That’s a lot of text, none of which even attempts to refute the factual claim that solar’s generation share has increased from 1% in 2015 to 10% in 2025.
Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.
They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.
Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-
The extensive EV car subsidies has really got people to buy EV. With 98.3% of all new cars sold, it is amazing what subsidies that accounts for more than 25% of the value of a new car does to encourage people to buy electric. In Sweden, it is a well know concept that when Norway do subsidies, they don't do it ungenerously.
Norway has however started to cut down on those subsidies, with one cut 2023 and now a second cut next year, and then a third one in 2027. They are combining that with extra fees for ICE, and time will tell what that will do to voters.
The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment.
I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied.
Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector.
The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources.
You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.
I was speaking to a Kuwaiti princeling a few years ago about solar and he just couldn’t get his head around zero marginal cost, the efficiency of assembly of the panels, and the economics that would drive the growth. We spoke for about half an hour and he kept bringing up that powerbrokers don’t care about the environment and I had to repeatedly point out that I hadn’t mentioned the environment once.
hydro is mostly tapped, solar on the other hand can grow a lot.
And we are talking about electricity, not energy in general. Tackling energy is more about electrification.
Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.
Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.
The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices
I won't disagree that Germany's energy transition has been badly managed. However, after many years of needing subsidies in the last few years the economic case for solar + storage has changed. The most vivid example I've seen if that is Pakistan. They are a poor country with no subsidies and had a huge explosion of solar without the government even being aware at first. It's been so dramatic that they've had to cancel scheduled tanker deliveries of LNG because they had no place to put it.
The energy transition is a decades long project. Germany started early in order to bring costs down which took time. You should consider reexamining the economics
The energy transition in Germany sucks because they are replacing nuclear with solar when they should have been replacing coal with solar.
That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.
If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.
Germany never had a huge amount of nuclear power anyway and keeping it going was expensive. Fukushima was just what pushed them over the edge.
Meanwhile in the UK rate payers are being forced to subsidize nuclear power with a guaranteed strike price that is ~4x what they have to pay for the same amount of power from solar and wind.
Remove the lavish subsidies and make nuclear pay for its own catastrophe insurance and it'd be dead in the water. Those subsidies would be put to far better use on storage, wind and solar.
Your comment is typical of the tortured efforts of skeptics to discredit renewables, also usually applied to electric cars and other climate friendly measures.
You ignore the points made to argue a bunch on non-sequiturs that you think serve your purposes. Plus you throw in various ad-hominem attacks.
The article points out the experiential growth of renewables and logarithmic reductions in price. You don't take issue with that, maybe because you don't understand the consequences of exponential growth?
You mention that largest renewable share is hydro, but the number of locations suitable for hydro is very limited, and the attendant cost is very high.
What you focus on in existing installed capacity. But so what? Yes sources of power that have been installed over hundreds of years are indeed outnumbering renewables. Somehow you don't get that the rapid increase of renewables will wipe out existing forms of power generation in a fraction of the time it took for those to appear.
Renewables are much, much cheaper than other forms, and more scalable (up and down). That is undeniable buy you or anyone else. That will drive installations even in the face of issues such as intermittency because the force of money, along with convenience and flexibility, beats everything.
