Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time

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(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)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.

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.

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

If you don't spend the profits on other things, which people are liable to do. The point is for there to be some awareness of oncoming costs.

They appear to accept this as inevitable and are also really angry about it despite it being the greatest economic, technical and political miracle of our age.

Even though their beloved French nuclear grid never got this far, they have convinced themselves that only nuclear can deliver those last 20%.

The whole viewpoint is bizarre and makes no internal logical sense and seem mostly based on hating admitting you were wrong about something.

A kWh isn’t a kWh if one contributes to grid stability and the other relies on it.

If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.

[0]: https://globalsolaratlas.info/

The problem with fusion is not technical (although we've not yet solved the technical challenges, which are considerable) but financial/economical.

Let's assume all the physics are sorted out later today. Now all we need is $100 billion to build a demo plant. Because we live in a real world, it will take 10 years before we can break ground.

Probably 5 more years of construction, testing, etc. So your $100b should start earning a return 15 years from now. If all goes well.

And returns should be pretty good. Assuming no great breakthroughs in storage tech between now and then.

Of course, returns will be seasonal, and mostly at night. We can expect solar to supply daytime demand. (Hey, solar is a form of fusion energy as well!)

So yeah, we need $100 billion now, perhaps more later as costs spiral, theres no prospect of a return anytime soon, actual returns are hard to forecast, and frankly life-span of the asset is hard to predict.

All of which is to say that it's unlikely to be privately funded. Govt maybe. Assuming the project survives multiple govt funding rounds. And, of course, being govt funded, timelines will drag and costs will overrun.

Unless of course, well, China. Cost is no object, experienced at getting major stuff built. Fewer delays. Money no object. But even there, why choose fusion when solar is so cheap? What strategic advantage does it hold?

Betting on fusion today means betting that it gets to production faster than storage. Indeed that it beats storage hy 30 years. And that's some bet to make.

The cost to produce such components that must safely operate in very demanding conditions is prohibitively expensive in comparison to producing a solar panel.

Solar panels will always win because you’ll never have the required demand to mass produce nuclear power station components.

It’s really that simple.

You can also bypass most project overrun concerns if you use already-approved reactors instead of trying to use a brand-new one, but of course this pushes back the schedule for profitability.

Compare a nuclear project to a solar panel. Solar is cheap, simple, commoditised, flexible, and is riding on almost miraculous learning curves. If dispatchable energy can be solved, beyond just gas/coal plants, ideally with long-duration storage based on the conversion of electricity, then this is going to be an infinitely better option. It's also just not clear what role nuclear plants have given that renewables need highly dispatchable power to ramp up and down according to their variable output, not baseload nuclear power.

Is there a study that identifies which regulations are unnecessary and how much removing them would save?

This is an oft repeated point by pro nuclear folk, but it’s not true. There are many regulatory regimes all over the world, and new nuclear is competitive in effectively none of them. Even in single party state china with few regulations , nukes are a declining share of total power every year.

They’re just giant big complex pieces of machinery. With huge ongoing security, insurance and deferred decommissioning costs.

That's the go-to nuclear apologist argument, but it doesn't hold water. Nuclear is struggling globally, even in China. That points to inherent problems. Regulation also doesn't explain why costs have been so widely underestimated. That's a function of dishonesty of the cost projections, not of regulation.

I'll add that regulation is the price you pay for implicit subsidy like government insurance against accidents. You don't get the latter without the former.

France is now on ancient fully depreciated nuclear reactors that are soon in dire need of replacement. Of course it’s cheap. But they have huge investments ahead of them to replace, upgrade, refurbish, etc. They have identified that that need to expand renewable energy to 50% of power generation, at least.

We’ve also seen recently that Germany has had to save France during hot summers when their reactors have had to shut down.

What’s the lesson from France? Build lots of nuclear all at once many decades ago when labor was cheap and then stop investing and letting your infrastructure rot, and you’ll have cheap power for some limited time? Is that something anyone can or should copy today? No.

Now, even VALCOE (value-adjusted LCOE) of wind and solar is coming down well below all other fossil and nuclear alternatives. So how can you say betting on renewables was the wrong at this time? It has been expensive to transition but long term it’s drastically cheaper than everything else. And we haven’t even started getting the benefits of how repowering old renewable power plants is significantly cheaper than building new ones.

The implication you're trying to draw there is a non sequitur. That situation doesn't contradict what I said. Moreover, France is going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the renewable age because they can't afford to subsidize nuclear builds enough to make a nuclear approach work.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Nucleosy...

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.

We have water, decent legal system, safety, talent, infinite power. Could be printing money with datacenter buildouts. Instead in upcoming election good portion of promises is anti-AI.

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.

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.

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.

I harp on one of this ideas a lot, Standard Thermal's resistive artificial geothermal idea. Their idea is to use densely packed fix orientation (to reduce mounting cost) panels feeding DC resistive heaters to produce heat that is stored in dirt for 100% availability. The projection here is 600 C heat at $3-5/GJ, which is close to the cost of heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas (natural gas at the customer end of the pipeline/distribution network will be considerably more expensive.)

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.

The ERCOT LFSCOE-95 scenario assumes another generation source supplies the remaining 5% of demand. Even then, wind and solar cost $97/MWh versus $32 for gas. And in Germany, the same model gives $220/MWh for wind and solar, $90 for nuclear and $31 for gas. So even your preferred scenario doesn’t support the conclusion you’re drawing.

Dismissing a peer-reviewed paper published in Energy because it’s four years old is particularly weak when you haven’t demonstrated which assumptions are invalid or how newer data overturn its conclusions.

And here’s a May 2026 peer-reviewed ERCOT study using detailed hourly dispatch modelling. It found that a more renewables-heavy electricity mix increased average costs by 12.1% relative to the alternative:

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/19/9/2195

As for externalities, those are legitimate additional costs to quantify, not an excuse to pretend that intermittency, storage, backup capacity and grid integration are free.

Calling a quantitative study an “opinion” while offering little more than your own opinion is rather ironic.

40% of all global shipping is used for fossil fuels. [1]

10% of the energy in a barrel of crude oil is used to refine it. [2]

I'm not even counting the energy cost of crude oil extraction, pipeline leaks, hauling gasoline, diesel and LPG to its final destination, or the million other places where energy is lost.

1. https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/16/shipping-freight-energy...

2. https://autoexpert.com.au/posts/the-energy-cost-of-petrol-pr...

"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.

So of course this didn't change in the 30 years following 1980, right?

Germany still uses coal, but I wouldn't say they are heavily dependent. They consume ~100TWh per year of coal (20% of total), down from ~300TWh in 2015 (50% of total). They plan to close them all by 2038, and they are on the way to do so even before that.

But coal is a political problem because the are producers, thus a good chunk of voters work in that industry. Political parties that promise to keep coal running could still get many votes.

Your argument about Germany is obviously BS, basically "it didn't happen yet therefore it can't happen". Solutions must apparently leap fully implemented into the world or else they are impossible, by your logic. Do you apply the same logic to nuclear, since no country gets the majority of its energy from nuclear (not even France)?

Storage can be dispatched, you know (and it's not just batteries.)

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.

supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.

I despair sometimes...

> Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, accounted for around 95% of all active storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW and as of 2020 a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

Really, you're making another "it hasn't been done therefore it can't be done" clown argument.

Only when you completely ignore the cost of its externalities, of course.

We solved fusion at a distance with cheap solar and batteries. And not a moment too soon.

- https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/veolia-opens-new-facil...

- https://www.6wresearch.com/market-takeaways-view/top-solar-p...

- https://www.rosi-solar.com/

- https://solarstoragextra.com/five-companies-spearheading-sol...

- https://www.rec-pan.eu/

- https://aerisoul.com/

Apparently it's still mostly about Aluminum and Glass as that's 95% of the weight of panels. The silicon is often recycled for precious-metals recovery and not circular. ROSI does try to do high-purity recovery. It seems volumes are still on the smaller side, probably because most of the volume has been deployed in the last 5-10y and they have 20-30y life expectancy. Still a lot of recycling.