Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
Sure, but their energy budget includes everything. They don’t have the luxury of importing energy others invested into decades ago when convenient and having it be off balance sheet like Denmark does.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
The main issue is that China is really big (emits around three times as much total CO2 as the US), so "38 reactors" sounds like a lot but meanwhile they're operating >1000 coal power plants.
China is also a Command Economy. The Party has decided that it will run more coal plants more intermittently, allowing it to decarbonize at low risk.
500GW of power at 40% utilisation gets you the same amount of energy as 250GW of power at 80% utilisation, and [roughly] the same CO2 emissions. But 500GW of Solar PV is shadowed effectively by the former where it would not be possible with the latter (without ludicrous amounts of storage). You couldn't choose that in the US or Europe without some kind of sophisticated compensation scheme because it's not profitable, but China does not need to care whether it is profitable only whether it can be done.
I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
> You couldn't choose that in the US or Europe without some kind of sophisticated compensation scheme because it's not profitable
"Not profitable" often has a strong correlation with "not efficient".
To begin with, you don't want to be burning coal even 40% of the time. The US generates ~15% of electricity from coal, China ~50%. Coal is the worst for both CO2 and air pollution, significantly worse than even natural gas. It's also worse than natural gas for non-continuous use because gas turbines at least respond quickly to load changes, whereas coal uses steam turbines that respond slowly the same as nuclear. And if you're going to do that in your "command economy" then why aren't you doing it with nuclear instead of coal?
> I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
The things that become stranded assets are the fossil fuel (especially coal) power plants, because they aren't viable to operate at times when the price of electricity is below their fuel cost.
It basically means they can't compete with solar during the day (unless it's cloudy and solar isn't available), whereas nuclear can because the negligible fuel cost means it can take any current price as long as it hits a given average price, and it can bring the average up at night. Which means that coal isn't even competitive with nuclear, since nuclear is getting something during the day whereas coal gets nothing, requiring coal to receive an even higher price than nuclear when renewable output is low and then gets out-competed by nuclear.
But the obvious solution to this is to stop burning coal whatsoever. Use nuclear for baseload, solar and wind for cheap variable generation with storage to smooth it out over the course of a day, and hydro or natural gas peaker plants combined with demand pricing to handle extended periods of low renewable output.
In capitalism, coal dies, so why is the "command economy" keeping it alive?
If no one else wants to burn coal, coal will be cheap. It's not that expensive to dig it out of the ground and transport, and most of China's coal is mined in China.
Any solution that doesn't involve everyone agreeing to care about the externalities of coal (air pollution and greenhouse gases) will result in someone continuing to burn a lot of coal.
That's assuming the main cost of burning coal is the cost of coal mining rights, which it isn't. Less demand doesn't make it any cheaper to mine it or transport it instead of leaving it in the ground (which are actually significant costs), and doesn't make it any cheaper to build or staff the power plant relative to alternatives.
They are using coal for the things they cannot yet replace with renewables for the same reason the US is using natural gas: it is the most abundant, secure, and economical non-renewable source they have.
The US is using natural gas because of politics, and even that is significantly better than coal. This also doesn't explain why China (at ~5%) hasn't managed the same percentage of nuclear as the US (~18%).
Or why they need that amount of coal when they have even more hydro than the US, which is much better at load-following than coal and should have been used to displace coal rather than nuclear.
They have more hydro and less nuclear. Hydro can displace anything when you have the geography suitable to actually build it. Which means the thing it displaced is the thing they have less of. They built new coal instead of new nuclear.
They have 64 running. 38 is the number that are being built right now. There are also ~20 that have been approved but construction has not yet started.
The number of coal plants is not relevant. It is how much coal they use that is relevant. Their massive and continuing renewable expansion along with massive storage expansion is bringing that down.
That's true, for now. But the actual amount they generate fell in 2025 and is projected to fall in 2026. Every other source grew that year, including Solar by 300 TWh (yes, China is crazy big, 300 TWh increase in solar and even in summer that was still only third biggest share)
My guess is that China sees strength in diversity. More solar yes, and more wind, more nuclear, even more hydro, to the extent that's possible. This has been what they were doing for a decade, but they're now deploying enough that it outpaces their system demand reducing the use of coal.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.
And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.
Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
> The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
The answer is obviously that it delivers when they don't.
Every power plant has to hit a certain average price per kWh, and the ones with a variable operating cost (fossil fuels) also need a minimum price in order to generate right now, since the cost of fuel is a significant part of their costs.
What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low.
> We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants.
This is just putting a battery storage unit at the site of an existing power plant because it already has a stout grid connection.
> Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
Pushing the bottom up during the times when other generation methods have low output does help with the hard part.
Regardless of whether nuke fuel cost is negligible, nukes were already quite expensive even under the previous model where nukes were highly utilized (expensive due to the very expensive non-fuel parts of building/running nukes). (And I'm not even sure if those existing high costs assumed the government handled the costs of insuring (or otherwise paying) if the nuke plant has a disaster, or if it included decommissioning/safe nuke disposal costs?)
But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't, then wouldn't nuke's cost per kwh end up 'x' times higher than before as a result because we still have the same amortized costs split over fewer generating hours per year, and nuke fuel cost is negligible?
> But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't
Nobody is talking about doing that. Nuclear plants are baseload. They always run 100% of the time because even if the current price of electricity is low, their incremental cost savings from reducing output is basically zero, so any positive price means they remain at full output.
This means you don't want 100% nuclear generation, because you don't have constant load. If you have 10GW of demand at night and 20GW during the day then you don't want 20GW of nuclear and nothing to do with half of it at night. But having 5 to 10GW is good, because you never need less than that anyway.
The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.
The massive battery buildout in places like California and Australia are seriously eating into these night time windows already, and we’ve really just gotten started. California will exit 26 with roughly ~20% fossil, and still dropping fast every year as batteries move deeper into the night. The opportunity for nuke to sell at higher prices during the night is being eaten fast. Batteries filled with cheap excess daytime solar are cheaper than nukes already, and can be deployed instantly. The niche won’t exist soon, which is why noones building nukes.
(Yes there is a small amount of legacy nuke in California too.)
We’re already seeing prices approaching zero or even going negative due to renewable buildouts, and with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
So it seems like even if you run nuclear 100% of the time, you’re not going to earn much of anything or may even need to pay the negative rates if you don’t stop feeding into the grid, for a number of hours per day, so I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover nuclear’s existing (noticeable) amortized costs?
And the trend line of renewable and storage costs getting cheaper doesn’t seem to be stopping.
> We’re already seeing prices approaching zero or even going negative due to renewable buildouts
There is a huge difference between prices hitting zero from time to time and the year-long average daytime price being zero. The latter is the thing that would bankrupt solar because that's when all of its generation occurs.
> with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
Which is completely expected, because a moderate amount of storage can be used to smooth out time of day misalignment of demand with supply, and it makes sense to charge that with solar during the day whenever it's available. But the thing that's displacing is peaker plants rather than baseload.
> I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover
It's not about being exactly 24 hours every day. It's about averaging 20+ hours every day instead of 12, and getting not just all 24 hours but also the higher price for all 24 hours on the days when the output of other generation methods is lower.
Expect that the price per kWh at any given time is inversely correlated with renewable output. What does that do to the profitability of renewables and what does it to do the profitability of something whose output is uncorrelated with renewable output?
That’s not what we are seeing in reality. In Spain the nuclear plants massively load follow. Same as I just mentioned they do in Sweden.
Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years.
And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.
And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear?
A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.
Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation
> And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.
You're kind of answering your own question when you can't call them "cheap stored renewables". Ask yourself why the price is lower in France than in Spain.
"Stored renewables" are fairly expensive even on the days when renewable output is high. When renewable output is low they're not even available because you had no surplus generation to charge the batteries during the day and now the sun is down and they're empty.
> A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.
A nuclear plant is hit lighter than this than a gas turbine because it still generates during the day. And when your concern is cost, are you aware of what it costs to produce "carbon neutral fuels"? That's original electricity generation cost + fuel production infrastructure cost + conversion losses + fuel storage cost + conversion losses again + capital cost for the rarely used fuel-burning generators. That's the thing that's ruinously expensive.
In this kind of debates people often forget how far north Sweden just happens to be. Solar farms has their average production output down to single digit percent during the worst months. At the same time, those months also see an increase to around double consumption of electricity demand compared to the warmest months. Solar production has a negative correlation to electricity demand in Sweden.
Wind has a slight positive correlation to demand, but the storage requirement for wind can be calculated as weeks/months compared to hours for solar.
Sweden also has a free market for electricity without any price roofs. That mean prices can be zero for long periods during the summer when solar is overproducing, but it can also reach over €1 per kw/h during periods of supply shortage. Have the record price for 5 days and have the remaining 360 days free of charge, and you would still end up paying more than if you paid the average cost for a full year (to be fair, in the cheapest of the 4 energy regions).
To add some more aspect for the Swedish energy grid, currently the south of Sweden that is connected to the Danish and German grid are suffering from significant supply shortage. The main power plant to address this is an old Oil power plant that was supposed to exist only as reserve energy, but have since a few years now been running every day throughout the year.
There is construction of more new thermal power plants. The two main strategy to solve the shortage, split along the two political lines, is either nuclear or to combine wind power with power plants burning bio fuel and then carbon capture the emissions (both being technologies with absolutely zero controversies). The later is what is being constructed right now, while nuclear might see construction in the future.
System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear in both Denmark and Finland.
The thermal plant you are complain about mothballed one of its two burners last autumn when the contract for firm emergency reserve capacity ended.
The final burner stayed open only with a new emergency reserve contract. Last time I checked it has ran like 50-100 hours per year. Never being called in as emergency reserve, although stepping up to hot standby a few times.
They also reactivated a mothballed CCGT plant in the same region for emergency reserve duties. But that was based on the war in Ukraine and ensuring local preparedness rather than needing the electricity.
You need to realign what you think is reality and what reality actually is. Look at the studies again and you will see that building new renewables is cheaper in terms of increasing the total amount of exported electricity and for expanding total amount of electricity produced over the year, not to fill in during periods of high demand and low supply. Producing electricity regardless of demand is a different question that producing electricity when there is demand for it. There is also a very significant price difference between electricity bought at the cheapest possible point vs the most expensive. Producing the cheapest energy, but only during periods when the price of energy is cheapest, does not make for the cheapest energy overall.
And if you want to believe a different reality, please convince the political parties in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and so on to replace existing thermal power plants with renewable energy, and to stop construction of new ones! The green party in Sweden went into the election that we had just a few weeks ago on a energy platform that said: Thermal power plants are essential to enable renewable energy and keep prices low. Not even they believe that you can replace thermal power plants with only renewable energy and storage. Their local branch in south of Sweden is part of the coalition that approved and support the current construction of the new thermal power plant, together with the carbon capture plan.
Not that people read sources, but here is the reality check (all naturally in Swedish):
yeah the math doesnt work. On top of the running costs you mentioned, You are trying to pay back the ridiculous capex over a reasonable timeframe (say 30 years). Nukes already have trouble doing that at 100% high power price sales. Saying "oh they can keep selling power but at a fraction of price" is technically true but fatal to the economics of nukes.
Because they aren’t when you look at wholesale costs?
Either way. France is wholly unable to build new nuclear given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and the ruinously expensive proposed subsides for the EPR2 fleet.
While Germany still pays for expensive early renewables. Back before the industry exploded in scale.
The relevant question is where to spend the next 100b to get the most decarbonization the fastest, today.
I also wonder how much of electricity costs in recent years have more to do with things like:
- Did France previously largely pay off the cost of building their old nuclear plants, while Germany has been spending heavily in recent years to majorly change their generation mix and build new generation? I've also heard that even France is now facing some significant challenges with the needed replacement of nukes nearing their retirement age being costly.
- How much of French and German generation buildouts were covered by the gov instead of ratepayers, if any?
However, I haven't researched the above questions.
The subsidies estimated for the EPR2 fleet (0% interest loan during construction, then reduced rate during exploitation) are 1/4 what Germany paid (365 billion) in subsidy for its renewable the last 20 years and nobody complained. All the money will be used in France/Europe meanwhile, the surplus of stable energy will benefit all its neighbors, meanwhile all the PV panels for solar production come from China. Renewables (even from France) which are responsible of much of the instability and problems of the european grid.
The 100b should be given to France to build its EPR2 fleet and save the italian electrical grid and provide backup to spanish solar production.
That’s a backwards looking metric. You’re complaining that late 2000s renewable were expensive.
The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t solve stability. When cold spells hit Europe the French exports turn into imports. So all the French neighbors needs enough backup capacity, generally fossil based today, to both make up for the French exports vanishing, they experiencing the same cold spell, and exporting to France.
Stick two French grids next to each other and they would quickly collapse due to how brittle they are.
> Except turning off when prices are too low for too long
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
> Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
Guess you just explained how one investor was convinced: the government.
Why? Because governments don't think in quarterly reports and short term profits, but also have to make strategic investments in stability. Ignoring the existence of baseload power needs is classical fallacy of "solar-pilled" westerners with the luxury of having 24/7 power from sources they are willing to ignore. I'm saying this with solar panels on top the house I'm living, and charging an electric car from them.
Solar and wind are not a panacea, and batteries won't solve all power needs, it is the same mindset as outsourcing polluting and humanely taxing industries to China or the third world and acting if we solved environmental or ethics problems, because we can now conveniently nott see them.
If we stop our industry, and civil infrastructure for the night, sure, no need for baseload, just some batteries... wish nobody wants to make a tea, make food, smelt aluminum at night...
A lesson being learnt in the Middle East and Eastern Europe right now is that any form of highly centralised energy generation (or energy processing) is hugely risky during a war. It's an Achilles' heel that makes modern economies hugely vulnerable when attacked, even by a mid-power like Iran, let alone a super power.
Solar and wind have been branded as unreliable by propogandists working for billionaire fossil fuel magnates, oil sheiks, and oligarchs.
The converse is true: distributed power generation and storage is incredibly robust and can easily meet the needs of our civilization even under active attack.
If you want long term thinking, if you want robustness over short term profits, then solar + wind + batteries are you answer.
No super power can blockade the sun and wind.
No super power can blow up every rooftop panel without also nuking entire cities.
> Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
yes, if magic unlimited free power arrives nuclear will turn out useless
if it will not, then it provides some stability to energy grid and ensures that low polluting, resilient source of power exists
somehow I think that risk of magic unlimited free power appearing is low - and if it appears, then costs of contracted power will be now negligible
personally I prefer to pay a bit more for reduced risk of blackouts
That’s for new nuclear. Existing nuclear reactors operate on the whim of the markets.
For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar
Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.
> Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
>
The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Electric generation is a business and existing sites will be prime locations for new panels (likely straightforward to permit, connection to the grid, etc.).
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).
Fortunately the grid storage rollout is happening at a blistering pace too. Reported payback of investment for 2 years for many of the early rollouts (due to arbitrage between peak/off peak prices) and while that won't last it's still amazing economics.
The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime.
>The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction.
That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
Firstly, the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years, I assume the situation is similar in the EU. New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. Similarly the cost of managing Fukushima is way higher than the cost of constructing all the nuclear plants in Japan. These costs are of course never added to the cost of nuclear power, since nobody operating nuclear plants has any chance of paying such sums. But they are in fact a larger factor than the construction costs were.
These experiences did have some effect, thankfully, in that made new power plants more expensive, because we know that we must take any conceivable measure to prevent more Chernobyls and Fukushimas from happening.
And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost, despite them being paid off a long time ago. Meaning there is significant cost even after the construction is paid.
So it seems that the claim that "construction is the main cost" comes from the operator's point of view. Basically "the construction is the largest part WE have to pay, because taxpayers cover the rest".
> That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
It's a common claim because it's correct.
> the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years
That includes paying principal and interest on the construction loans, right?
> New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
The modern cost increases have nothing to do with actual deficiencies in older US plants. Chernobyl had no containment building and a positive void coefficient. Even the US nuclear power plants build in the 1960s have a containment building and a negative void coefficient.
> Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined.
It's a good thing none of the US nuclear plants have ever been Soviet RBMKs then.
> And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost
The reason was that their electricity prices were very low at the time from a combination of having a large amount of hydro and the then-price of natural gas being low. Most places have no ability to control either of those things. Meanwhile how is the decision to close those reactors looking given how prices are now?
>That includes paying principal and interest on the construction loans, right?
One would think! But no, all US plants except Vogtle and Watts are paid off long ago.
Now, why did you just throw that out there without checking? Are you not interested in knowing the truth, you just want to argue for nuclear no matter what the facts say?
If so, let me assure you that neither one of us will enjoy a continued discourse on the topic.
Just have to say though - that the Swedish reactors were closed because electricity was cheap is the point. Sweden basically stated that even when paid off, nuclear can't survive if electricity is cheap. But surely we, the taxpayers and businesses and industries, want it to be cheap?
> Now, why did you just throw that out there without checking?
Because it can't possibly be (and isn't) an accurate claim for the recent plants with modern construction costs. Whereas if you're comparing the 1970s construction costs to the modern day operating costs to imply that the operating costs are high, that's obviously not a useful comparison to begin with.
> But surely we, the taxpayers and businesses and industries, want it to be cheap?
We might want it to be free, but we also want some other things, like "doesn't burn carbon" and "can reliably heat your house on a cloudy winter night". And then the question is, what's the most economical way to get those things?
>Whereas if you're comparing the 1970s construction costs to the modern day operating costs to imply that the operating costs are high, that's obviously not a useful comparison to begin with.
If we learn that making new nuclear as cheap as old nuclear it's is still not cheap enough, surely it is a very useful comparison?
It's not useful if the goal is to defend nuclear at all costs, I'll give you that, but that's not a worthy goal.
>And then the question is, what's the most economical way to get those things?
Absolutely, and that's why finding out the real, actual truth of the costs is very important.
If you add the true cost to society from things like Sellafield, Asse II, the interest-free loans, the army personnel and national labs handling waste, the decades of countermeasures for Chernobyl in dozens of countries and so on - if you add upp all that, perhaps generating e-fuel is actually cheaper than nuclear?
If not already, the Chinese have taught us that once you get the wheels rolling, prices decimate pretty rapidly. They made solar and batteries viable, maybe we could do e-fuels?
Synthetic fuel, batteries everywhere, pumped storage, geothermal, gravity, pressurized air, heated salt - maybe all of those are actually cheaper than nuclear, if we really add up ALL the costs of nuclear?
That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game. And all of that is made even worse because of the whole "nuclear" part, with plenty of critical parts becoming irradiated and essentially impossible to touch unless you let it rest for a couple of decades. On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.
> That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game.
There are nuclear plants built in the 60s and 70s that are not only still operating but in the process of extending their operating licenses in order to keep operating for decades more. The period of time it takes before this makes "keep operating it" unviable is evidently pushing 80 years without actually hitting the limit.
Control rooms and reactor vessels are themselves made of modular components and a lot of maintenance to those things happens during refueling.
> On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
That can't be the argument against building new ones. It's the argument that what you want is to build the newer, safer designs and then operate those for a long time.
Hopefully, small modular reactors (SMRs) bring down construction costs and build times significantly. The economics would be better than 2010s fossil fuel prices if companies like NuScale and TerraPower deliver on their ambitious, but attainable promises.
Suburban America is dying because it is operating like a Ponzi scheme: the property taxes aren't high enough to pay for the long-term maintenance and replacement of infra, and for the past handful of decades it has compensated by filling the budget holes with one-off windfalls due to taxes on new development.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
So, as a rule of thumb, the solar panel loses approximately 1% per year. So after 30 years it's generating around 70% of rated capacity.
At that (or any earlier or later) point one could replace the panels. That's really cheap to do, and can be done with more-or-less unskilled labor.
If you are space-constrained (like your residential roof) then you'll likely do it earlier.
If you are a commercial producer, sitting in a desert somewhere, it'll likely be better to just "plant another field" next door. Keep the 70% (it's free), and bolster capacity by adding more panels, not replacing old ones.
And this is before we take into account places where the ecology under the panels has changed and become more valuable in its own right.
So 25 years from now, or maybe 10 years from now, it might pay to replace panels. Which may in turn lead to very cheap 75% 2nd hand panels becoming widely available.
They vary too much to have such confidence, and the technology changes so it would invalidate any real world tests with a previous technology.
That 1% finger in the air estimate is what installers or sales people tend to use to give people a vague idea what to expect. Your panels will not make as much power in 25 years as they do today. But because weather happens the hypothetical input power - sunlight falling on the panels, can vary maybe 5% from one year to the next, larger than the degradation in any single year no question. So it's very possible a solar PV roof has its "best" year in year two or three even though that's not intuitive.
That isn't even a very good rule. Look at the NREL panel aging data. Some of their panels are aging in reverse, producing more power after a accelerated aging treatment and years in the field.
None of the generation options have tightly controlled lifetimes. So that means you can always "put off" work to some extent and that hasn't changed between a Coal power plant and Solar farms. Similar to transport infrastructure, if you're a democracy your voters will be very angry if you "waste" money on maintenance and they'll also be very angry if you don't do the work and then bad things happen.
Thanks to recent events though.. nuclear got its subsidies back. Every border empire ever- at least 3 nuclear power plants per country in the next decade.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
Which is quite surprising, because on an irradiance map[0] The Netherlands and Germany have some of the worst per-year solar output in the world - an installation in the Mojave Desert would produce literally twice the amount of power with the same panels! And especially The Netherlands doesn't exactly have a lot of empty land either.
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
Netherlands is mostly rooftop solar, which is easy and cheap to install there. No permitting required, previous net metering policies gave a very predictable ROI and cost is very reasonable: say 3k eur for 8 panels including installation, that would get you like 3000kwh/year. Panels would be just over 2k, the crew to get it done like 600-800 euros. Electricity ain't electricity cheap there to the point the ROI would be just a couple years with the net metering. You'd be stupid not to get it at that point and a few thousand bucks is a very feasible investment for most people without having to resort to financing.
I live in Texas now where there's a lot more sun and a lot more electricity usage (though it's cheaper per kwh). Panels and inverters are a significant percentage more expensive due to tariffs and stuff, but that's not even the biggest cost driver. It's the permitting and installation costs that make it so so so much more expensive. If I could get a bunch of panels on my roof for $5k, they'd be there already. But typical costs I'm seeing is low five figures which is well beyond my appetite or electricity costs.
A big part of it is that The Netherlands has quite generous subsidies for roof solar panels on your home: you may subtract total power delivered to the grid from total power consumed when calculating your yearly electricity bill. This effectively means you can use excess solar generated during summer months to reduce your winter electricity bill, nullifying one of the biggest downsides of PV (intermittent generation).
The subsidy is set to expire next year, however. Although it was extremely successful in getting People to install roof solar, it is a severe adverse incentive for home battery systems (why store your generated power in a battery when you can give it to the grid and get it 100% back for free whenever), and it is making electricity more expensive for those who cannot install solar.
Looking at yearly solar irradiation actually underplays the disadvantage we have in northern Europe in terms of PV. If all we had to do is built twice the capacity that would be one thing but our winters are quite dark, making PV energy generation almost negible around the winter solstice. Whatever generation capacity we can displace in the summer we still have to keep around to make up the shortfall in December. I love when I see solar panels here but rationally speaking Germany and the Netherlands should be among the late adopters.
> In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
If global solar capacity was 1873 GW in 2025, global wind capacity was 1132 GW, and global nuclear capacity was 398 GW, how could solar and wind have surpassed nuclear in March of 2026 for the first time?
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Idea, which unfortunately won't be feasible until MAGA dies:
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
At least in the case of wind the federal government has attacked via the permitting process. That limits what states can do, cutting taxes doesn't help if you can't build at all.
There have often been private deals between renewables and big energy customers but the finances don't always work out how you might expect. Renewable projects are built using debt with interest rates largely based on the likelihood of generating revenue by selling electricity. And because of the long time scale interest can snowball to form a substantial part of the cost. Having a guaranteed customer in the form of a data centre is balanced by the risk that they might go out of business. You are basically coupling the risk of the generator to the risk of the consumer. That is why CfD style schemes are often favoured because it is just a safer source of revenue. Obviously hyper scalers have access to very cheap credit, but they may end up paying more for the electricity.
It is a shame that nuclear power has stagnated - we could have been moving towards fossil fuel free grid half a century ago. We've lost decades of progress there. But it's a good thing that solar power is coming into its own more and more.
Where we lost decades of progress was governments pouring enormous amounts of R&D money into nuclear instead of renewables. We got a nuclear a head start that turned out to be a dead end. We could have gotten solar, wind and storage cost competitive with fossils decades earlier. And as a side effect kept the west competitive in energy tech.
Nuclear isn't uncompetitive due to some inherent technological reason. It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
Solar used to be completely uncompetitive, but improvements in technology and increases in scale made the economics work. Nuclear got kneecapped before that could have a chance of happening.
Yeah, nuclear is fine. It just at this point it can’t really compete with solar+battery for how quickly you can bring things online. The 10 or 15 years required to build a nuclear plant is pretty devastating for it when you can build up solar in 1-2 years instead.
It also can't compete on cost. Nuclear is crazy expensive and prone to cost overruns, so no market party is willing to build it without the government taking on all of the financial risks. And with the rapidly evolving power landscape the long payback time only makes things worse.
It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.
Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
Its not just matter of regulation if it was that easy to build China would be building 100s. And by saying China I am referencing their manufacturing capacity and them being a command economy that does not have the same financial profitability concerns. It is not like they have not tried they have but nuclear technology the world has currently have does not translate to mass manufacturing.
You know what I call solar--fusion power. There's a giant fusion reactor running for free. We simply need to extract the useful energy. Want to build a terrestrial fusion reactor? A conventional nuclear reactor? You still need to extract useful energy and deal with excess heat. The way I see it, from an economic perspective, long-term, solar wins. Of course, this is just my long-view
I installed solar panels in my backyard, and then texted my dad that my basement is now powered by fusion with a roughly eight minute delay.
He then asked "isn't pretty much all power on earth outside of nuclear fission technically done by fusion if we give enough of a delay?". I didn't really have a rebuttal to that.
Geothermal is not nuclear fission. It's some combination of primordial heat from the formation of the Earth (which was gravitational energy) and radioactive decay (which is distinct from fission).
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
This is not very surprising given that nuclear technology was choked for the past 30 years, until recently.
That does not negate the celebration of solar generation growth, but we should consider that nuclear did not have as much enthusiasm and investment as solar did in the recent decades.
Each nuclear plant is practically a new adventure, and recursively so. It’s specialized work and the people who learn to build one properly don’t travel the world consulting on them, except perhaps at the management and design levels. Welders aren’t.
Meanwhile once you’ve installed 10% of a solar project, the rest of the project is almost exactly the same, and you can ramp up or ramp down the size of the final build as you go and capital either becomes constrained or part of the build goes online and starts subsidizing the rest. Your experts have journeymen under them that can start taking on more work allowing the throughput to increase.
How Big Projects Get Done talks about how roads, solar and wind all have this property, and most special projects don’t, which leads to either massive cost overruns or dead projects.
Solar install is also easier and requires less exactitude, so training is faster and easier. Lose 1% of the modules in a PV field and your output is down slightly and temporarily. Screw up 1% of the welds in a nuclear plant and you're in massive trouble.
There could still be a great future in that from stored thermal energy from renewables. I harp on this a lot here; the estimated cost for 600 C heat available with 100% capacity factor is $3-5/GJ, just from resistive PV heat.
A cup of water with salt added doesn't get noticeably warm since there's just not much entropy difference in salt water vs fresh water. These days you can reverse the process at very low electricity cost with reverse osmosis.
That's not fire. We might colloquially call it fire, but that's not what it is.
Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.
Yes. They argue Helion screwed up computing the rate of energy flow from fast ions to cool electrons. I have not seen a good rejoinder from Helion, which is a very bad sign.
Given this, and given the apparent failure of Zap's scheme to scale, I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.
China just finished building some but it's a dead end technology.
It first lost to PV for daylight generation, then it fell back on storing the heat for use generating after sunset but cheap batteries made that obsolete too.
In order for renewables like solar and wind energy to truly take the burden off a grid, we have to have large capacity energy storage solutions that balance the grid over a 8+ hour period. That way we can handle peak demand of the grid during high load which often happens when there's little light and on hot days when the wind doesn't generate nearly as much electricity.
Transmission lines can act like storage when there is PV to the east or west of you. This doesn’t remove the need for storage, but can dramatically reduce it.
The old model of cheap peaking power plants and cheaper base-load power is equivalent to cheap peaking power + cheap but inconsistent green energy. It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
Chile still wants transmission north south because in the winter solar closer to the equator has longer days and in the winter solar near the poles does.
Oh boy, you are very naive, ain't you? No country will put their energy stability in hands of their neighbors. Or do you see China, Korea, India and Russia interconnect their grids? What other supranational grids you know of?
Note how there are only 7-8 regional connections spanning multiple countries (counting Europe and North America as one block each). One is there for historical reasons (IPS/UPS, Russia), others for economic integration (post-Soviet) or political affinity. With the exception of one, none are integrated with aggressive countries, and in most cases the distance isn’t far enough for it to become reasonable to do what you think can be done. The US ended up with separate interconnections because a single one proved unstable anyway. Hell, Japan has two networks!
DC links do exist outside those blocks, but they’re bilateral and small. The problem isn’t that it’s technically impossible, it’s that states won’t make their grid reliability depend on a neighbor. Just to point a single case, in 2018 a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia was enough to throw off the frequency of the entire continental European grid. Something being technically possible doesn’t make it practical
Yes. Batteries are coming. I think many people truly misunderstand the full power with which solar/wind + batteries will transform our societies (and by the way also giving more resilient and insular power networks than centralized power plants can ever give)
This can be done in a distributed way using home batteries. This would increase demand for peak solar production for use outside this peak. At the moment solar production creates a large price disparity that can be corrected with home batteries.
Just study learning rates of different technologies and it quickly becomes very evident, how future energy mixes will roughly look like.
(That's also why fossil fuels have no future in the energy mix. They don't have any significant learning rate - just like minerals.)
See e.g. this seminal paper: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.
Wind power has been undergoing a very similar rapid fall in cost, and rapid rise in installations, and is a fantastic natural resource (and also one that complements solar almost perfectly!), but it always feels like solar gets 10x the attention and conversation that wind gets.
My interest is mostly getting solar installed at home, something I can feasibly do. I don't think my city allows for residential wind turbine installs.
Dumb question: is there a limit to how much energy we can capture? I'm imagining a wind gust blowing east to west across a city filled wind turbines. By the time the gust reaches the west end of the city, has most of its energy been captured or otherwise dissipated?
Contrasting that with solar, where any surface area receiving direct sunlight doesn't prevent other adjacent areas from also capturing solar.
Wind power scales with the turbine area squared, and the wind velocity cubed. That means there's massive incentive to make bigger and taller turbines (windspeeds are higher the further away from the ground you are).
For that reason, there is very little reason to build small wind turbines, even if there wasn't a down-stream loss of power from putting too many close together.
So there's the hobbyist side of it, but I guess it's not totally clear why that matters to the people talking about the world's power mix.
But as I write that, I guess it becomes more clear to me that a personal interest in installing the technology makes one pay more attention to it elsewhere, and promote more conversations about it that get others involved.
A lot of energy is used for heating, heating water is more efficient with fossil fuel than with electricity - because for electricity you have transmission loss.
That used to be the case, but with the efficient heat pumps that have come out in the last few years, that is no longer true. Since you’re using electricity to move heat rather than produce it, it’s two to three times more efficient than burning fossil fuels for heating.
Does it, though? Assuming 80% of energy use is fossil and fossil has a 50% loss, if all that fossil were to transition to ~100% efficient electricity[0] we'd already be at 33% of our renewable electricity needs. That's quite a bit more than the 20% the "80% fossil" seems to suggest!
"One-third done" sounds an awful lot like we're going to start seeing optimistic "we'll be halfway there at the end of the decade" headlines soon...
[0]: Things like the grid and car batteries don't operate at 100% but closer to 95%, but things like heat pumps operate at 300% efficiency, so I reckon that'll more-or-less cancel out for back-of-the-napkin math.
Yes we're not done yet, but renewable only started gaining share again around 2010, and how quickly solar/battery is being deployed is really impressive.
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
Contrary to their name, "rare earth metals" aren't actually rare, and for a lot of the renewables stack they aren't strictly necessary.
Take lithium batteries, for example. They were attractive for early BEVs because the consumer electronics market already developed an industry for them, and they were attractive for early grid storage because the BEVs scaled that industry up. But that doesn't mean you have to use lithium for grid storage, and when push comes to shove we could also use sodium-ion batteries, or iron redox flow batteries.
If your country no longer has access to iron and salt, I reckon you have bigger things to worry about.
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
Your four year old paper shows wind+solar costs as on par with nuclear in the final (LFSCOE95) model in the ERCOT market before factoring in dropping battery farm costs.
Other papers exist with a different opinion (eg: Australia's more recent CSIRO energy report finds nuclear not providing bang for the buck in the Australian market)
Further, despite claiming Level Full System Costs, there's no factoring in for externalities - eg: climate costs of dragging out fossil fuels while waiting for nuclear to come online, political costs of being steadily reliant on outside countries for fuel and supply (cost of gas to non gas nations, etc).
There are other issues - it's a paper with an opinion - not the foundational rock you want to base strong assertions on, as you did.
Your data is way out of date. Renewables, particularly solar+battery, are incredibly attractive from an economic perspective. That’s why the build-out has accelerated so much. It’s not government hippies (I wish—have you seen the state of world politics lately?), it’s cold hard capitalism.
Give me balcony solar (in the U.S.) or give me death![1]
[1] Really, climate change risks already a massive liability in so many places (forst fire-caused particulate air pollution, etc.). We need far more solar and battery capacity to bend the curve.
There needs to be more general understanding of energy density and scalability, which is why I don't think we'll get away from fossil fuels without nuclear or fusion.
Of course, the officially titled World Nuclear Industry Status Report is actually produced by anti nuclear activist Mycle Schneider (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycle_Schneider).
I've been forced to use Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 at my job for the past 4 years, and the longer I use it, the more it makes me wish I was using OpenBSD w/ xfce.
I saw numbers in GW where I was expecting numbers in GWh ? How does the amount of energy produced compare ? "In 2025, nuclear plants generated 2,703 TWh", how about solar and wind ?
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
> Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
What kind of civilization is possible on intermittent power ? All western civilization is built on 24/24 7/7 available energy (from direct use of petroleum or electricity). I think we should give two numbers: the raw TWh output and the stable TW output and see where they are coming from. Africa and Asia are rapidly being electrified, but if it does not create an industrial boom outside China by guaranteed available energy it's just more people having intermittent AC and not real development.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
This oft quoted idea that nukes are only expensive because of incompetent regulations, and if they just got out of poor nuclear a way it would be affordable, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.
Only during the day... Nuclear power still FAR outperforms solar at night.
I'm sick of everyone saying that solar is this great solution that will solve all our energy woes. There are times and places for it for sure, but we don't have the battery capacity to actually go all-in on it. (And nobody will ever approve the large-scale hydro-batteries we need, and manufacturing conventional batteries is terrible for the environment, negating the gains that solar gives us.)
This can't be true. It must be fake news, because my telescreen told me that nuclear is the only viable future. Coincidentally most of the world's uranium comes from Russia.
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
> I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments
Idk, when you because of that implementation, for 20 years pay for the energy 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy, that seems pretty fanatical by me.
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
If China has decided to save the world from climate change as a second order effect from keeping their deflationary manufacturing system operating and for national energy security reasons, I have no complaints. I do not care why, it is immaterial, just keep the solar, wind, batteries, and EVs printing as fast as possible to the world. We have to get to net zero as fast as possible, and then sequester all of the carbon emissions emitted as climate carbon debt since the Industrial Revolution started. That’s a lot of work left to go.
- Official curtailment figures — effectively, the share of renewable energy that could have been generated but was never sent out into the world, because of insufficient grid capacity or demand — suggest about 9% of wind and solar energy was wasted in the first half of this year. That almost certainly underestimates the problem, given the scale of green production.
- China could have generated an extra 401 terawatt-hours of power in the first six months alone, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a nonprofit supporting efforts to curb pollution — nearly as much as Spain and the Philippines’ combined annual generation. [My note: !!!]
Ember Energy: China Energy Transition Review 2026:
China’s energy transition is moving toward “building while breaking,” as its clean energy system begins assuming functions long performed by fossil fuels - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi... - September 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> If China maintains expansion at the 430-gigawatt-per-year level, installed wind and solar capacity would reach roughly 2,700 gigawatts by 2027. That would be more than five times the entire wind and solar capacity in the EU. Whether this value is realistic depends mainly on two factors: expansion of high-voltage transmission lines connecting generation and consumption regions, and political will to actually decommission the coal power plant fleet.
Every year renewables consume another ~10% of fossil generation in China, and should push out almost all fossil generation in the next 5-10 years, at current deployment rates. China is relying on coal for peaking until their battery deployment rates catch up to negate the need for coal generators.
- "As the power system integrates more renewables, the true value of batteries to China’s energy transition is becoming undeniable," Yang said. China added a record amount of new battery storage facilities in 2025, ending the year with more than half of global capacity. Growth has continued this year, with installed lithium-ion battery storage reaching almost 150 gigawatts by the end of the first quarter, according to Ember. The country is targeting 300 gigawatts of battery storage capacity by 2030, up from 136 at the end of 2025, in addition to expanding its fleet of longer-duration pumped hydro storage to around 160 gigawatts from 66.
- The government ended co-location requirements last year and most new battery storage projects are now standalone systems that can earn revenue through a variety of ways, such as by purchasing electricity when prices are low and selling it when they rise.
- Still, China can do more to improve utilization as its systems still fall short of the internationally recognized benchmark of about 350 cycles a year, Yang said. If they had reached that level last year, they could have captured and stored an additional 23 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity, enough to power Singapore for about five months.
- BNEF analysts attribute China’s lead in the sector largely to policy support. Beijing identified LDES as a crucial component of its net-zero roadmap in 2023. The following year, China’s energy regulator launched 56 pilot projects, which helped launch the current boom. The country has built a massive lead in other climate tech sectors as well, from solar panels to hydrogen.
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
I am mostly pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
Well, what would you expect a solar rollout to look like?
Assuming we'd instantly switch from zero solar demand to unlimited solar demand, we'd need some kind of scaleup of PV manufacturing first, and with a fixed construction capacity of PV factories we'd see a linear rise in PV factory capacity - which would result in an exponential growth in yearly PV factory output.
But the same applies to the factories as well: the construction capacity is going to scale up as well, so as more PV factory part manufacturing becomes available we'll start to see an exponential growth in new PV factories, which would result in even larger PV factory output.
Scaling from "lab experiment and niche application" to "significant chunk of the grid" is a lot harder than scaling from "significant chunk of the grid" to "the entire grid" - especially with solar being embarrassingly parallel rather than requiring mega-scale deployments.
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
The Sun is #1 die nukes die!
very happy now.
had some issues with my off grid solar powered house and shop last week, but bounced back quickly and ran a small welder
as part of the system verification test,
still running massivly outdated gear, holding out till I can integrate car charging in a bigger upgrade.
saw a smaller farm last week that paved a small padock out by the road with 30~50 kw grid tie array , ground mount to concrete blocks, drop it and run, zero out the powerbill.
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
Brainwashed fission bros double-count reactor builds every year they are under construction. In terms of completed stations, China is opening 1 new reactor (~2GW) and hundreds of new PV stations (~300GW) per year. Over 99% of it is solar and nuclear is a sideshow.
Wow that's bananas. I suspected the answer would skew towards solar but not by that much. To me that also substantially discredits the "bureaucracy makes nuclear expensive" argument, my impression is the Chinese at doing this kind of engineering efficiently.
We absolutely have solved cheap battery storage. 100% solved. It is crazy to make this statement when we are discussing nuclear thermal power, which requires multiple 20-million-dollar steam turbines for every station. You should have said "We still haven't solved cheap superalloy fan blades".
Are we burning the battery materials into gases and sending the results into the atmosphere? No, then we are unlikely to run out of materials on a primary or secondary, recycled, basis. Not to mention the diversity of choices available for chemistries and storage
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
After its commercial span is over, over 90% solar and battery materials can be recycled to make new panels and batteries. Compare that with nuclear where we need to stow away basically-forever-radioactive spent material.
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
Note that this is actual generated terawatt hours. Nuclear power has a substantially higher capacity factor, but solar has been growing so rapidly that it has taken the lead on generated output too. Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also, though solar is racing ahead much faster. The next big milestone, not to be reached for several years at the present rate, would be solar generation overtaking hydroelectric generation. You can see data up through 2025 here:
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.
Nuclear power is generated on demand and allows a full decarbonization of the power grid as can be seen France.
Solar just produces when the sun is shining meaning you can’t build a power grid on it.
Just comparing total generation over a year is comparing apples and oranges.
A kWh is a kWh. A kWh of either solar or nuke means a kWh of coal or gas was not burnt. Seems like apples to apples to me.
An interesting fact is that China has passed "peak coal" in 2024 while still growing with about 5% in a year.
Denmark had peak coal early (2003) due to early investments in wind power. Coal is now practically gone.
We might see China get the same shift in electricity source as Denmark had over the past 20 years, just much faster.
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
Sure, but their energy budget includes everything. They don’t have the luxury of importing energy others invested into decades ago when convenient and having it be off balance sheet like Denmark does.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
> China would actually have to build stuff to do that.
and they do. Unlike Denmark, China is the world's factory and can use the windfall from exports to fund projects and have them on its balance sheet.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
The Chinese strategy right now is to just massively overbuild renewables so that even fallow periods generate a substantial amount of energy.
China's power generation is still >50% coal, so I don't know if I would call renewables "overbuilt" yet.
Yet. Wouldn't be against it.
If Sweden can build nuclear, why can't China?
China has 38 reactors under construction and are leaders in advanced designs.
The main issue is that China is really big (emits around three times as much total CO2 as the US), so "38 reactors" sounds like a lot but meanwhile they're operating >1000 coal power plants.
Also, it is a good idea to see where Chinese leaders are expanding focus to see what their thoughts on viability are.
Nuclear has declined as a share of power being built out in 5 year plans. The projected output of nuclear in 2030 is 100GW vs 2800GW for solar+wind.
China is also a Command Economy. The Party has decided that it will run more coal plants more intermittently, allowing it to decarbonize at low risk.
500GW of power at 40% utilisation gets you the same amount of energy as 250GW of power at 80% utilisation, and [roughly] the same CO2 emissions. But 500GW of Solar PV is shadowed effectively by the former where it would not be possible with the latter (without ludicrous amounts of storage). You couldn't choose that in the US or Europe without some kind of sophisticated compensation scheme because it's not profitable, but China does not need to care whether it is profitable only whether it can be done.
I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
> You couldn't choose that in the US or Europe without some kind of sophisticated compensation scheme because it's not profitable
"Not profitable" often has a strong correlation with "not efficient".
To begin with, you don't want to be burning coal even 40% of the time. The US generates ~15% of electricity from coal, China ~50%. Coal is the worst for both CO2 and air pollution, significantly worse than even natural gas. It's also worse than natural gas for non-continuous use because gas turbines at least respond quickly to load changes, whereas coal uses steam turbines that respond slowly the same as nuclear. And if you're going to do that in your "command economy" then why aren't you doing it with nuclear instead of coal?
> I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
The things that become stranded assets are the fossil fuel (especially coal) power plants, because they aren't viable to operate at times when the price of electricity is below their fuel cost.
It basically means they can't compete with solar during the day (unless it's cloudy and solar isn't available), whereas nuclear can because the negligible fuel cost means it can take any current price as long as it hits a given average price, and it can bring the average up at night. Which means that coal isn't even competitive with nuclear, since nuclear is getting something during the day whereas coal gets nothing, requiring coal to receive an even higher price than nuclear when renewable output is low and then gets out-competed by nuclear.
But the obvious solution to this is to stop burning coal whatsoever. Use nuclear for baseload, solar and wind for cheap variable generation with storage to smooth it out over the course of a day, and hydro or natural gas peaker plants combined with demand pricing to handle extended periods of low renewable output.
In capitalism, coal dies, so why is the "command economy" keeping it alive?
If no one else wants to burn coal, coal will be cheap. It's not that expensive to dig it out of the ground and transport, and most of China's coal is mined in China.
Any solution that doesn't involve everyone agreeing to care about the externalities of coal (air pollution and greenhouse gases) will result in someone continuing to burn a lot of coal.
That's assuming the main cost of burning coal is the cost of coal mining rights, which it isn't. Less demand doesn't make it any cheaper to mine it or transport it instead of leaving it in the ground (which are actually significant costs), and doesn't make it any cheaper to build or staff the power plant relative to alternatives.
They are using coal for the things they cannot yet replace with renewables for the same reason the US is using natural gas: it is the most abundant, secure, and economical non-renewable source they have.
The US is using natural gas because of politics, and even that is significantly better than coal. This also doesn't explain why China (at ~5%) hasn't managed the same percentage of nuclear as the US (~18%).
Or why they need that amount of coal when they have even more hydro than the US, which is much better at load-following than coal and should have been used to displace coal rather than nuclear.
> This also doesn't explain why China (at ~5%) hasn't managed the same percentage of nuclear as the US (~18%)
They started way later.
What makes you think hydro displaced nuclear in China?
They have more hydro and less nuclear. Hydro can displace anything when you have the geography suitable to actually build it. Which means the thing it displaced is the thing they have less of. They built new coal instead of new nuclear.
They have 64 running. 38 is the number that are being built right now. There are also ~20 that have been approved but construction has not yet started.
Right, that's the problem. They need to eat a big hole in a four digit number of coal power plants, so these two digit numbers are insufficient.
The number of coal plants is not relevant. It is how much coal they use that is relevant. Their massive and continuing renewable expansion along with massive storage expansion is bringing that down.
> The number of coal plants is not relevant. It is how much coal they use that is relevant.
The majority of the electricity they actually generate is from coal.
That's true, for now. But the actual amount they generate fell in 2025 and is projected to fall in 2026. Every other source grew that year, including Solar by 300 TWh (yes, China is crazy big, 300 TWh increase in solar and even in summer that was still only third biggest share)
My guess is that China sees strength in diversity. More solar yes, and more wind, more nuclear, even more hydro, to the extent that's possible. This has been what they were doing for a decade, but they're now deploying enough that it outpaces their system demand reducing the use of coal.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.
And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.
Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
> The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
The answer is obviously that it delivers when they don't.
Every power plant has to hit a certain average price per kWh, and the ones with a variable operating cost (fossil fuels) also need a minimum price in order to generate right now, since the cost of fuel is a significant part of their costs.
What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low.
> We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants.
This is just putting a battery storage unit at the site of an existing power plant because it already has a stout grid connection.
> Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
Pushing the bottom up during the times when other generation methods have low output does help with the hard part.
Regardless of whether nuke fuel cost is negligible, nukes were already quite expensive even under the previous model where nukes were highly utilized (expensive due to the very expensive non-fuel parts of building/running nukes). (And I'm not even sure if those existing high costs assumed the government handled the costs of insuring (or otherwise paying) if the nuke plant has a disaster, or if it included decommissioning/safe nuke disposal costs?)
But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't, then wouldn't nuke's cost per kwh end up 'x' times higher than before as a result because we still have the same amortized costs split over fewer generating hours per year, and nuke fuel cost is negligible?
> But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't
Nobody is talking about doing that. Nuclear plants are baseload. They always run 100% of the time because even if the current price of electricity is low, their incremental cost savings from reducing output is basically zero, so any positive price means they remain at full output.
This means you don't want 100% nuclear generation, because you don't have constant load. If you have 10GW of demand at night and 20GW during the day then you don't want 20GW of nuclear and nothing to do with half of it at night. But having 5 to 10GW is good, because you never need less than that anyway.
The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.
The massive battery buildout in places like California and Australia are seriously eating into these night time windows already, and we’ve really just gotten started. California will exit 26 with roughly ~20% fossil, and still dropping fast every year as batteries move deeper into the night. The opportunity for nuke to sell at higher prices during the night is being eaten fast. Batteries filled with cheap excess daytime solar are cheaper than nukes already, and can be deployed instantly. The niche won’t exist soon, which is why noones building nukes.
(Yes there is a small amount of legacy nuke in California too.)
We’re already seeing prices approaching zero or even going negative due to renewable buildouts, and with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
So it seems like even if you run nuclear 100% of the time, you’re not going to earn much of anything or may even need to pay the negative rates if you don’t stop feeding into the grid, for a number of hours per day, so I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover nuclear’s existing (noticeable) amortized costs?
And the trend line of renewable and storage costs getting cheaper doesn’t seem to be stopping.
> We’re already seeing prices approaching zero or even going negative due to renewable buildouts
There is a huge difference between prices hitting zero from time to time and the year-long average daytime price being zero. The latter is the thing that would bankrupt solar because that's when all of its generation occurs.
> with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
Which is completely expected, because a moderate amount of storage can be used to smooth out time of day misalignment of demand with supply, and it makes sense to charge that with solar during the day whenever it's available. But the thing that's displacing is peaker plants rather than baseload.
> I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover
It's not about being exactly 24 hours every day. It's about averaging 20+ hours every day instead of 12, and getting not just all 24 hours but also the higher price for all 24 hours on the days when the output of other generation methods is lower.
Expect that the price per kWh at any given time is inversely correlated with renewable output. What does that do to the profitability of renewables and what does it to do the profitability of something whose output is uncorrelated with renewable output?
That’s not what we are seeing in reality. In Spain the nuclear plants massively load follow. Same as I just mentioned they do in Sweden.
Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years.
And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.
And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear?
A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.
Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation
> And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.
You're kind of answering your own question when you can't call them "cheap stored renewables". Ask yourself why the price is lower in France than in Spain.
"Stored renewables" are fairly expensive even on the days when renewable output is high. When renewable output is low they're not even available because you had no surplus generation to charge the batteries during the day and now the sun is down and they're empty.
> A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.
A nuclear plant is hit lighter than this than a gas turbine because it still generates during the day. And when your concern is cost, are you aware of what it costs to produce "carbon neutral fuels"? That's original electricity generation cost + fuel production infrastructure cost + conversion losses + fuel storage cost + conversion losses again + capital cost for the rarely used fuel-burning generators. That's the thing that's ruinously expensive.
In this kind of debates people often forget how far north Sweden just happens to be. Solar farms has their average production output down to single digit percent during the worst months. At the same time, those months also see an increase to around double consumption of electricity demand compared to the warmest months. Solar production has a negative correlation to electricity demand in Sweden.
Wind has a slight positive correlation to demand, but the storage requirement for wind can be calculated as weeks/months compared to hours for solar.
Sweden also has a free market for electricity without any price roofs. That mean prices can be zero for long periods during the summer when solar is overproducing, but it can also reach over €1 per kw/h during periods of supply shortage. Have the record price for 5 days and have the remaining 360 days free of charge, and you would still end up paying more than if you paid the average cost for a full year (to be fair, in the cheapest of the 4 energy regions).
To add some more aspect for the Swedish energy grid, currently the south of Sweden that is connected to the Danish and German grid are suffering from significant supply shortage. The main power plant to address this is an old Oil power plant that was supposed to exist only as reserve energy, but have since a few years now been running every day throughout the year.
There is construction of more new thermal power plants. The two main strategy to solve the shortage, split along the two political lines, is either nuclear or to combine wind power with power plants burning bio fuel and then carbon capture the emissions (both being technologies with absolutely zero controversies). The later is what is being constructed right now, while nuclear might see construction in the future.
This comment doesn’t seem aligned with reality?
System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear in both Denmark and Finland.
The thermal plant you are complain about mothballed one of its two burners last autumn when the contract for firm emergency reserve capacity ended.
The final burner stayed open only with a new emergency reserve contract. Last time I checked it has ran like 50-100 hours per year. Never being called in as emergency reserve, although stepping up to hot standby a few times.
They also reactivated a mothballed CCGT plant in the same region for emergency reserve duties. But that was based on the war in Ukraine and ensuring local preparedness rather than needing the electricity.
You need to realign what you think is reality and what reality actually is. Look at the studies again and you will see that building new renewables is cheaper in terms of increasing the total amount of exported electricity and for expanding total amount of electricity produced over the year, not to fill in during periods of high demand and low supply. Producing electricity regardless of demand is a different question that producing electricity when there is demand for it. There is also a very significant price difference between electricity bought at the cheapest possible point vs the most expensive. Producing the cheapest energy, but only during periods when the price of energy is cheapest, does not make for the cheapest energy overall.
And if you want to believe a different reality, please convince the political parties in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and so on to replace existing thermal power plants with renewable energy, and to stop construction of new ones! The green party in Sweden went into the election that we had just a few weeks ago on a energy platform that said: Thermal power plants are essential to enable renewable energy and keep prices low. Not even they believe that you can replace thermal power plants with only renewable energy and storage. Their local branch in south of Sweden is part of the coalition that approved and support the current construction of the new thermal power plant, together with the carbon capture plan.
Not that people read sources, but here is the reality check (all naturally in Swedish):
https://www.energinyheter.se/20251021/33900/nytt-varmekraftv... - The construction of the new thermal power plant
https://www.energinyheter.se/20261002/35404/oresundskraft-in... - The addition of carbon capture and storage (CCS)
https://www.mp.se/politik/energi/ and https://www.di.se/debatt/sank-priserna-satsa-pa-fjarr-och-kr... - The Swedish Green Party and their view of thermal power plants
yeah the math doesnt work. On top of the running costs you mentioned, You are trying to pay back the ridiculous capex over a reasonable timeframe (say 30 years). Nukes already have trouble doing that at 100% high power price sales. Saying "oh they can keep selling power but at a fraction of price" is technically true but fatal to the economics of nukes.
If nuclear is too expensive why are French (~70% nuclear) electricity prices much lower compared to Germany (~60% renewables) ?
Because cost of production and the price being charged are two different things.
Because they aren’t when you look at wholesale costs?
Either way. France is wholly unable to build new nuclear given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and the ruinously expensive proposed subsides for the EPR2 fleet.
While Germany still pays for expensive early renewables. Back before the industry exploded in scale.
The relevant question is where to spend the next 100b to get the most decarbonization the fastest, today.
> Because they aren’t when you look at wholesale costs
I searched wholesale costs - the first result - click 'Monthly' for the easiest view to digest: https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an...
I also wonder how much of electricity costs in recent years have more to do with things like:
- Did France previously largely pay off the cost of building their old nuclear plants, while Germany has been spending heavily in recent years to majorly change their generation mix and build new generation? I've also heard that even France is now facing some significant challenges with the needed replacement of nukes nearing their retirement age being costly.
- How much of French and German generation buildouts were covered by the gov instead of ratepayers, if any?
However, I haven't researched the above questions.
The subsidies estimated for the EPR2 fleet (0% interest loan during construction, then reduced rate during exploitation) are 1/4 what Germany paid (365 billion) in subsidy for its renewable the last 20 years and nobody complained. All the money will be used in France/Europe meanwhile, the surplus of stable energy will benefit all its neighbors, meanwhile all the PV panels for solar production come from China. Renewables (even from France) which are responsible of much of the instability and problems of the european grid.
The 100b should be given to France to build its EPR2 fleet and save the italian electrical grid and provide backup to spanish solar production.
That’s a backwards looking metric. You’re complaining that late 2000s renewable were expensive.
The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t solve stability. When cold spells hit Europe the French exports turn into imports. So all the French neighbors needs enough backup capacity, generally fossil based today, to both make up for the French exports vanishing, they experiencing the same cold spell, and exporting to France.
Stick two French grids next to each other and they would quickly collapse due to how brittle they are.
> Except turning off when prices are too low for too long
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
> Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market
That's a bit cruel, because no such nuclear plant has ever been built and operated, anywhere in the world. :)
> Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
Guess you just explained how one investor was convinced: the government.
Why? Because governments don't think in quarterly reports and short term profits, but also have to make strategic investments in stability. Ignoring the existence of baseload power needs is classical fallacy of "solar-pilled" westerners with the luxury of having 24/7 power from sources they are willing to ignore. I'm saying this with solar panels on top the house I'm living, and charging an electric car from them.
Solar and wind are not a panacea, and batteries won't solve all power needs, it is the same mindset as outsourcing polluting and humanely taxing industries to China or the third world and acting if we solved environmental or ethics problems, because we can now conveniently nott see them.
If we stop our industry, and civil infrastructure for the night, sure, no need for baseload, just some batteries... wish nobody wants to make a tea, make food, smelt aluminum at night...
A lesson being learnt in the Middle East and Eastern Europe right now is that any form of highly centralised energy generation (or energy processing) is hugely risky during a war. It's an Achilles' heel that makes modern economies hugely vulnerable when attacked, even by a mid-power like Iran, let alone a super power.
Solar and wind have been branded as unreliable by propogandists working for billionaire fossil fuel magnates, oil sheiks, and oligarchs.
The converse is true: distributed power generation and storage is incredibly robust and can easily meet the needs of our civilization even under active attack.
If you want long term thinking, if you want robustness over short term profits, then solar + wind + batteries are you answer.
No super power can blockade the sun and wind.
No super power can blow up every rooftop panel without also nuking entire cities.
> Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
yes, if magic unlimited free power arrives nuclear will turn out useless
if it will not, then it provides some stability to energy grid and ensures that low polluting, resilient source of power exists
somehow I think that risk of magic unlimited free power appearing is low - and if it appears, then costs of contracted power will be now negligible
personally I prefer to pay a bit more for reduced risk of blackouts
That’s for new nuclear. Existing nuclear reactors operate on the whim of the markets.
For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar
Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.
https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...
Because when the continent is not flooded with solar, you still need/want power
And nuclear power is the worst solution imaginable to do firming for renewables.
You need something with low CAPEX to do that. Which is the complete opposite of nuclear power.
Denmark highly depends on imports.
> Wind is just about to surpass nuclear generation also
Err, no. from the first paragraph of the article:
> The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) 2026, overseen by French nuclear energy consultant Mycle Schneider, shows that wind power alone surpassed nuclear generation on a monthly basis in March 2025, followed by solar in April – the first time global monthly solar generation exceeded nuclear output.
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
My completely uninformed perspective: There's a danger here, in that we're rolling out all at once, which means infra will reach EOL all at once. Replacement costs of suburban infra is killing a lot of American municipalities that can't grow in order to generate the taxes to cover those replacement costs of water infra and such.
More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Electric generation is a business and existing sites will be prime locations for new panels (likely straightforward to permit, connection to the grid, etc.).
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).
Fortunately the grid storage rollout is happening at a blistering pace too. Reported payback of investment for 2 years for many of the early rollouts (due to arbitrage between peak/off peak prices) and while that won't last it's still amazing economics.
Well, that will certainly be an issue for nuclear power capacity in the future.
The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction. An operating plant has the wear items replaced on a regular basis as part of normal maintenance, so it's more like Ship of Theseus than something that has a specific lifetime.
>The primary cost for nuclear is the initial construction.
That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
Firstly, the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years, I assume the situation is similar in the EU. New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. Similarly the cost of managing Fukushima is way higher than the cost of constructing all the nuclear plants in Japan. These costs are of course never added to the cost of nuclear power, since nobody operating nuclear plants has any chance of paying such sums. But they are in fact a larger factor than the construction costs were.
These experiences did have some effect, thankfully, in that made new power plants more expensive, because we know that we must take any conceivable measure to prevent more Chernobyls and Fukushimas from happening.
And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost, despite them being paid off a long time ago. Meaning there is significant cost even after the construction is paid.
So it seems that the claim that "construction is the main cost" comes from the operator's point of view. Basically "the construction is the largest part WE have to pay, because taxpayers cover the rest".
> That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
It's a common claim because it's correct.
> the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years
That includes paying principal and interest on the construction loans, right?
> New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
The modern cost increases have nothing to do with actual deficiencies in older US plants. Chernobyl had no containment building and a positive void coefficient. Even the US nuclear power plants build in the 1960s have a containment building and a negative void coefficient.
> Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined.
It's a good thing none of the US nuclear plants have ever been Soviet RBMKs then.
> And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost
The reason was that their electricity prices were very low at the time from a combination of having a large amount of hydro and the then-price of natural gas being low. Most places have no ability to control either of those things. Meanwhile how is the decision to close those reactors looking given how prices are now?
>That includes paying principal and interest on the construction loans, right?
One would think! But no, all US plants except Vogtle and Watts are paid off long ago.
Now, why did you just throw that out there without checking? Are you not interested in knowing the truth, you just want to argue for nuclear no matter what the facts say?
If so, let me assure you that neither one of us will enjoy a continued discourse on the topic.
Just have to say though - that the Swedish reactors were closed because electricity was cheap is the point. Sweden basically stated that even when paid off, nuclear can't survive if electricity is cheap. But surely we, the taxpayers and businesses and industries, want it to be cheap?
> Now, why did you just throw that out there without checking?
Because it can't possibly be (and isn't) an accurate claim for the recent plants with modern construction costs. Whereas if you're comparing the 1970s construction costs to the modern day operating costs to imply that the operating costs are high, that's obviously not a useful comparison to begin with.
> But surely we, the taxpayers and businesses and industries, want it to be cheap?
We might want it to be free, but we also want some other things, like "doesn't burn carbon" and "can reliably heat your house on a cloudy winter night". And then the question is, what's the most economical way to get those things?
>Whereas if you're comparing the 1970s construction costs to the modern day operating costs to imply that the operating costs are high, that's obviously not a useful comparison to begin with.
If we learn that making new nuclear as cheap as old nuclear it's is still not cheap enough, surely it is a very useful comparison?
It's not useful if the goal is to defend nuclear at all costs, I'll give you that, but that's not a worthy goal.
>And then the question is, what's the most economical way to get those things?
Absolutely, and that's why finding out the real, actual truth of the costs is very important.
If you add the true cost to society from things like Sellafield, Asse II, the interest-free loans, the army personnel and national labs handling waste, the decades of countermeasures for Chernobyl in dozens of countries and so on - if you add upp all that, perhaps generating e-fuel is actually cheaper than nuclear?
If not already, the Chinese have taught us that once you get the wheels rolling, prices decimate pretty rapidly. They made solar and batteries viable, maybe we could do e-fuels?
Synthetic fuel, batteries everywhere, pumped storage, geothermal, gravity, pressurized air, heated salt - maybe all of those are actually cheaper than nuclear, if we really add up ALL the costs of nuclear?
That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game. And all of that is made even worse because of the whole "nuclear" part, with plenty of critical parts becoming irradiated and essentially impossible to touch unless you let it rest for a couple of decades. On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.
> That works for things like auxiliary pumps, but replacing the reactor vessel or control room is going to be a completely different game.
There are nuclear plants built in the 60s and 70s that are not only still operating but in the process of extending their operating licenses in order to keep operating for decades more. The period of time it takes before this makes "keep operating it" unviable is evidently pushing 80 years without actually hitting the limit.
Control rooms and reactor vessels are themselves made of modular components and a lot of maintenance to those things happens during refueling.
> On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
That can't be the argument against building new ones. It's the argument that what you want is to build the newer, safer designs and then operate those for a long time.
Hopefully, small modular reactors (SMRs) bring down construction costs and build times significantly. The economics would be better than 2010s fossil fuel prices if companies like NuScale and TerraPower deliver on their ambitious, but attainable promises.
Much easier to do upgrades piecemeal though with solar and wind.
Suburban America is dying because it is operating like a Ponzi scheme: the property taxes aren't high enough to pay for the long-term maintenance and replacement of infra, and for the past handful of decades it has compensated by filling the budget holes with one-off windfalls due to taxes on new development.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
Explain the mechanism by which you believe photovoltaic panels start failing.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
Everything fails given a long enough time span.
For solar PV it is ~30 years.
While the cell may continue to generate power, it may have diminished so greatly as to no longer justify its physical footprint
Yes, and no.
So, as a rule of thumb, the solar panel loses approximately 1% per year. So after 30 years it's generating around 70% of rated capacity.
At that (or any earlier or later) point one could replace the panels. That's really cheap to do, and can be done with more-or-less unskilled labor.
If you are space-constrained (like your residential roof) then you'll likely do it earlier.
If you are a commercial producer, sitting in a desert somewhere, it'll likely be better to just "plant another field" next door. Keep the 70% (it's free), and bolster capacity by adding more panels, not replacing old ones.
And this is before we take into account places where the ecology under the panels has changed and become more valuable in its own right.
So 25 years from now, or maybe 10 years from now, it might pay to replace panels. Which may in turn lead to very cheap 75% 2nd hand panels becoming widely available.
Wouldn't it be more like 74% after 30 years?
They vary too much to have such confidence, and the technology changes so it would invalidate any real world tests with a previous technology.
That 1% finger in the air estimate is what installers or sales people tend to use to give people a vague idea what to expect. Your panels will not make as much power in 25 years as they do today. But because weather happens the hypothetical input power - sunlight falling on the panels, can vary maybe 5% from one year to the next, larger than the degradation in any single year no question. So it's very possible a solar PV roof has its "best" year in year two or three even though that's not intuitive.
For current technology it's 90% after 30 years.
That isn't even a very good rule. Look at the NREL panel aging data. Some of their panels are aging in reverse, producing more power after a accelerated aging treatment and years in the field.
None of the generation options have tightly controlled lifetimes. So that means you can always "put off" work to some extent and that hasn't changed between a Coal power plant and Solar farms. Similar to transport infrastructure, if you're a democracy your voters will be very angry if you "waste" money on maintenance and they'll also be very angry if you don't do the work and then bad things happen.
You can't really delay maintenance of steam turbines. You absolutely may delay maintenance of solar panels because they don't need any.
You just replace it with more solar panels like what is so complicated about this? Also, this stuff is growing every year. It’s all staggered.
And the replacements will cost less and produce more power than the originals.
> Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent.
Yep, that’s what exponential growth looks like.
Thanks to recent events though.. nuclear got its subsidies back. Every border empire ever- at least 3 nuclear power plants per country in the next decade.
Wow almost a tripling of solar output in less than 4 years. That’s incredible!
> From March 2025 through June 2026, either solar or wind individually generated more electricity than nuclear every month. In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.
> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.
> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
How much of all of that is China vs the rest of world? They seem to just in the last decade or two absolutely exploded when it comes to solar and other renewable energy sources.
China is around half that capacity. Asia represents 3/4 of new capacity.
With this being said, Australia, Netherlands and Germany are leading in solar capacity per capita according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
Which is quite surprising, because on an irradiance map[0] The Netherlands and Germany have some of the worst per-year solar output in the world - an installation in the Mojave Desert would produce literally twice the amount of power with the same panels! And especially The Netherlands doesn't exactly have a lot of empty land either.
If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.
[0]: https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Netherlands is mostly rooftop solar, which is easy and cheap to install there. No permitting required, previous net metering policies gave a very predictable ROI and cost is very reasonable: say 3k eur for 8 panels including installation, that would get you like 3000kwh/year. Panels would be just over 2k, the crew to get it done like 600-800 euros. Electricity ain't electricity cheap there to the point the ROI would be just a couple years with the net metering. You'd be stupid not to get it at that point and a few thousand bucks is a very feasible investment for most people without having to resort to financing.
I live in Texas now where there's a lot more sun and a lot more electricity usage (though it's cheaper per kwh). Panels and inverters are a significant percentage more expensive due to tariffs and stuff, but that's not even the biggest cost driver. It's the permitting and installation costs that make it so so so much more expensive. If I could get a bunch of panels on my roof for $5k, they'd be there already. But typical costs I'm seeing is low five figures which is well beyond my appetite or electricity costs.
Crazy how much government can influence our choices via taxes and permit rules!
Clean coal, that's the future kids - America
A big part of it is that The Netherlands has quite generous subsidies for roof solar panels on your home: you may subtract total power delivered to the grid from total power consumed when calculating your yearly electricity bill. This effectively means you can use excess solar generated during summer months to reduce your winter electricity bill, nullifying one of the biggest downsides of PV (intermittent generation).
The subsidy is set to expire next year, however. Although it was extremely successful in getting People to install roof solar, it is a severe adverse incentive for home battery systems (why store your generated power in a battery when you can give it to the grid and get it 100% back for free whenever), and it is making electricity more expensive for those who cannot install solar.
Looking at yearly solar irradiation actually underplays the disadvantage we have in northern Europe in terms of PV. If all we had to do is built twice the capacity that would be one thing but our winters are quite dark, making PV energy generation almost negible around the winter solstice. Whatever generation capacity we can displace in the summer we still have to keep around to make up the shortfall in December. I love when I see solar panels here but rationally speaking Germany and the Netherlands should be among the late adopters.
With the current energy situation, less gas used for power plants in the summer is more than can go into storage facilities for the winter.
I mean that is why the EU is so gung ho on increasing cross border transmission capacity
That’s why they need above average per capita instal.
Yes, this is honestly a huge problem. The US isn't even trying.
They also produce a lot of electric vehicles.
They will probably end up less dependent on oil which is a good thing for them, considering the conflicts this causes
> In March, April and May 2026, both technologies independently surpassed nuclear generation. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.
If global solar capacity was 1873 GW in 2025, global wind capacity was 1132 GW, and global nuclear capacity was 398 GW, how could solar and wind have surpassed nuclear in March of 2026 for the first time?
Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Idea, which unfortunately won't be feasible until MAGA dies:
Huge tax breaks / incentives for data center construction but only if they are 100% powered by zero-carbon renewable energy.
Extend those breaks to existing data centers if they convert to 100% renewable energy.
To qualify they must either self-generate, having their own solar/wind/battery farms, or purchase 100% (net) renewable energy from the grid if that is possible, or some mix of that. They'd be allowed to have fossil fuels or "dirty" grid connections for backup if main power fails but not for normal operation.
First, it gets AI off fossil fuels and off the regular grid, but more importantly it adds yet another industrial scaling subsidy to renewable deployment, making renewables cheaper and more entrenched in the energy mix.
Unfortunately by the time the idiots are out we will probably have passed peak data center construction bubble, having missed a golden opportunity to yoke a huge economic bubble to the renewable migration. But hey, we get measles outbreaks and a new war in the Middle East, right?
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
At least in the case of wind the federal government has attacked via the permitting process. That limits what states can do, cutting taxes doesn't help if you can't build at all.
There have often been private deals between renewables and big energy customers but the finances don't always work out how you might expect. Renewable projects are built using debt with interest rates largely based on the likelihood of generating revenue by selling electricity. And because of the long time scale interest can snowball to form a substantial part of the cost. Having a guaranteed customer in the form of a data centre is balanced by the risk that they might go out of business. You are basically coupling the risk of the generator to the risk of the consumer. That is why CfD style schemes are often favoured because it is just a safer source of revenue. Obviously hyper scalers have access to very cheap credit, but they may end up paying more for the electricity.
It is a shame that nuclear power has stagnated - we could have been moving towards fossil fuel free grid half a century ago. We've lost decades of progress there. But it's a good thing that solar power is coming into its own more and more.
Late is better than never.
Where we lost decades of progress was governments pouring enormous amounts of R&D money into nuclear instead of renewables. We got a nuclear a head start that turned out to be a dead end. We could have gotten solar, wind and storage cost competitive with fossils decades earlier. And as a side effect kept the west competitive in energy tech.
It's not a shame it stagnated. It's good that it stagnated, since it wasn't competitive.
It's a shame it wasn't competitive.
What do you think I mean by "stagnated"?
Nuclear isn't uncompetitive due to some inherent technological reason. It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
Solar used to be completely uncompetitive, but improvements in technology and increases in scale made the economics work. Nuclear got kneecapped before that could have a chance of happening.
Yeah, nuclear is fine. It just at this point it can’t really compete with solar+battery for how quickly you can bring things online. The 10 or 15 years required to build a nuclear plant is pretty devastating for it when you can build up solar in 1-2 years instead.
It also can't compete on cost. Nuclear is crazy expensive and prone to cost overruns, so no market party is willing to build it without the government taking on all of the financial risks. And with the rapidly evolving power landscape the long payback time only makes things worse.
That's the most depressing thing. Nuclear has been successfuly overregulated.
It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.
Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
Its not just matter of regulation if it was that easy to build China would be building 100s. And by saying China I am referencing their manufacturing capacity and them being a command economy that does not have the same financial profitability concerns. It is not like they have not tried they have but nuclear technology the world has currently have does not translate to mass manufacturing.
And we've sunk decades into small modular reactors and it hasn't born much fruit either.
If you deregulated it and made it pay for its own disaster insurance it would stop existing.
Without price anderson act dumping the liability on to taxpayers nobody would build nuclear reactors even at the cost they are.
A completely predictable outcome of being under regulated and having several disastrous outcomes.
Unfortunate, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
You know what I call solar--fusion power. There's a giant fusion reactor running for free. We simply need to extract the useful energy. Want to build a terrestrial fusion reactor? A conventional nuclear reactor? You still need to extract useful energy and deal with excess heat. The way I see it, from an economic perspective, long-term, solar wins. Of course, this is just my long-view
I installed solar panels in my backyard, and then texted my dad that my basement is now powered by fusion with a roughly eight minute delay.
He then asked "isn't pretty much all power on earth outside of nuclear fission technically done by fusion if we give enough of a delay?". I didn't really have a rebuttal to that.
Not geothermal I would think?
Actually thinking back I think he might have said "nuclear fission and geothermal". This was months ago.
Arguably nuclear fission in this case.
Geothermal is not nuclear fission. It's some combination of primordial heat from the formation of the Earth (which was gravitational energy) and radioactive decay (which is distinct from fission).
On a monthly basis. News articles about solar power tend to quote maximum capacity, confusing the issue. This is about energy rather than power, aggregated over a month, so it's a somewhat more meaningful statement.
This is not very surprising given that nuclear technology was choked for the past 30 years, until recently.
That does not negate the celebration of solar generation growth, but we should consider that nuclear did not have as much enthusiasm and investment as solar did in the recent decades.
Each nuclear plant is practically a new adventure, and recursively so. It’s specialized work and the people who learn to build one properly don’t travel the world consulting on them, except perhaps at the management and design levels. Welders aren’t.
Meanwhile once you’ve installed 10% of a solar project, the rest of the project is almost exactly the same, and you can ramp up or ramp down the size of the final build as you go and capital either becomes constrained or part of the build goes online and starts subsidizing the rest. Your experts have journeymen under them that can start taking on more work allowing the throughput to increase.
How Big Projects Get Done talks about how roads, solar and wind all have this property, and most special projects don’t, which leads to either massive cost overruns or dead projects.
Solar install is also easier and requires less exactitude, so training is faster and easier. Lose 1% of the modules in a PV field and your output is down slightly and temporarily. Screw up 1% of the welds in a nuclear plant and you're in massive trouble.
We're getting to a point where we can stop boiling water for electricity.
What a time to be alive.
There could still be a great future in that from stored thermal energy from renewables. I harp on this a lot here; the estimated cost for 600 C heat available with 100% capacity factor is $3-5/GJ, just from resistive PV heat.
Well, if we want more drinking water we might start boiling salt water with electricity.
That's a very obsolete desalination technique.
A cup of water with salt added doesn't get noticeably warm since there's just not much entropy difference in salt water vs fresh water. These days you can reverse the process at very low electricity cost with reverse osmosis.
99+ missed calls from millimeter wave bored geothermal
That's many years from even attempting to make power. They've done what, a couple inches wide hole to 100 feet?
First power hit the grid a few weeks ago
https://spectrum.ieee.org/fervo-cape-station-geothermal
It's still small scale but it's up and running and the site has plenty more capacity that can be added on bit by bit.
Or as Bill Mckibben observed "for 10's of thousands of years, humanity has burned things to produce energy. The period of fire is coming to an end".
I think fire is still involved in the creation of solar energy though... Just not man-made fire.
That's not fire. We might colloquially call it fire, but that's not what it is.
Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.
When I really think about that it’s incredible that such a phenomenon is actually very common in the universe.
That's why I hope Helion Fusion does well. The system they are developing sends power to a device that captures power directly no boiling water.
wasn't there recently papers claiming helion fusion's design is literally incapable of producing energy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB4hB9QJX8
Yes. They argue Helion screwed up computing the rate of energy flow from fast ions to cool electrons. I have not seen a good rejoinder from Helion, which is a very bad sign.
Given this, and given the apparent failure of Zap's scheme to scale, I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.
“How did humanity solve climate change? We taught sand to move electrons with photons.”
Except for solar collection that boils water to generate power.
China just finished building some but it's a dead end technology.
It first lost to PV for daylight generation, then it fell back on storing the heat for use generating after sunset but cheap batteries made that obsolete too.
In order for renewables like solar and wind energy to truly take the burden off a grid, we have to have large capacity energy storage solutions that balance the grid over a 8+ hour period. That way we can handle peak demand of the grid during high load which often happens when there's little light and on hot days when the wind doesn't generate nearly as much electricity.
Transmission lines can act like storage when there is PV to the east or west of you. This doesn’t remove the need for storage, but can dramatically reduce it.
The old model of cheap peaking power plants and cheaper base-load power is equivalent to cheap peaking power + cheap but inconsistent green energy. It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
That only work on large continuos mass of land that expand east-west. Small countries or Chile have problems
National borders don’t limit power transmission.
Chile still wants transmission north south because in the winter solar closer to the equator has longer days and in the winter solar near the poles does.
> National borders don’t limit power transmission
Oh boy, you are very naive, ain't you? No country will put their energy stability in hands of their neighbors. Or do you see China, Korea, India and Russia interconnect their grids? What other supranational grids you know of?
Russia, China, and most of the rest of the world has interconnected their grid with other countries.
This is a map of where the grid is frequency matched across internal borders allowing easy exchange. DC connections don’t need this synchronization, but it reduces losses with AC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
In war this might be a minor issue, but in war electrical infrastructure ends up a target so it doesn’t matter that much.
Instead of looking at the pretty map, look at the table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid#Dep...
Note how there are only 7-8 regional connections spanning multiple countries (counting Europe and North America as one block each). One is there for historical reasons (IPS/UPS, Russia), others for economic integration (post-Soviet) or political affinity. With the exception of one, none are integrated with aggressive countries, and in most cases the distance isn’t far enough for it to become reasonable to do what you think can be done. The US ended up with separate interconnections because a single one proved unstable anyway. Hell, Japan has two networks!
DC links do exist outside those blocks, but they’re bilateral and small. The problem isn’t that it’s technically impossible, it’s that states won’t make their grid reliability depend on a neighbor. Just to point a single case, in 2018 a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia was enough to throw off the frequency of the entire continental European grid. Something being technically possible doesn’t make it practical
Yes. Batteries are coming. I think many people truly misunderstand the full power with which solar/wind + batteries will transform our societies (and by the way also giving more resilient and insular power networks than centralized power plants can ever give)
This can be done in a distributed way using home batteries. This would increase demand for peak solar production for use outside this peak. At the moment solar production creates a large price disparity that can be corrected with home batteries.
Just study learning rates of different technologies and it quickly becomes very evident, how future energy mixes will roughly look like. (That's also why fossil fuels have no future in the energy mix. They don't have any significant learning rate - just like minerals.) See e.g. this seminal paper: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.
Wind power has been undergoing a very similar rapid fall in cost, and rapid rise in installations, and is a fantastic natural resource (and also one that complements solar almost perfectly!), but it always feels like solar gets 10x the attention and conversation that wind gets.
My interest is mostly getting solar installed at home, something I can feasibly do. I don't think my city allows for residential wind turbine installs.
Dumb question: is there a limit to how much energy we can capture? I'm imagining a wind gust blowing east to west across a city filled wind turbines. By the time the gust reaches the west end of the city, has most of its energy been captured or otherwise dissipated?
Contrasting that with solar, where any surface area receiving direct sunlight doesn't prevent other adjacent areas from also capturing solar.
Wind power scales with the turbine area squared, and the wind velocity cubed. That means there's massive incentive to make bigger and taller turbines (windspeeds are higher the further away from the ground you are).
For that reason, there is very little reason to build small wind turbines, even if there wasn't a down-stream loss of power from putting too many close together.
So there's the hobbyist side of it, but I guess it's not totally clear why that matters to the people talking about the world's power mix.
But as I write that, I guess it becomes more clear to me that a personal interest in installing the technology makes one pay more attention to it elsewhere, and promote more conversations about it that get others involved.
80% of global energy consumption is still fossil fuels (oil/coal/gas), however.
Yes but primary energy isn't a good metric. There's 40-60% loss when converting fossil fuel to final energy being consumed.
A lot of energy is used for heating, heating water is more efficient with fossil fuel than with electricity - because for electricity you have transmission loss.
That used to be the case, but with the efficient heat pumps that have come out in the last few years, that is no longer true. Since you’re using electricity to move heat rather than produce it, it’s two to three times more efficient than burning fossil fuels for heating.
That’s fair, but factoring the energy loss in, it still remains the clearly larger share.
Does it, though? Assuming 80% of energy use is fossil and fossil has a 50% loss, if all that fossil were to transition to ~100% efficient electricity[0] we'd already be at 33% of our renewable electricity needs. That's quite a bit more than the 20% the "80% fossil" seems to suggest!
"One-third done" sounds an awful lot like we're going to start seeing optimistic "we'll be halfway there at the end of the decade" headlines soon...
[0]: Things like the grid and car batteries don't operate at 100% but closer to 95%, but things like heat pumps operate at 300% efficiency, so I reckon that'll more-or-less cancel out for back-of-the-napkin math.
Yes we're not done yet, but renewable only started gaining share again around 2010, and how quickly solar/battery is being deployed is really impressive.
That's primary energy, of which about half is wasted as heat. Electrification will bring this down by a lot.
And big usage of energy is actually heating home so heating water
That’s good. I wonder how much longer it will take for countries to make their energy supply dependent on fossil fuels or nuclear power, thereby becoming pawns of unpredictable or hostile regimes and being helplessly at the mercy of geopolitics. It’s so baffling that many countries, even those with plenty of sun and wind, still prefer to rely on fossil fuels rather than make life a little easier for future generations.
And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.
The answer is batteries (why it hasn’t seen the adoption and also what is about to enable it)
The geopolitics don't go away because the resources needed to switch to renewables aren't evenly distributed geographically:
https://www.statista.com/chart/33754/countries-with-the-larg...
https://www.techpolicy.press/us-critical-mineral-aggression-...
Battery storage is only a solution if you can actually generate a surplus of energy that can be stored, which is not a given.
We absolutely need to move off of fossil fuels but thinking that renewables are the only solution seems very short-sighted to me.
Contrary to their name, "rare earth metals" aren't actually rare, and for a lot of the renewables stack they aren't strictly necessary.
Take lithium batteries, for example. They were attractive for early BEVs because the consumer electronics market already developed an industry for them, and they were attractive for early grid storage because the BEVs scaled that industry up. But that doesn't mean you have to use lithium for grid storage, and when push comes to shove we could also use sodium-ion batteries, or iron redox flow batteries.
If your country no longer has access to iron and salt, I reckon you have bigger things to worry about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y94yV7WUwGY is a short lecture by someone from BloombergNEF that speaks to some of your questions.
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
Your four year old paper shows wind+solar costs as on par with nuclear in the final (LFSCOE95) model in the ERCOT market before factoring in dropping battery farm costs.
Other papers exist with a different opinion (eg: Australia's more recent CSIRO energy report finds nuclear not providing bang for the buck in the Australian market)
Further, despite claiming Level Full System Costs, there's no factoring in for externalities - eg: climate costs of dragging out fossil fuels while waiting for nuclear to come online, political costs of being steadily reliant on outside countries for fuel and supply (cost of gas to non gas nations, etc).
There are other issues - it's a paper with an opinion - not the foundational rock you want to base strong assertions on, as you did.
Your data is way out of date. Renewables, particularly solar+battery, are incredibly attractive from an economic perspective. That’s why the build-out has accelerated so much. It’s not government hippies (I wish—have you seen the state of world politics lately?), it’s cold hard capitalism.
Give me balcony solar (in the U.S.) or give me death![1]
[1] Really, climate change risks already a massive liability in so many places (forst fire-caused particulate air pollution, etc.). We need far more solar and battery capacity to bend the curve.
There needs to be more general understanding of energy density and scalability, which is why I don't think we'll get away from fossil fuels without nuclear or fusion.
Of course, the officially titled World Nuclear Industry Status Report is actually produced by anti nuclear activist Mycle Schneider (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycle_Schneider).
What are you implying?
Is this the year of the Linux desktop ?
I've been forced to use Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 at my job for the past 4 years, and the longer I use it, the more it makes me wish I was using OpenBSD w/ xfce.
I saw numbers in GW where I was expecting numbers in GWh ? How does the amount of energy produced compare ? "In 2025, nuclear plants generated 2,703 TWh", how about solar and wind ?
Because the damp rock we live on happens to have humans living mostly on the North half rather than split 50:50, there's a noticeable shift in solar generation over seasons.
So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.
The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.
Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.
You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
> Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.
We do own land that we could install a turbine on, which would be awesome to supplement our solar PV. But we live in New Mexico and when I asked an electrical inspector why there were so few smaller wind turbines here, he told me that there are few that can survive more than a couple of years of NM winds.
There's a reason the world's largest wind generating facility is about 60 miles SE of where I live, and they are not using turbines of a sort a typically home owner could contemplate.
What kind of civilization is possible on intermittent power ? All western civilization is built on 24/24 7/7 available energy (from direct use of petroleum or electricity). I think we should give two numbers: the raw TWh output and the stable TW output and see where they are coming from. Africa and Asia are rapidly being electrified, but if it does not create an industrial boom outside China by guaranteed available energy it's just more people having intermittent AC and not real development.
Unless nuclear gets dramatically cheaper one should expect to see basically just the minimum amount of it to maintain grid stability / heavy industry, or something in that direction (I think). Obviously this is quite path dependant.
The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.
If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
The grid tends to be somewhat grid-shaped, and even industrial-scale solar doesn't usually have a large centralized grid hookup.
It's like trying to starve a country by bombing its supermarkets: you could try, but in reality you're mostly wasting bombs.
> more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel.
supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.
It’s not very hard to make solar panels. Almost any country could spin up a plant if they had to. Or buy from a diverse set of other countries.
Renewables often make more sense for robust decentralized infrastructure.
However, the upfront cost of Full-sized Fission power facilities are often still around 1/2 to 1/3 the end user $/kWh. The issues arise with the long term waste stewardship costs, and the cognitive disconnect people can engineer their way out of the liabilities.
Now that "AI" data-centers are acting like a public infrastructure equity siphon, in some places private solar can have a payback period measured in under a few years. =3
What? Nuclear is cheap to build when the rules hold still. The problem is that while a plant is being under construction (which can be fast), policies change and on a multi-year build, every change means rework and financing costs on capital that is sitting idle. That's the main driver of prices, along with restrictions that keep tightening, the most overbearing being the linear no-threshold model. It's not a problem inherent to nuclear build out. Gas is faster and more modular because it is less encumbered and because we have far more experience building it. If gas/carbon construction was as hampered as nuclear is, the costs would be equivalent. They are not, because coal and gas have the backing of powerful interests that would not let that kind of policy instability happen. Meanwhile, nuclear has no backer with the same amount of resources
This oft quoted idea that nukes are only expensive because of incompetent regulations, and if they just got out of poor nuclear a way it would be affordable, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.
Only during the day... Nuclear power still FAR outperforms solar at night.
I'm sick of everyone saying that solar is this great solution that will solve all our energy woes. There are times and places for it for sure, but we don't have the battery capacity to actually go all-in on it. (And nobody will ever approve the large-scale hydro-batteries we need, and manufacturing conventional batteries is terrible for the environment, negating the gains that solar gives us.)
Maybe read the article.
We probably need a lot more nuclear then.
Now that PV panels are less expensive than cabinet grade plywood, it makes a lot of sense to get some independence through local generation.
This can't be true. It must be fake news, because my telescreen told me that nuclear is the only viable future. Coincidentally most of the world's uranium comes from Russia.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
Well technically it is nuclear power, just a free fusion reactor we don't have to maintain. :)
Another milestone in our journey to become a Kardashev I civilization.
Pedantic fyi: Solar is nuclear…
I’ll see myself out
So despite a borderline fanatical implementation of solar by almost every major government for 20+ years and virtually no new Nuclear plants for 30+ solar is just barely surpassing solar?
Whenever there is a discussion about nuclear I always remember this XKCD https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png
Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.
They might not look silly because they will have material from which to make nuclear weapons, which is the principal reason we have nuclear power at all.
I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
> I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments
Idk, when you because of that implementation, for 20 years pay for the energy 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy, that seems pretty fanatical by me.
> 10 times more comparatively to coal generated energy
Only when you completely ignore the cost of its externalities, of course.
> fanatical implementation
Not supported by the stats in TFA:
>According to the report, the gap between renewables and nuclear widened substantially in 2025. Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year,
Sounds like a quarter of the growth was in the past year.
Most of it has been installed in the last 4-5 years, and we are still accelerating.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
That’s awesome, and more evidence this hasn’t been “20 years” in the making.
World is almost at 1TW/year solar PV deployment rate. China has enough PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand. We aren’t done going fast yet, we’re going to go faster.
We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.
China themselves could have installed all of that capacity. But they are limited by batteries and other infrastructure and are catching up to those while planning a bigger play in the dessert solar farm.
They plan to increase 50% for Wind and Solar in 5 years, and possibly double in 10 years. Since 80%+ of all future planned Nuclear reactor are also in China, they would have more than double their renewable energy in 10 years. China is the number one in electricity production and usage, more than twice the size of US and 33%+ of the world. Given the size of China this is both exciting and scary.
If China has decided to save the world from climate change as a second order effect from keeping their deflationary manufacturing system operating and for national energy security reasons, I have no complaints. I do not care why, it is immaterial, just keep the solar, wind, batteries, and EVs printing as fast as possible to the world. We have to get to net zero as fast as possible, and then sequester all of the carbon emissions emitted as climate carbon debt since the Industrial Revolution started. That’s a lot of work left to go.
It’s a noble thought but the reality is this: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Chi...
and this: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/His...
Your graphs are out of date.
China’s AI Dominance Rests on Harnessing Excess Energy - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-china-ai-energy-futu... | https://archive.today/6dq8B - October 8th, 2026
- Official curtailment figures — effectively, the share of renewable energy that could have been generated but was never sent out into the world, because of insufficient grid capacity or demand — suggest about 9% of wind and solar energy was wasted in the first half of this year. That almost certainly underestimates the problem, given the scale of green production.
- China could have generated an extra 401 terawatt-hours of power in the first six months alone, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a nonprofit supporting efforts to curb pollution — nearly as much as Spain and the Philippines’ combined annual generation. [My note: !!!]
Ember Energy: China Energy Transition Review 2026: China’s energy transition is moving toward “building while breaking,” as its clean energy system begins assuming functions long performed by fossil fuels - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi... - September 2026
Bloomberg: Solar Surpasses Coal as China’s Top Source of Power Capacity - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-01/solar-sur... | https://archive.today/i3TSe - August 31st, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
China: Renewables now top 60 percent of capacity - https://denkstrom.org/en/goodnews/china-renewables-500-gw-ca... - June 1st, 2026
> If China maintains expansion at the 430-gigawatt-per-year level, installed wind and solar capacity would reach roughly 2,700 gigawatts by 2027. That would be more than five times the entire wind and solar capacity in the EU. Whether this value is realistic depends mainly on two factors: expansion of high-voltage transmission lines connecting generation and consumption regions, and political will to actually decommission the coal power plant fleet.
Every year renewables consume another ~10% of fossil generation in China, and should push out almost all fossil generation in the next 5-10 years, at current deployment rates. China is relying on coal for peaking until their battery deployment rates catch up to negate the need for coal generators.
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
- "As the power system integrates more renewables, the true value of batteries to China’s energy transition is becoming undeniable," Yang said. China added a record amount of new battery storage facilities in 2025, ending the year with more than half of global capacity. Growth has continued this year, with installed lithium-ion battery storage reaching almost 150 gigawatts by the end of the first quarter, according to Ember. The country is targeting 300 gigawatts of battery storage capacity by 2030, up from 136 at the end of 2025, in addition to expanding its fleet of longer-duration pumped hydro storage to around 160 gigawatts from 66.
- The government ended co-location requirements last year and most new battery storage projects are now standalone systems that can earn revenue through a variety of ways, such as by purchasing electricity when prices are low and selling it when they rise.
- Still, China can do more to improve utilization as its systems still fall short of the internationally recognized benchmark of about 350 cycles a year, Yang said. If they had reached that level last year, they could have captured and stored an additional 23 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity, enough to power Singapore for about five months.
How China Built a Big Lead in Global Race for Batteries That Last for Days - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-03/china-s-b... | https://archive.today/i7n3B - March 3rd, 2026 (Control -F "China Leads on Batteries That Can Store Power for Days" graphic)
- BNEF analysts attribute China’s lead in the sector largely to policy support. Beijing identified LDES as a crucial component of its net-zero roadmap in 2023. The following year, China’s energy regulator launched 56 pilot projects, which helped launch the current boom. The country has built a massive lead in other climate tech sectors as well, from solar panels to hydrogen.
("China speed")
Er, yes, that's exactly the behavior you would expect of something growing exponentially - it looks slow at first and then suddenly overtakes things. 23-27% annual growth takes a while to really get moving.
I am mostly pro-nuclear, and the comic is funny, but of course we extract energy from sugar, coal, fat, and gasoline via oxidation, while we extract energy from uranium via fission. So the more relevant variable being demonstrated in the comic is chemical process vs nuclear process, not how much energy is "in" the fuel. And that comparison is a lot less cut-and-dry.
Good luck getting fission to work on any of the other materials.
Well, what would you expect a solar rollout to look like?
Assuming we'd instantly switch from zero solar demand to unlimited solar demand, we'd need some kind of scaleup of PV manufacturing first, and with a fixed construction capacity of PV factories we'd see a linear rise in PV factory capacity - which would result in an exponential growth in yearly PV factory output.
But the same applies to the factories as well: the construction capacity is going to scale up as well, so as more PV factory part manufacturing becomes available we'll start to see an exponential growth in new PV factories, which would result in even larger PV factory output.
Scaling from "lab experiment and niche application" to "significant chunk of the grid" is a lot harder than scaling from "significant chunk of the grid" to "the entire grid" - especially with solar being embarrassingly parallel rather than requiring mega-scale deployments.
The first TW of solar capacity took 60 years to reach. The 2nd TW took 2 years. We've reached the inflection point.
China is building a lot of nuclear, and in my home province in Canada they are planning to expand nuclear infrastructure (we will see if it comes to pass).
Solar just thrives in places without dependable established grids and has way lower buy in.
Two different tools for different things.
It really is sad how ugly solar is. Miles and miles of beautiful, peaceful open desert are ruined. It's a bit of an environmental travesty.
You're aren't looking at all factors here. I look at solar and think its beautiful for what its displacing.
Utility scale solar PV restores deserts. It also compliments agriculture use cases (“agrivoltaics”).
If you believe solar is ugly and deserts are beautiful, well, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I believe clean, solid state hardware that will reliably produce low carbon energy for decades without causing any harm and potentially contributing positive benefits to its surroundings, with no other inputs required, is incredibly beautiful. Like simplicity, it is the ultimate sophistication (da Vinci).
The Great Solar Wall: China doubles down on its ambitious effort to tame deserts - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3363108/grea...
Triple win: solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00516-8
Swathes of Earth are turning into desert — but the degradation can be stopped - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03621-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
The Sun is #1 die nukes die! very happy now. had some issues with my off grid solar powered house and shop last week, but bounced back quickly and ran a small welder as part of the system verification test, still running massivly outdated gear, holding out till I can integrate car charging in a bigger upgrade. saw a smaller farm last week that paved a small padock out by the road with 30~50 kw grid tie array , ground mount to concrete blocks, drop it and run, zero out the powerbill.
Color me unsurprised. Industry in which it's been basically illegal to build gets taken over by booming subsidized industry.
There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.
> China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying.
Would be interesting to know how much nuclear vs solar they are building per year domestically.
Brainwashed fission bros double-count reactor builds every year they are under construction. In terms of completed stations, China is opening 1 new reactor (~2GW) and hundreds of new PV stations (~300GW) per year. Over 99% of it is solar and nuclear is a sideshow.
Wow that's bananas. I suspected the answer would skew towards solar but not by that much. To me that also substantially discredits the "bureaucracy makes nuclear expensive" argument, my impression is the Chinese at doing this kind of engineering efficiently.
We absolutely have solved cheap battery storage. 100% solved. It is crazy to make this statement when we are discussing nuclear thermal power, which requires multiple 20-million-dollar steam turbines for every station. You should have said "We still haven't solved cheap superalloy fan blades".
"We still haven't solved cheap battery storage."
we literally already have salt battery
I wonder if we will run out of battery materials in a hundred years, then what?
Are we burning the battery materials into gases and sending the results into the atmosphere? No, then we are unlikely to run out of materials on a primary or secondary, recycled, basis. Not to mention the diversity of choices available for chemistries and storage
Impossible as there are so many chemistries, but hopefully we don't run out of water for pumped hydro.
we might end up switching to sodium batteries for the grid, they’re heavier so not great for cars, but otherwise they’re fine
Global scale HVDC networks could eliminate a significant part of the storage requirement.
If we run out of Saltwater then we have very different problems at our hand.
1. Sodium batteries 2. Kinetic Batteries
It is far more likely to run out of practical fissile materials than it would be to run out of electrochemical materials.
green gas or flow batteries
Publication says that specialty of the publication is booming. Noted.
Industry newspaper writes news about industry. Who do you expect us going to write about this, Knitting Monthly?
If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.
These are easily verified hard numbers that could be looked up anywhere. It's not an "opinion" or a subjective piece.
What is your note, precisely?
quite sad to see that even educated hackers ain't getting this is a bad news - solar is dirt. nasty chemicals on it's production, nasty thrash after it's commercial span is over. nuclear is much more reliable, has tons of space to improve, cheaper and greener over the long term. such a shame this greenwashing
Are you trying to claim solar has nastier end-of-life cleanup than nuclear? That is certainly one way to get people to discount everything you say.
Every energy source has complications regarding the production of the capability. We know that fossil fuels have a much more damaging impact than other sources of energy production.
Not to discount your point of renewables having massive issues, they just simply do not compare to the destruction that is caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground and the damage it does once we start burning it
After its commercial span is over, over 90% solar and battery materials can be recycled to make new panels and batteries. Compare that with nuclear where we need to stow away basically-forever-radioactive spent material.
We have a giant fusion machine in the sky delivering energy in great excess what we use, and we only capture a tiny fraction of it at the moment. We can make each household practically independent. Fission and (hopefully soon) fusion will be good for meeting grid demand when renewables can't, but a distributed grid is simply more resilient to everything, from local events to country and nation-wide disruption of central generation points.
Please share the recycling supply chain for solar panels