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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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!

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Well, if we want more drinking water we might start boiling salt water with electricity.

99+ missed calls from millimeter wave bored geothermal

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".

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.

“How did humanity solve climate change? We taught sand to move electrons with photons.”

Except for solar collection that boils water to generate power.

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.

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.

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.

Yes but primary energy isn't a good metric. There's 40-60% loss when converting fossil fuel to final energy being consumed.

That's primary energy, of which about half is wasted as heat. Electrification will bring this down by a lot.

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.

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.

What are you implying?

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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?

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.