should be skeptical of. This graph shows all energy usage over time: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy New energy sources have always been add…

Comparing primary energy is VERY misleading. From Marc Jacobson: The use of primary energy on the vertical axis is an old trick by the fossil fuel industry to mislead people into thinking that one unit of fossils = one unit of renewables. In fact, one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity is the equivalent of three units of fossil fuel electricity. Another trick is to pretend we need all those fossils…

Making one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity equivalent to three units of fossil fuel electricity is an old trick of renewable energy advocates to argue that in future we will need less primary energy.

They base this on the efficiency of older gasoline engines, which is about 25%. They ignore future improvement in fuel efficiency and disregard all current combustion engines with higher efficiency.

High-tech gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of more than 50%.

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/how-f1-technology...

Very fuel efficient diesel engines have been developed for large ships because fuel costs are large part of operating costs of big ships. Low speed diesel engines like the MAN S80ME-C7 have achieved an overall energy conversion efficiency of 54.4%, which is the highest conversion of fuel into power by any single-cycle internal or external combustion engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Diesel_engin...

Renewable energy advocates also like to disregard efficiency of gas turbines. Latest generation gas turbine engines have achieved an efficiency of 46% in simple cycle and 61% when used in combined cycle. And still some of the waste heat can also be used for cogeneration.

Another trick is to pretend that renewables need almost no mining-transportation-refining. According to International Energy Agency.

"The special report, part of the IEA’s flagship World Energy Outlook series, underscores that the mineral requirements of an energy system powered by clean energy technologies differ profoundly from one that runs on fossil fuels. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a similarly sized gas-fired power plant."

https://www.iea.org/news/clean-energy-demand-for-critical-mi...

Re: IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first

#100

Post by leonidasrup »

ilogik wrote: post #56
iso1631 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solar becoming the world's primary source of energy Solar has always been the primary source of energy, Something like 99.95%, with geothermal taking 90% of the rest and tidal being basically zero

What about nuclear?

Uranium is only naturally formed by the r-process (rapid neutron capture) in supernovae and neutron star mergers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Origin

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