Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan.
It makes 7.72Mwh per year, worth $1000. Tight valley, tons of snow. We put that on the loan for 8 years, then get $1000 per year free money for 20 years or so. Biggest no brainer of all time.
Dad in Victoria Australia just got 10.6kw fully installed and operational for $4000 AUD. ($2,700 USD)
Australia has so much electricity during the day they’re talking about making I free for everyone in the middle of the day.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-03/energy-retailers-offe...
It would be worth including control of the people who vote for the politicians by direct investment such as when the oil producing Saudis bought the second largest stake in NewCorps which controls FoxNews controlling the content that influences voters. And, less than ethical control using bots on social media by Russia.
A lot of what influences "solar prices in the US" is controlled by foreign oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia controlling content and media consumed by American voters.
Which makes it more of a ladder pull than a rug pull...
[1] https://www.sce.com/clean-energy-efficiency/solar-generating...
It's funny how “free markets” keep producing the most expensive solar prices in the developed world. Don't get me started on Healthcare (I just moved back to the U.S. a couple years ago after 18 years in Canada, what a cluster*ck).
Oil and gas buy politicians, foreign oil money buys media influence, and social-media bots keep voters angry at the wrong targets.
Saudi capital helps shape the messaging, Russia helps amplify the noise, and Americans get stuck paying more for clean energy while being told it’s patriotic.
But hey, Make America Great Again, right?
Oil and gas don't buy polticians more than any other industry does, but voters do get particularly angry at politicians when the price they pay for energy suddenly spikes.
This very well may be true, but taken at face value Canada seems to be paying you around $7k to install solar panels on your roof (that's 8k interest free loan is losing out to inflation + any interest it would have earned).
Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however.
What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there.
I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting?
There's an alternative, and almost certainly cheaper per watt with cost of scale, where your tax dollars go to a new solar farm instead, something everyone could take advantage of.
If a country has abundant land and expensive labor, the money is probably best spent improving grid transmission capacity and otherwise getting the f- out of the way of utility-scale renewables. Places like Pakistan, which is going through a rooftop solar boom, are arguably the opposite - scarce land in the cities, but cheap labor to get up on roofs.
Happy to hear any analyses to the contrary and update my knowledge accordingly.
On the other hand, it is also distributed which from some perspectives is a benefit, and is also do-able with very little planning and grid extension. So that's one argument for it.
How things come out on balance depends a bit on what you value and how you imagine the future.
I think homeowners should install solar panels and batteries where it makes economic sense. If there's money left over after funding utility-scale solar then it should be used for EV incentives and/or funding electrified mass transit. The whole point is to electrify everything rapidly and reduce carbon emissions.
Solar panel grid tied inverters generally will refuse to function if there's no external power coming in.
The benefit from the distributed generation means that if your local area has large loads added you don't necessarily need to upgrade the HVDC lines from the power plant to accommodate.
Right, but as always, ROI is hardly the most important thing in life, there is more considerations than just "makes more money". For example, as someone affected by a day long country-wide electricity outage where essentially the entire country was without electricity and internet for ~14 hours or something, decentralizing energy across the country seems much more important, than optimizing for the highest ROI.
But again, this is highly contextual and depends, I'm not as sure as you that there are absolute answers to these things.
If you personally have battery backup, that helps you personally and you should pay for it, just like you might pay extra to turn up the heat while I keep it lower to save money.
Decentralizing through subsidies at the homeowner level is maybe not the best use of money.
It's not as if homes outside of cities have their own diesel generators to power their house.
(Since I'm guessing from this line of comments you'll point out the less than 1% of people who actually do do this, maybe it's better to focus only the 99% here).
Yeah, no true, I don't understand the point/argument though?
More people relying on renewables == long term better for everyone on the planet
That includes moving people outside of cities to renewables energy sources, is your point that this isn't so important because they're a small piece of the population usually?
That's because you're rich like most people on HN.
Environmental protection is a luxury good. This has been proven time and time again.
A great reason to prioritize growth and wealth creation. Poor countries don't make those tradeoffs, they're worried about survival not what percentage of their energy usage is renewable.
Pakistan has imported almost 45 gigawatts worth of solar panels over the last five or six years, which is equal to the total capacity of its electricity grid. Almost 34 gigawatts have come in only in the last couple of years.
It’s a very bottom-up revolution. This is not government deciding this is the route to take. And it’s not being driven by climate concerns, it’s all about the economics. Renewables are out-competing the traditional sources of energy.
Even in Gaza Strip you'll see sometimes solar panels next to the refugee camps, and broken ones on top of the ruins.
Further, environmental protection is not a luxury good, it's a long term investment. Ask me more in another 30-50 years when the larger impacts of climate change are happening. Or ask someone else about how much we've spent on superfund cleanup sites.
Environmental protection is a luxury good in economic terms. The Environmental Kuznets Curve is compelling to me. It's extremely difficult to assess the ROI on long term investments, particularly when your country has unstable rule of law or conflict.
I'm pro-solar, it's amazing technology that empowers individuals and communities. I just don't agree that everything I love I must force other people to pay for.
Rethink your position because it's completely upside down
> The 20th century infrastructure model was:
> Centralized generation
> Government-led
> Megaproject financing
> 30-year timelines
>Monopolistic utilities
> The 21st century infrastructure model is:
> Distributed/modular
> Private sector-led
> PAYG financing
> Deploy in days/weeks
> Competitive markets
Probably, but I also haven't been rich all my life, I've also been broke and borderline homeless, and my point of view of paying taxes so others get helped, hasn't changed since then. In fact, probably the reason my perspective is what it is, is because money like that has helped me when I was poor, and I'd like to ensure we continue doing that for others.
And I agree, poor countries can't afford to think about "luxury problems" like the pollution in the world, but since we're talking about people living in such countries where we can afford about these problems, lets do that, so the ones who can't, don't have to. Eventually they'll catch up, and maybe at that point we can make it really easy for them to transition to something else?
Also, you keep ignoring that the environment is a public good. Poor people in Canada will also be disproportionately impacted by bigger temperature extremes (heat waves, extreme cold), worse air quality, etc.)
To be clear, I don't think rooftop solar subsidies are the best use of government money either. Governments should subsidize utility-scale solar, EVs, efficient buildings, and mass transit. They should focus on cheaper and more efficient permitting, and better grids.
Do you want to guess how cheap solar will be in 10-20 years, and how much power we could generate in the mean time.
This is not a discussion worth having.
The efficiency of solar does not matter in 2026. Panels are so cheap that just you don't have to think about it if you have abundant land. If solar is 4x less productive in the winter you just build 4x as many panels. Panels have to be angled more vertical the further north you go so the snow will just slide off. They are not "non-operative 3-4 months a year" - this is just Big Oil FUD.
this is not a matter of some fictional invisible hand. these are decisions made by real people who do not care about you, society, the health of the environment or the people who inhabit it. stop carrying their water.
Tell that to places like Pakistan where solar is allowing people to have cheaper electricity without connecting to the grid
Solar is great. It can stand on its own without subsidies.
You don't know this, and to some degree likely cannot know this.
But at a national level the data is compelling. I'm convinced by the Environmental Kuznets Curve.
(This is very low on my list of things that I care about, to be clear.)
> Seems like a no brainer deal
This is opinion, not fact. I happen to share your opinion, but enshrining opinions in law is almost always going to violate someone’s consent.
Who said that? Taxes are what you pay to be a member of the society you live, and also to help those less fortunate, like your neighbors. You can skip paying those, if you stop living in society, many done that before, and it is still possible.You can't possibly see taxes as "forcing someone to buy something they do not want" right? Two completely different things.
And yes, this is all my opinion, like most comments on HN.
Actually, generally speaking this is almost certainly not possible for more than short periods of time.
The book "The Stranger in the Woods" is one such case, about a man who lived in the woods for 27 years by himself.
That said, it isn't easy, and it's harder in some countries than others, but I'd still say it's possible in many countries today, YMMV.
Not OP, but it wasn't presented as a fact. Literally used the word Seams.
> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them
Seatbelts? Circuit breakers? Literally any safety equipment. You're required to have them because it's not just good for you, but expensive to society if hospital beds are low or there's not enough firetrucks to go around.
Similarly, if you're polluting more than you have to be due to the source of your electricity, that's bad for everyone. I also rent, but I still understand that it's to the public's benefit that home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth) be given motivation to consume cleaner energy if I don't want to have the climate get even worse. It's the same thing, just the effects feel less direct. That doesn't make them any less valid.
As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads?
Are you annoyed corn farmers get subsidies for growing corn?
Would you be annoyed if people got subsidized life saving health care?
It feels like the US can’t have nice things because people are hell bent on others not having nice things.
What a shame.
Yes, and people should be annoyed by this given the underfunding, poor urban planning, and outright hostility by many local governments against anything that dares encroach on the sanctity of car culture.
I'm a militant cyclist and I'm extremely unhappy with the state of urban planning in the world. But... Roads are a really good thing and I'm glad my government builds them.
I just wish they'd built them a bit differently, at least in the city.
So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads.
https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...
Yes, the costs should be apportioned to those who are making them. If the bus causes the most road damage, then it should be charged. Then it'll make financial sense to invest in rail. Financial incentives are how capitalism works and the purpose of governments under capitalism is to apply externalities to the source causing them.
"Yet you participate in society, curious!"
> In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included
There's nothing capitalist about that. Driving around and polluting the environment is currently done for free. That should be taxed. Highways and streets are by and large (in NA) used as a publicly subsidized private good at the expense of everyone else. Subsidized to the detriment of all because it pulls funding away from public transit that would move more people, prioritizing convenience of drivers over the safety of everyone else (to say nothing of it creating dead spaces with nothing but parking as far as the eye can see).
If I instead phrase it as "I'd rather subsidize someone's health care than pay for your free electricity", would that help you understand that there tends to be a priority system when spending tax dollars?
You don't have infinite tax dollars to spend after all.
“others not having nice things” is a superset of “others not having unearned nice things”.
You probably wouldn’t. I hear more people complaining about hypothetical government spending than actual government spending.
The answer to this isn't "less subsidies" it's "find a way to make everyone benefit from the subsidies.
I hope the incentives for cleaner energy continue to stack up. With the surge in demand from AI surely productivity will be more tightly coupled with energy usage and cost.
Conversely, standing charges ARE regionalised - because that does advantage the SE of England. Oh well!
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
TL;DR - Until new interconnectors between Scotland and England are finished in 2029, there will be significant curtailment of Scottish wind power which increases costs.
This is also an interesting site for seeing curtailment per wind farm - https://windtable.co.uk/data?farm=Seagreen
Ideas crop up like generating hydrogen with the curtailed energy or maybe at least in Winter, use it for heat generation. The problem would seem to be the capex and the inverse of intermittency being the problem for them in utilising that energy, i.e. waiting for curtailment.
At least with available hydro you can pump water back up hill using a reliable and cheap tech.
OVO[1] and Octopus[2] offer smart charging tariffs that give EV owners reduced electricity rates.
The usual caveat is you can only benefit if you can install a charger and park near that charger. Still, based on this 2021 article [3] 65% of UK homes have at least one off street space, so the potential for a majority of homes to smart charge is there.
To extend the benefit of cheap smart charging to more people, it would be good to see legislation that makes it easier for leaseholders and renters to require the installation of a smart charger where technically possible.
1. https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/charge-anytime 2. https://octopus.energy/ev-tariffs/ 3. https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/cars-parked-23-ho...
Charging batteries definitely seems like part of the solution and electricity tariffs that adapt to wholesale costs on a shorter time basis help incentivise it. There are times over weekends/holidays where the wholesale price enters negative territory, essentially paying you to charge your battery.
Electrolysing hydrogen to burn is inefficient vs that kind of thing but at least acts as a battery itself, though there's costs/problems in storing it.
And the general problem of how long do you need to store energy vs what the weather forecast may be.
It seems like it's not a solved problem and it'd be exciting to move towards a point where it is. Hard to believe in the 50's they thought nuclear would solve everything and would be "too cheap to meter"
Oh no we messed up nuclear oops sorry made it very expensive. Pay up
Oops sorry we messed up transmission pay up
Oops sorry we let people get into huge energy debt pls pay off their debt in your bill...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722022 (citations)
[2] In Scotland, Renewable Power Has Outstripped Demand - https://e360.yale.edu/digest/scotland-renewable-energy-100-p... - January 30th, 2024
(at the rate it takes to deploy transmission, might as well start dropping TBMs in the ground and let them grind towards each other from interconnect landings, potentially faster than the approval grind, complaints from locals about land use and right of ways, etc)
Solar production in Canada will continue to grow, but we're not doing nearly as much as Europe to encourage it.
Surely local manufacturers don’t use 100% Canadian made parts.
If you have all of that expense, and suddenly people have solar panels so pay $0 for an energy bill - do you see the problem? The actual cost of fuel/generation is very small compared to the fixed costs.
The more people use solar, the more in the red the utility becomes. You can 'fix' this by making it so every home has a fixed 'connection cost' and then a smaller 'usage cost' on top, but that destroys the incentive for solar panels - they'd never break even for the average buyer.
Solar is great, fantastic even. But it should be done centrally, or people will have to get used to the idea that they will never pay themselves off and are just doing it for the environment.
> must be connected to the grid.
That's a legislative problem. If a home can prove it can produce enough electricity for itself, it should not be forced to be connected.
> You can 'fix' this by making it so every home has a fixed 'connection cost' and then a smaller 'usage cost' on top
A lot of places already do this.
Also: Even if half of a neighborhood doesn't need the connection, the work ends up being similar. It's more based on distance/area.
Australia is giving free power to everyone during the day because they have so much.
More solar is a great thing.
(still good news, as most of Canada's electric generation is low carbon hydro, and the rest of fossil generation can be pushed out with storage and renewables, although I do not have a link handy by province how much fossil generation needs to be pushed out)
I paid nearly double that for our 450w panels 18 months ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence...
2024-08-27 - Indian solar panels face US scrutiny for possible links to China forced labor
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indian-solar-panels-...
2025-04-30 - Human Rights in the Life Cycle of Renewable Energy and Critical Minerals
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/c...
[1] Forced prison labor in the “Land of the Free” - https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/ - January 16th, 2025
[2] [US] Child labor law violations are at their highest in decades. - https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2024/05/01/... - May 1st, 2024
(staunchly anti child and forced labor to be clear)
How the heck are the panels even installed and connected for that price? That's about 25 panels, IIRC. What about the installation material and the ac/dc converter?
Government incentives. Spend tax dollars putting solar on literally every roof in the country instead of more coal or nuke plants.
Not just talking about it, if you get a smart meter and sign up for a plan that matches the grid rates you can actually be paid to take electricity during the day right now.
If you're wondering "couldn't you just make bank with a battery" yes you can. In fact Australia dominates the world in grid connected storage (per capita) and this chart itself is actually out of date (it's growing even faster than shown).
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
I'll also point out that gas and oil generation has declined rapidly.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-rise-of-battery-storage-and-...
For anyone that thinks renewables can't phase out peaker plants it happens very naturally and rapidly once there's enough solar to set rates negative in the day.
It is like saying that you pay $30,000 for a car. But the most important question is: For which car?
Also, if the installation services are so expensive, you can always install everything yourself.
Study how to do it, get the tools and materials, and then do it. It would be time-consuming, challenging and perhaps it would carry extra risks. Absolutely.
But it is not rocket science. It can be done. As long as there is a motivation to do it, i.e. a good value you will get out of it in return, it should be a valid approach to consider, in my opinion.
€13.000 for this still seems expensive.
Are there tariffs on Chinese PV in Canada?
Energy is like RAM or clockspeed: you can't have enough of it.
Hasn't happened ever before, not sure why this time it would be different.
FWIW - I am all for solar but selling rooftop solar in canada as cheap and no-brainer is false.
3-4 year payback would be a no brainer. 8-13 year payback with an inverter upgrade and op-costs is definitely a decision that needs to be thought out.
The grid you are offsetting is fairly green to begin with so the net benefit is marginal.
If you are going to be isolated and put backup power into the equation. You ROI tanks further but at least you have about a day or two worth of energy in the storage asset.
Canada is a massive exporter of electricity to the USA. The more clean energy CND produces the more there is to displace North East's coal.
Of course, solar on Canadians' roof is a joke. A proper regulatory regime would encourage solar in Arizona and encourage lettuce Canada; not vice versa.
If you are trying to argue that in aggregate the demand for energy in canada drops because of high adoption of residential solar which then passes off clean energy to the US - its a reach. Also the amount of individual infra for each small residential asset is probably not particularly great return on investment - would be better to do as large deployments.
I went ahead anyway because I’m a “I’d rather have hard numbers than speculation“ person, and it was literally $0 of my money.
Here we are 18 months later. I have all the hard data, numbers and proof that this system will cost me $0 in the short term, make me over $20,000 in the long term, requires no maintenance and is great.
And yet there are still people like you telling me it can’t work.
I’m proving it does, very well. Panel prices are falling so fast your “last time I looked into it” is woefully out of date.
Why are you denying reality?
I run energy modeling - I ran the numbers last month with the new programs and newest panel prices. 12-14 years without any op costs and a 3% per year escalator on electricity. You can get it down to 8 years if you have a great spot without having to put on ballasts but it isn't braindead yes for everyone (especially if they have to watch their money).
Current price: 7.6 kW AC; Installed: 26,155.65 - 5,000 Grant = 21,155.65$. << Hard numbers.
This has the same corrupt nexus with the anti-renewable mantra. Essentially subsidize oil and gas under the table and punish renewables then tell the electorate that the latter is worse than the former.
Instead of giving Americans free choice American automakers pay American politicians to prop up their uncompetitive prices and subpar offerings. All while they take in huge private profits. American workers could work on foreign automobiles, just as they do with other automakers not from China. It's not about workers, it's not about national security. You don't even have to go into all the environmental concerns that of course disproportionately affect poorer individuals.
It's corporate welfare. And yes, it should be criminal. At the very least, if the American people are going to inflate CEOs salaries they should have seats on the board.
This is actually not a wild idea. You might be surprised to find who one of the largest shareholders of the Volkswagen group is. It's not like that is an obviously mismanaged socialist hellhole company, it's a perfectly competitive and well regarded car company.
Americans need to start demanding more equity or oversight in operations their governments are already paying for. The fact most Americans think this amounts to communism just means more people have to call out the money is already flowing.
Still made sense financially, pays for itself after ~8 years and the panels are warrantied for 30... but we're seriously lagging.
There's a similar phenomenon with heat pump systems. Installation costs are absolutely absurd.
So solar only makes sense when it's nearly completely subsidized?
That's not the statement you think it is.
"How to cut U.S. residential solar costs in half"
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/11/how-to-cut-u-s-reside...
Birch points to Australia, where he said the average 7 kW solar array with a 7 kW battery costs $14,000. That equates to $2.02 per W, with batteries included.
“You can sell it on Tuesday and install it on Wednesday, there’s no red tape, no permitting delays,” said Birch.
...
In the United States, that same solar and battery installation averages $36,000, said Birch. Permitting alone can take two to six months, and the cost per watt of a solar plus storage installation is up to 2.5 times the Australian price, landing at $5.18 per W.
My Dad in Australia just got 10.6kw fully installed and running for $4,000 AUD
Made 6.9Mwh in 2025, only just less than ours with no shade at all.
Real numbers don’t lie.
What you are describing is adding more solar capability to counter act the shade. Also the other part of it is that the panels work in parallel/not in series or alternatively don't dis activate as many conversion points as possible.
Physics never lies - they are the only laws that you cannot break.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266675922...
(And a gazillion other studies.)
My gut response to your post was also aggression, not because you’re preaching uncomfortable truths, but because you’re repeating fossil fuel lobbyist talking points that I’m getting really tired of seeing all over social media.
Im with you I hate the people who preach fossil fuel talking points. I also don't like the shady solar sales people who say solar is a no brainer - they are just pushing product to install on your roof. It is a pretty good product but not 100%.
I think it's more frustration. Pointing out there is a maintenance cost to infrastructure is silly and doesn't add to the discussion.
We all know materials have to be shaped into machines to extract energy.
If you had a concern about the material costs of renewables you should know what they are and if you wanted to have a good faith discussion, you'd also be able to compare against legacy energy material costs.
Lingan Generating Station would be a typical example. Big thermal power station, built to burn local coal, realistically the transition for them is to non-coal thermal power, burning LNG or Oil, or trees or whatever else can be set on fire. If they burned trash (which isn't really a practical conversion, but it's a hypothetical) we could argue that's renewable because it's not like there won't be trash, but otherwise this is just never going to be a renewable power source.
Canada is a huge place, so I don't doubt that none those coal stations are near you (unless, I suppose, you literally live next to Lingan or a similar plant but just aren't very observant) but most of us aren't self-sufficient and so we do need to pay attention to the consequences far from us.
Ontario, Quebec, BC and Alberta, the four largest provinces by population and a heady percentage of the land area, have zero coal power generation facilities.
Ontario is mostly nuclear supported by hydro, with an absolute fallback of natural gas. Quebec is overwhelmingly hydro + wind. BC is mostly hydro. Alberta is mostly non-renewables like natural gas, but phased out its last coal plants.
If someone is in Canada, odds are extremely high that there is no coal plant anywhere in their jurisdiction. I also wouldn't say that there is a whole bunch of coal power online -- they're an extreme exception now.
Coal isn't one of the "convenient" fossil fuels where you might choose to run electrical generation off this fuel rather than figure out how to deliver electricity to a remote site, coal is bulky and annoying. Amundsen Scott (the permanent base at the South Pole, IMO definition of remote) runs on JP-8 (ie basically kerosene, jet fuel), some places use gasoline or LNG. I don't expect hold outs in terms of practicality for coal, it's just about political will.
Sure, it's embarrassing that we still have any coal plants. But really, there are only eight small units remaining, located in the provinces of Nova Scotia (4), New Brunswick (1), and Saskatchewan (3). Every other jurisdiction abolished them.
Maybe small nuclear will be the solution for these holdouts. The fact that Alberta held onto coal for so long, and never built a nuclear plant, was outrageous.
Fantastic virtue signaling. Of course totally devoid of any mention about the individuals picking raw materials for those electric car components though, since they're not "our" children.
You think elves drill oil and mine coal?
I will stand by your statement from the philosophical point of view that nothing in life is free and everything has its trade offs - but this is a pretty clear positive. In addition, Canada has pretty decent workplace safety enforcement for the sort of workers that'd be doing the maintenance - it certainly isn't perfect but it is something that Canadians seem to find important.
I haven’t touched ours, they are clean and have been going fine with zero maintenance, though admittedly it’s only been a year.
> Where are you getting this maintenance schedule from?
The solar panel owner does not know the required maintenance they are now permanently responsible for. Ibid, your honor.
Focus on solutions, not trying to be right. It’s aggravating.
Also, like, every study on this matter. The efficiency drop from being dirty for vaguely modern solar panels is _tiny_; below 5% and potentially below 1%.
Where are you getting this maintenance schedule of yours from?
Their "Anti-Solar Talking Points" handbook from Big Oil.
> I've washed them once.
> I'm still getting great production.
Thank you for reiterating my point.
If you're in a place that gets significant snowfall such that they're often covered then production during winter is likely to be fairly marginal anyway, so may not be worth your while.
Zero maintenance.
Roof-based panels also take on some roof wear, increasing longevity of roofing as well.
This time, however, it looks like it's actually true and that's just for wind and solar. This is incredible, and done through slowly compounding gains that didn't cause massive economic hardships along the way.
For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc.
You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.
Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).
Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating.
So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies.
______
If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever
That said, those are two pretty large items. If we reached 90% electrification on both it would be a pretty big win: Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use and all heating/cooling (industry, building, agriculture) represents ~50%.
It’s still a great trend.
Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose.
It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obviously a shill. You had to be paying close attention at the time to notice.
And sadly that kind of engineered delay is widespread.
The next milestone to watch: when battery-backed solar becomes cheaper than gas peakers for evening demand across most of Europe. We might be closer than people think.
What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself
By forcing oil prices to get 10x cheaper, at the barrel of a gun. See: Venezuela and Iran. Will it work? I would not bet on it.
That's very fragile.
Luckily, we're moving to a world where a disjoint, self-interested response can be an advantage. Countries decide, for their own selfish reasons, to adopt green energy. For energy independence, affordability, clean air, etc.
So when one country politically rotates out for dumb reasons, other countries pick up the slack and make a bit of progress.
Middle and low income countries (most notably China) increased consumption is more than offsetting reductions from high income countries.
Nowadays, for very energy intenive things like heating or driving a car, fossil fuels still are more prevalent than electric alternatives. Once demand shifts in favor of the electrified alternatives, electricity demand is continuing to raise (although not as steep as the drop in demand for the fossil fuels will be). Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
While the prices of energy storage have come down significantly and are projected to continue to drop, there is still a noteable lack of cost effective long term storage solutions.
Heating is actually likely to be one of the easier questions here, because heat is just fundamentally an easier problem to tackle than most other intensive uses of energy in the modern world.
1. Solar isn't the only incredibly cheap form of intermittant renwewable energy production. Wind is also great, tends to support local manufacturing economies more than solar, and is anti-correlated with peak-sunshine. The wind tends to blow hardest in the winter and around sunset.
2. Heatpumps can pretty comfortably achieve 300+% coefficients of performance, meaning that for every joule of energy you put into a heatpump, you'll get 3+ joules of heat pumped into your home, office, or city-scale heat thermos
3. Heat energy storage is cheap compared to batteries. You just store large quantities of water or sand and heat it up with a resistor or a heat pump. The scaling of surface area versus volume ensures that the bigger you make the heat-battery, the less energy you'll lose from it over time (percentage wise).
4. Heat is a waste product from many other forms of energy usage, and can be harnessed. For instance, gas peaker plants aren't going away any time soon, and cities which aren't harnessing the waste heat from those peaker plants and using it in a district heating system are wasting both money and carbon.
Just a couple kilometers from my home for instance is a gas power plant that stores waste heat in giant thermoses, and pumps hot water to my building to to be used for heating. They currently have the largest heat pump in europe under construction on the same site intended to supplement the gas plant, both to take up slack from the fact that it'll be running less often, and to expand the service to yet more households.
* Distance travelled by passenger cars in Norway
* EV electricity consumption and total power generation in Norway
EVs now make up approximately 1/3 of miles travelled, but the increase in total electrcity consumption is fairly small.
It already seems like Russia is positioned to be completely subservient to China in the future.
Russia holds leverage over China because China is incredibly resource dependent and very susceptible to the threat of blockade through the first island chain by the US. Only Russia can bypass such a blockade with fertilizer, grain, oil and gas.
The US is driving these countries into each other's arms.
Oh, see how well it went.
That did not go as expected for Russia either.
Economical co-dependency is a good tool for increasing the price of going to war and making it irrational. It’s also not a zero sum game and tends to profit both sides. However, it can suck if you do it with non-democratic regimes and autocratic rulers who trample human rights.
So between France, Germany, Poland and all the other EU members it‘s keeping the continent at peace and generally does not suck because it‘s between broadly democratic nations. It also benefits each one massively and makes things possible like a common electric grid that increases reliability in general. So nearly all upside.
I do think economic cooperation with the Soviet Union and later Russia - much, much more limited than between EU members - was helpful in cooling tensions and making the world a bit safer, sure, but Russia has clearly behaved in a way that makes that no longer a good idea.
But sadly they have a political system that doesn't reflect what is best for the ordinary person. So those incentives can be ignored by those making the decisions.
See also, Trump invading Greenland.
China wants Russia to at least keep the Ukraine war going, if not eventually win the darn thing. Russia winning (or getting away with an armistice that lets them keep Crimea and Donbas) means a precedence China has for a land-grab of its own - obviously Taiwan, but other countries in its "sphere of influence" have seen hostilities for years, from land grabs [1] to overfishing [2], not to mention the border dispute with India.
And as long as we are distracted with Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia, China has free rein to do whatever they want.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So...
[2] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/energy-world/chinas-overfi...
The global response would not be the same, even remotely. And what would China get from it? A tiny island of rubble and an ego boost, while losing enormous global favor? The cost of that island may well be a few trillion for China, just so they can say they defeated the nationalists.
The only one who would really care is the US. So by taking Taiwan, China blows up the US stock market and takes control of the chips.
Would the rest of the world decide to go to war with China for the political freedom of Taiwan?
... which nevertheless are very important worldwide. Early in the war, there was a lot of effort to make sure grain exports could run smoothly because otherwise Africa would have been in serious trouble.
> The global response would not be the same, even remotely.
We're already at a stage where Trump doesn't give a single fuck about NATO and some of his advisors would rather have it disbanded yesterday in favor of isolationism, or even outright march into territory to annex it. I have absolutely zero faith that Trump would intervene on Taiwan's favor - an intervention does not fit into Trump's and especially Miller's world view wherein the world is to be divided into areas of influence for the super powers to act with impunity.
> And what would China get from it? A tiny island of rubble and an ego boost, while losing enormous global favor?
Never underestimate nationalist idiocy. Putin invaded Ukraine because of his dream to restore "Great Russia", it is entirely possible that the CCP wants the same for the ego of their leadership to be the ones "bringing the lost areas home". They already did so with Hongkong, and not reacting to China violating the treaty with the UK was the biggest mistake the Western nations have ever done.
Which is also, coincidentally why they seem like a better trade partner to me as European at this point.
I don't know what is the thinking on Ukraine now in Beijing, but they were massively pissed off when Russia invaded because it has caused a lot of disruption to belt and road and to East-West relations in general.
He argues that because solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of new energy generation, they are on an unstoppable exponential "S-curve" that will make coal, gas, and nuclear power obsolete by 2030.
Look up his videos on YT, for example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU
See: the overly optimistic SMR plans being predictably scrapped in many places.
What you do have is ample land to build out solar and export eg. Ammonia (made out of Hydrogen) for "free" energy.
Edit: After further reading it appears that solar will be the defacto affordable option in energy production, even with SMRs and streamlined construction in the picture. Perhaps a mix of renewables, better battery infra, and SMRs for stable sources of power is the future.
Fortunately, wind energy generation also exists, and is a nearly ideal complement to solar power, because it's nearly as cheap as solar, and its energy peaks are mostly anti-correlated with solar energy peaks (typically the winter and sunset are the windiest parts of the year / day).
Wind's main problem is that it's more reliant on large scale projects (rather than solar which scales all the way from a pocket calculator to an installation the size of city), and wind is also more susceptible to regulatory / NIMBY sabotage than solar.
Especially with China currently flooding the market with cheap solar and batteries, I think it makes sense for governments to focus much more of their attention and efforts on promoting (or at least getting out of the way of) wind projects, and let the market drive solar adoption.
Solar performs dramatically worse in the winter than in summer.
In other words, as an example, a 10% increase in solar power generation does not necessarily mean that there was a 10% increase in electricity consumption where that electricity was generated via solar.
i.e. It is entirely possible for a growing solar fleet to generate more power during the middle of the day than previously, and simultaneously for not all of that increased power to be used / usable.
From what I recall, curtailment of wind and solar at least in Germany amounts to about 3% wasted energy from those sources, so no, it's not a very significant worry. These renewable sources really are displacing fossil fuels.
A big part of this story is batteries. Especially during the summer, the wholesale electricity price in Germany can swing daily from -10 to +10 cents per kWh during the mid-day, up to 150+ cents per kWh at night, due to supply-and-demand.
This gradient in prices creates a huge incentive for people to build batteries that buy up cheap electricity during the day (sometimes literally getting paid to do so), so that they can sell it back later on in the day when prices rise. This incentive helps make sure energy does not get wasted, it encourages more batteries to be installed, and it encourages businesses to shift the their energy usage to times of the day that align with high renewable output.
Interesting, they mentioned Finland. I wonder how Norway and Finland fair using solar since they have rigorous winters with polar nights.
https://www.iea.org/countries/norway/electricity https://www.iea.org/countries/finland/electricity
I was also reading: https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2019/10/the-way-forward-for...
Fossils are dead, slow.
Wind moves fast. Photons move even faster.
My weekly supermarket shop for the basic essentials (cheese, eggs, flour, vegetables) now come to around $60/80 a trip.
Parmesan Cheese is around ~£22-£45 ($30-$60) per kg compared to the US $7–$24+ per kg.
Just because we've got, if the government isn't supporting it's pretty much wasted. The renewable farms we do have are mostly funded by private investments firms. Scotland and Wales wants more renewable but the UK government says no.
> End 2024 installed electricity generating capacity was 105 GWe: 35.0 GWe natural gas; 32.8 GWe wind; 18.3 GWe solar; 7.4 GWe biofuels & waste; 5.9 GWe nuclear; 4.8 GWe hydro (including 2.9 GWe pumped storage) and 1.3 GWe oil.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
What is stupid about nuclear? It's a huge amount of clean, secure energy.
Would your preference be dependence on Russian/US oil natural gas? Would you feel the same if Russia invaded Finland/Baltics and US took over Greenland?
It's not the stupidly of the reactor producing. I don't agree with it personally, but hey whatever, it's a thing. The stupidly of it is that we are small island.
Claim what you wish about how safe they are but like anything: errors and malfunctions. Cyber sabotage and all that.
If an reactor were to implode we're eff'd. We don't have landmass to facilitate the output waste in the UK and the waste we do currently produce has to be shipped elsewhere; sold for dark money.
> Would your preference be dependence on Russian/US oil natural gas? Would you feel the same if Russia invaded Finland/Baltics and US took over Greenland?
My preference would be my hand with a gun pointed at my temple and myself pulling the trigger. To dark?
Yes, we do. It really doesn't make that much space to store the waste. The biggest problem is people being irrationally scared of it.
1 https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-uks-record-auction-for-o... )
2030 is four years away & the next election is in 2029. The Labour party is unlikely to get in again, and if they do it'll be a miracle. Far-Right or Fascist Right.
Reform UK won't get enough seats to sit in parliament this election but if in the future, it's a dystopian vision I don't want to think about. Trump-XL, tax the EU, climate change doesn't exist, kick out asylum seekers, higher taxation to further screw Scotland and Wales. Heavily back pocketed by the US oil and tobacco industry, Nigel is foul MAGA of the UK.
Conservatives, sponsored by oil and pharmaceutical. Exxon, Esso, BP et cetera. They got their wish with Brexit, they made a bucket load of cash from that and they're the ones who scrapped the renewable industry in the first place. One of their aims is to scrap the NHS and make it privatised.
No it doesn't. Maybe if you are shopping at Waitrose. It is more expensive. But it isn't £45 for basics. I did an entire shop which will last me the week for £30 (in Aldi).
Everyone has their super market preference. ASDA would be cheaper still. You can't disagree that prices have sky rocketed, shrunk in quantity and now lower quality.
Energy is not expensive because of Net Zero taxes. Here's a breakdown of the average UK electricity bill over time [1]. The Renewables Obligation, that subsidised wind and solar at a time when they were infeasible without subsidies, was a scheme that ran between 2002 and 2017. It was stopped once renewables became cheaper than the alternatives. We will continue to pay for the renewable plants set up back in the day, but this will gradually taper off. In this electricity bill estimate for 2030 [2], you'll find that the Renewables Obligation is much lower (£17 rather than £102) for two reasons: plants losing subsidies as they age out and a chunk of the subsidy being borne by the treasury from general taxation.
So why aren't electricity bills coming down? Because we're recognising the reality that we will need to be powered by a mix of nuclear, wind and solar. Check out this real time dashboard of electricity generation in the UK [3], which shows you how Wind has zoomed in the last 14 years. From 2GW to 14GW, wind is now the single largest source of energy generated in the UK.
Wind is only going to grow, because it is cheap compared to the alternatives. In the Jan 2026 auction for wind power, an 8.4GW contract was awarded for a price 40% lower than the cost of a gas power plant. And unlike gas you aren't at the vagaries of global gas prices, like we were in 2022.
And now you're thinking, if wind is so cheap and we're continuing to build more, why is the estimate for the 2030 electricity bill higher than 2025? The 2030 page explains this - the wind is being built in the North Sea, far from where it is needed - in the South of England. This means investing in the transmission network, which will cost £70B over the next 5 years. That cost will be passed onto consumers.
So no, bills aren't high because of renewables. The decision to double down on wind, solar, batteries and nuclear by the previous and current government are sound. We will be more energy independent than we were in 2022 and possibly paying a bit less in overall bills. The reduction in carbon emissions is a nice bonus.
[1] - https://www.electricitybills.uk
[2] - https://www.electricitybills.uk/2030
[3] - https://grid.iamkate.com
No. Citation neede. The issue is the moronic way energy auctions are done, first by setting the price to the highest source that can satisfy (always gas) but ignoring (!) geography. Then, phase 2, dropping the impossible providers (i.e. Scottish hydro in the North for South England), and doing another (much more expensive pass). The Octopus CEO had a succinct explainer recently, can't find the video...
Found it: https://youtu.be/5WgS-Dsm31E?t=91 starts at 1:31
Also, Trump called out the idiotic decisions by greenies such as shutting down nuclear power plants and make long your industries less competitive as a result.
The shift to renewables started off pretty well in the early 2010s before it came to a grinding halt thanks to some wierd debates around the topic. For the past few years, buildout of solar has been remarkably fast, especially considering the slow pace of other projects. In 2025, 16.4 GW of solar power went live.
The biggest issue that drives prices here is the grid. New high voltages transmission lines have faced intense local oppsition, so transmision between North and South is limited, which is problematic given the focus of the north on (offshore) wind and the south on solar PV. Since Germany is a single electricity price zone, the low to negative electricity prices from wind turbines do not reflect the reality of grid capabilities, resulting in significant redispatch costs.
The solution would be obvious. Split Germany into n electicity price zones (with n>1). However, there is a lot of political opposition, specifically from the conservative CDU/CSU against this.
So yeah, Germany is struggling with relatively expensive electrcity prices, complaining about it, but refusing to implement a borderline free solution for it.
France and Canada are currently estimating costs to refurb old nuclear that are higher then new build renewables.
There is a lot of opposition because zone split would mean erasing southern industry and I may be wrong, but southern regions are pumping most of the money into state budget. Cutting those means cutting own legs.
There's simply no sense in turning electricity into hydrogen so that it could be used in 6 months (losing 50+% of the energy along the way as heat!) when you could just sell that electricity right now, or stick it in a battery so you can use it 6 hours from now.
There will be an economic case for hydrogen energy storage in Europe in 10 years, but unfortunately the technology is basically sitting at a standstill right now with no attention and no investment because it's not needed yet.
A hydro-driven grid does not need storage. Hell, if you have enough hydro, it can even be your storage. Not all of Europe has the geography to be able to cover their needs with just hydro.
(As an aside, I'm from Groningen/NL :))
Electricity/heating and gasoline in the EU is many times more expensive than in the U.S., and as a result EVERYTHING is more expensive.
Mix that with lower buying power and taxes and we spend 2-3 times for stuff.
I would think that most people would happily choose lower prices over clean energy and paper straws.
Our companies are also less and less competitive because of these initiatives, and companies from China take over in part thanks to the complete lack if environmental and labor laws over there.
Seems to me like this is happening more and more, and it's so widespread and obvious that it almost makes you think that politicians are being bought by Chinese companies/government.
For instance, the rising prices of carbon permits under the EU emissions trading scheme.
So, my point is that countries that don't ignore the economy just to be green--like the U.S. and specially China--seem to have vastly cheaper electricity and gasoline, which I would guess makes them more competitive/lowers prices.
Over here we have no NG and no oil, and on top of that we tax our companies because of emission limits, while in China they burn coal like there is no tomorrow.
We wanted to outlaw non-electric cars, while the car industry in Europe is huge and we don't have a way to build batteries, etc. etc.
Seems to be a pattern that is hard to understand.
Maybe because Europe as a whole has little to no signifcant oil reserves ready for extraction? Very much unlike the US.
> I would think that most people would happily choose lower prices over clean energy and paper straws.
The US does have plenty of cheap energy and yet its industrial output is dwarfed by Chinas, which is increasingly relying on domestically products green tech. Also, people seem to be not very concerned with energy prices. If they were, they would not act as irrational when it comes to topics like heatpumps or electric vehicles.
> that it almost makes you think that politicians are being bought by Chinese companies/government.
Looking at the energy policy of some countries (Germany specifically), it seems vastly more likely that politicans are bought by oil companies.
That's interesting about oil companies. Is that who's lobbing to pass laws that just seem (to me) to be written on purpose to make our companies less competitive? How does that work, how do oil companies profit from that?
It costs less? The Danish organisation for green energy interest (biased I known) has calculations that shows a 5 billion DKK saving per year for the Danish consumers. So about €0.02 per kWh.
I also think you're wrong about prices. I think most will pay more, if they get clean energy. Not a lot more, but if it's only a few cents, I think many/most will pay that, perhaps not happily, but still. People, in parts of Europe at least, are perhaps more baffled that the Americans won't pay the slightly higher cost and and protect the environment. As it happens that's not a choice we need to make, wind and solar is now cheaper than fossil fuel.
I'm good with protecting the environment. Here, though, we're making European companies less competitive. They shut down, and Chinese companies fill the gap, flooding us with products that are worse for the environments because they have no laws, bad for workers because they have no laws, and bad for the environment again because instead of local they're shipped across continents on boats that burn as much fuel as a whole country for a year just to bring cheap plastic stuff that we used to make better ourselves.
Want to sell to the EU: Workers can only work e.g. 40 hours a week, must have five weeks of vacation per year and here are the tax rates for various types of pollution.
DK has one of the highest household prices in EU per eurostat https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Imo CO2 tax should be gone to alleviate this, especially when China and US dont have it. This just causes offshoring.
If you want electrification, you need cheap electricity. If you want more ren, you put more incentives there instead of overtaxing fossils to make own industry uncompetitive
What are oil companies doing to drive European companies out of business (not saying they aren't, I just don't know)?