> “The IEA has, consistently over the last couple of decades, way underestimated how fast renewables are growing,” said Robert Brecha, a senior climate and energy adviser at Climate Analytics,
> The policy outlook for renewables in the United States is so bleak that the IEA lowered the country’s renewable capacity growth expectations by 50 percent compared to last year’s projections.
Maybe room for optimism they are underestimating what non govt supported solar growth would be in the US?
Solar at least is a much faster way to add capacity to the grid than coal or natural gas, particularly residential rooftop solar. In a competition with China for AI predominance, trump shot the USA in the foot by deep sixing renewal incentives.
The US is choosing to make itself increasingly redundant. Increasing speed whilst in Reverse gear whilst talking as if they're highway cruising in 5th.
It's nice to know that the rest of the world is still pushing forwards, up a steep hill, in first gear. I hope it can continue, and the hill shrinks.
It doesn't really matter where the panels come from. Yes the manufacturer captures some of their value, but that's in the range of 20% of their overall value (and dropping).
In my country there is no govt subsidy for solar. But math doesn't lie. A typical residential system returns 16% on capital invested. Not surprisingly residential solar here is now measured in Gw.
The good news for the US is that it really doesn't matter if they fall behind. Solar can be installed so quickly that any lost impetus can be made in in a year or two. There's basically very little lead time required between decision and implementation.
Yes, the grid votes into play. Especially for commercial solar installations. If I drop a 200Mw facility in a sunny area the grid needs updating to accept that 200Mw at that point.
Bit that's "boring" infrastructure. Cables, trenches, transformers. It can be done in "months" (perhaps a couple years) not decades.
For residential solar of course it's a non issue. The inverter caps the amount sent to the grid, and that cap is most often set to 0. (The 16% return I mentioned earlier is before feeding to the grid.)
Backup works for a few outliers. But when everyone needs that backup at the same time, it's not a backup anymore.
From what we know...
- baseload electricity generation is not economical or practical (reactive) as a pure backup.
- a few grid-level mega-storage prototype projects, but nowhere near the scale of powering modern cities for a couple of off-weather days, or events where people congregate.
The hope is that – a combination of "couple of hours" of grid-level battery, and use that time to bring up a baseload. But the economics of that is abysmal (high capex/opex for what's essentially "hoping as an investor" for a few off-days so that this thing gets used after all). Those micro-nuclear-plants seem to still have a place.
As of now, grid as a backup is still only wishful thinking. Except for those who are already off-grid and changed their lifestyles to accomodate a few no-power days as a compromise.
It does matter where critical infrastructure components come from. Whether you can call solar panels critical or not, China has a virtual monopoly on them due to lower production costs. The same story plays out with virtually EVERY product that we in the West need.
True. Given their lifespan it behooves folks to "get them while they can".
A warlike country with a history of antagonism to China is probably less secure than countries that have chosen to behave like good neighbors.
If you feel like panel production is strategic, which is an easy argument to make, and given that the US has a substantial ability to produce panels [1], perhaps a useful strategy would be to consume those panels as much as possible, subsidizing production to make it a growth area.
Indeed it might become a surplus, allowing for export, which in turn improves foreign relations. And the simple existence of the domestic market leads to improvements, better quality and so on.
I'm no economist but the above seems like a solid strategy to me. It would be most interesting to see the outcomes where a country pursued this strategy versus one that actively worked to marginalize solar, killing domestic production instead.
I wonder if there are more countries in the same boat which could be used to see the long-term outcome of the various strategic options?
[1] Solar systems comprise of more than panels. But the other parts are just electronics so not important in the context of managing solar as a specific product.
>A warlike country with a history of antagonism to China is probably less secure than countries that have chosen to behave like good neighbors.
That is naive. China will become imperialistic if given a chance. Look at how they treat their neighbors.
>If you feel like panel production is strategic
I don't necessarily. But many strategically important things suffer the same fate. We cannot compete with China and other low-wage countries without restructuring the monetary system and probably our lifestyles. The Chinese know this and have used the situation to hoover up production capacity for many things that are critical to national security.
>US has a substantial ability to produce panels [1], perhaps a useful strategy would be to consume those panels as much as possible, subsidizing production to make it a growth area.
It would make far more sense to simply ban the import of cheaper panels, and let those who need the panels pay the true cost. The reason is that you could apply the same logic to every offshore-made item, and these subsidies would make random people pay for stuff that random other people are using.
>I'm no economist but the above seems like a solid strategy to me. It would be most interesting to see the outcomes where a country pursued this strategy versus one that actively worked to marginalize solar, killing domestic production instead.
I don't think anyone is trying to kill their domestic solar industry in general. But these installations have to be justified somehow. If the domestic panels are not the cheapest/best option available, they won't be used.
Inverters have more electronic parts, but the parts themselves are very off-the-shelf, and the electronic design is pretty straightforward.
Inverters are still fairly expensive for a couple reasons;
Firstly economies of scale. A residential site buys 1 inverter, but 10 to 20 panels. A commercial site has an even bigger ratio.
Secondly Inverters are the bit that connects to the grid. So there are regulatory requirements which need to be tested for. And likely tested in multiple different jurisdictions.
Panels on the other hand are "difficult" to produce in volume. Largely because of the quality of raw silicon that is required. Its not that the panels themselves are complex, but the supplier chain to them is.
Sure but with a 20 year life span it's not like you can easily cut people off from the them. An interruption in supply has an enormous lead time to build a solution.
Panels are often quoted has having a 20 year (or 25 year) lifespan. But it doesn't really work like that.
Panels degrade a bit (about 0.7%) every year. So after 25 years or so they're down to 80% of rated power. Or, put another way, after 25 years they're still delivering 80% of rated power.
Depending on space, it may be advantageous to replace panels at some point. Or you might add more and leave those alone.
But they don't just "stop working" - the performance drop off is pretty linear.
I was checking Google Maps recently. In such places as Islamabad or Cyprus, residential solar is big. I also hear, the price of panels is low % of the entire installation.
What excites me is that solar works one level up. Coal is energy, solar is a source of energy. If you sell solar panel manufacturing equipment, you work in the second derivative.
If we exported even more manufacturing abroad we can keep dropping CO2. We could stop smelting steel, making fertilizer, and making cement in the US to drop us 15% to 20% lower. Though we’ll still lead the world in CO2 per capita though of major countries.
I think you're wrong but it could be a case of Poe's Law. I have met people who argued with me in this way though, in real life, as if per capita emissions is more important than everything else including our existence itself. They just didn't think it over.
Its easy to convince the world that Americans are special because we won WWII singlehandedly and invented gas cars that we can output 3x more CO2 than anyone else. they should be grateful and change the way they live not us. They should focus on reducing their emissions so I can keep driving my ford F150 on my 20 mile commute to work.
The fact is, the rest of the world greatly outnumbers us in the West. We could all die off tomorrow and it wouldn't solve the global warming problem (if you believe it is a problem), nor would it convince anyone else to live greener and give up their own progress. We have our own systems and way of life, are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy in the West as a whole, and cannot wager our existence as a distinct culture on the good will of adversarial countries around the world that greatly outnumber us and outproduce us. We can make gradual progress toward being green, perhaps, but most of the work must necessarily be done by the rest of the world. We don't owe them our lives.
The third largest country by population in the world doesn't matter. So that means every country smaller than us could die off tomorrow and it doesn't matter so they can use as much as us. Also not a problem, its not like we don't have water problems and all our cattle have died off because of it or that 3rd most populous state is having coastal flooding issues thats get worse every year. Just install more pumping stations in Miami to solve the issue and we can switch from beef to eating soy products instead.
I think when I was very young, the US briefly offered an appealing lifestyle.
But its one of the few countries these days where I believe emigration would send me significantly backwards.
GDP isnt an interesting metric for this conversation tbh. The US can be "Winning" the monetary accumulation race while still being a terrible place in most other aspects.
Why dont you use "Adult literacy rate" as a comparison.
> The US can be "Winning" the monetary accumulation race while still being a terrible place in most other aspects
The US is definitely not "a terrible place in most other aspects". The US is at the top (or near the top excluding small countries like Switzerland) in:
- Consumer spending;
- Disposable income;
- Size of housing afforded;
- Top university rankings;
- Research and development;
Europe suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the US. Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes. This causes real problems. In 2024, there were 62,700 Europeans who died from extreme heat, compared to ~3,000 Americans.
For consumer spending and disposable income, as for gdp per capita, averages are irrelevant as they can (and are) skewed by high earners/spenders and tell us little about the experience of the other 70% of the population.
Air conditioning is simply not necessary in many places in Europe. Either because of climate or building standards (ie proper insulation and/or traditional building styles with a lot of thermal mass).
The size of housing is more due to limitations on development permits designed to limit urban sprawl, as well as differing traditions and preferences.
Having top universities is nice, but won’t help you if the rest of your education system sucks, because 99% of people do not visit the top universities.
Same with wealth and quality of life: the strength of a society is probably measured best by asking where you’d rather be poor, than where you’d rather be rich.
> Air conditioning is simply not necessary in many places in Europe.
67 thousand people are dying each year in Europe from extreme heat, compared to 3k in the US. I'm sure AC "is not necessary in some places in Europe", but this lack of AC is a real material difference and has real, obviously negative consequences.
"Europe is the continent that is warming most quickly, at twice the global average,” says Tomáš Janoš, ISGlobal and Recetox researcher and first author of the study.
Historically you didn't need air conditioning in Europe to survive the summer, but that seems to change very quickly.
Better housing is not the same as larger house. US tends to build large houses far away from everything where you have to drive just to get the groceries. For many people, having smaller house/apartment somewhere you can walk to shop, school, visit friends, whatever and take car out only for longer trips is massively preferable. Likewise, smaller house with better insulation is better.
At some point, bigger house translates to "more chores" and that is it.
- Universal healthcare: I have never needed to pay for my medicine, and I can rest assured that my family won't go bankrupt if I ever get cancer or something.
- Extensive paid leave: I have 1.5 month of it every year.
- Retirement age: 62 years here (for now, at least).
- Public education: I have two masters from public schools, that I got essentially for free.
Americans suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the EU.
While it is undeniable that the US leads in these areas, it should be pointed out that the distribution of who spends and who has disposable income does matter. As in: if you and your 100 closest neighbors live in poverty, it matters very little if you have a multi-billionaire on the block who brings up the average disposable income.
> - Size of housing afforded;
Europe is a lot more densely populated than the US. You really should be comparing urban areas in both, or rural areas in both.
> - Top university rankings;
> - Research and development;
I'll grant you these.
> Europe suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the US. Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes. This causes real problems. In 2024, there were 62,700 Europeans who died from extreme heat, compared to ~3,000 Americans.
As others have pointed out: European homes tend to be much better insulated, and have much greater thermal mass, than American ones. Moreover, a far bigger percentage of the American population lives in warmer climates than in Europe.
That being said, the deaths from extreme heat do show that something needs to change here in order to meet the warming climate. And things are. The push for heat pumps in Europe also opens the door to running them as coolers when needed (when they're the air-to-air type).
> While it is undeniable that the US leads in these areas, it should be pointed out that the distribution of who spends and who has disposable income does matter.
Agreed. But the median American has one the highest consumer spending and disposable incomes in the world.
> Europe is a lot more densely populated than the US. You really should be comparing urban areas in both, or rural areas in both.
OK. But housing in American cities is generally larger than the equivalent in European cities. And housing in American suburbs is likewise larger than in European suburbs.
> Agreed. But the median American has one the highest consumer spending and disposable incomes in the world.
Absoutely. But the differences are no longer insane when considering medians: US at 43 kUSD, and the rest of top 5 at 42, 41, 39, 37. While for the means, the US is 50% ahead of number 5 (top 5 goes 62, 47, 47, 42, 41). That's yaw-dropping, while the lead in medians is not. Randomly sourced from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/disposabl... , which I assume is at least in the ballpark.
> OK. But housing in American cities is generally larger than the equivalent in European cities. And housing in American suburbs is likewise larger than in European suburbs.
Sure. But it's still important to compare apples to apples. And when doing so, the difference, like for disposable income, is far less stark.
>Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes.
Also, screens on windows (to keep out mosquitoes and such) are almost ubiquitous in the US (even in government-funded housing for poor people, the disabled and the elderly) whereas many homes in Europe do not have them (even though Europe has mosquitoes that spread illnesses).
I do not believe for a single second that the lack of those in southern Europe is a matter of cost or availability. To me, as a European (albeit a northerner, where mosquitoes are very annoying, but not a source of disease), those screens are just incredibly tacky and disgusting. They scream American.
If it were a matter of cost/availability, then surely they'd be everywhere on wealthy homes in affected areas in Europe?
I don't find screens on windows tacky & they are nice in summer to avoid all kinds of flying insects getting in when the windows are open in the evening.
But they do make it harder to exchange inside and outside air, as they increase air resistance, especially in hot summer evenings when there is little temperature difference and no wind.
>those screens are just incredibly tacky and disgusting. They scream American.
Do you refer to screens that are held in place with magnetic or adhesive strips? Those are tacky. I mean screens in metal frames that are held in place by metal that was installed by the builder when the home was built. (The builder probably bought pre-made windows, and the screens, frames and hardware to hold the frame in place were an integral part of the window when it was bought.)
> while still being a terrible place in most other aspects.
When I worked for a multinational company we had a lot of people from foreign offices visit the United States for the first time.
It was really interesting for me to see how many of them, especially those who built their worldview from headlines and internet comment sections, were so surprised to discover that the US wasn’t the dystopian hellhole like they had come to believe. It was almost a rite of passage for us to dispel a bunch of myths over lunches and explain how the things they saw in a headline somewhere were not representative of typical American experiences.
Don’t get me wrong, this country has a lot of things that need to improve. However, the internet comments version of the US has taken on a life of its own.
I’m now old enough to have a lot of friends who either worked in foreign countries for extended periods of time or even emigrated abroad, only to come to realize that the rest of the world isn’t as picture-perfect as they though it would be according to the Internet. There’s a dynamic where no positive comments about the US are allowed, but negative comments about other countries are considered out of bounds, denied, or downvoted away.
For example, the recent US reductions in COVID vaccine availability are something I vehemently oppose, but even the current US system makes it far easier to get a COVID vaccine than in the NHS. Every time I tell people this fact (which is easily verifiable by Googling it) I get shouted down or accused of making it up. Both online and in person.
> even the current US system makes it far easier to get a COVID vaccine than in the NHS
Okay, I'll bite. During covid I got my three injections very easily. Currently you can get them for free if you are older/at-risk, or you can pay £100 to get them private, or your employer might pay for it as part of private insurance (as mine does)
You do understand the US, much like Europe, is highly bifurcated.
Show me the gap between the top and the bottom in Europe and the EU.
In Western Russia poverty looks like people earning $100-$200 per month. They exist in third world conditions. That's part of Europe.
Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US). Hint: it's not even close.
The US is more like Latin America here, where top 25% does not mean you are immune to the problems of the other 75%. Your average resident of an affluent western European country does not come into daily contact with a poor resident of western Russia (except maybe through some recent drones...?). But in the US, it's hard to escape the poverty and violence unless you're closer to the top 1%. I am probably around top 20%, in an affluent part of an affluent coastal US city (but not Manhattan affluent). Still, I don't walk outside after dark because of the high crime rates. The crime rates are not as high as in the bad parts of the same city, but people are mugged on a daily basis, and even murders are uncomfortably frequent. I didn't have this problem when I lived in several different places in western Europe, which had lower incomes, but also much lower levels of violent crime. I will admit that American pay is better, but not sure about the quality of life.
It seems unlikely that this pattern of homicides would be explain by differences in general government policies between the U.S. and UK, such as healthcare policies.
NYC is very safe for an American city, but London is not particularly unsafe for a UK one; its violent crime rate is about average for England as a whole.
You are right. Should not have relied on the most likely LLM-generated description attached to the data. I trusted it because I already had the wrong impression that it was less safe, but that was just because the raw number of crimes is high because it is very populated.
As a general rule of thumb, probably never trust anything an LLM says; they're bad at things.
(I'm particularly unsurprised that they'd get confused about _London_, because, well, what is a London anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London . Even _human_ writers sometimes get confused about stats for London.)
I’m sure you can a find a city or two where this is true, but the general trend in most places is slow reduction since a peak in, usually the 80s or 90s. It’s not well-understood _why_ this is.
Social media tends to make people _feel_ like there’s a lot of violent crime.
There was another HN thread recently where someone was commenting about how living conditions in specific parts of Europe were better than the US. When everyone questioned them, they explained that they just didn’t consider various parts of the EU or even certain large cities in major EU countries to be part of the comparison because everyone knew their living standards were lower.
It’s a strange double standard where the US gets evaluated as a mix of the worst headlines from every state, but when commenters talk about Europe being a utopia they actually refer to a cherry picked mix of the best parts of different countries.
I can’t speak to the specific living standards of a bottom half European but I can say I have visited probably a dozen major cities of Europe and never seen a single person living in a tent on the street. In at least half of those cities I have ventured well outside the “tourist” areas.
Meanwhile, I can’t go anywhere in my American city without encountering people living in conditions worse than the average person in a third world country.
Clearly you havent visited Paris, especially the northern part. Tent people are everywhere and it used to be more at the periphery but nowadays even inside the city around popular metro stations, they are right there.
All this tells me that you have rose tinted glass and would rather ignore reality. Sure, there are plenty of things the EU does better than the US but I seriously doubt the bottom part of the population is living significantly better...
> Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US).
I don't know where you learned statistics but this is like comically bad.
I suggest you pick an even smaller country like Andorra ~82K people and compare that with the top 82K people in the US.
Seriously, it's well known the US is skewed towards the top and it's actually a problem... We all remember how Warren Buffet had to say it was weird how he played a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary, right?
I need to brush up on statistics. Would it be better to compare p95 or p90 between the two? Granted I don’t see a lot of these stats outside the tech industry and I always wondered why.
So your argument is that Countries:Countries is unfair, and that Europe should be inclusive of Russia, which isn't even an EU member state, and they are at war with by some metrics, for a proper like comparison?
Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela?
The failure of your argument is front and center, you basically admit that Germany has done well for itself, and so you label it "Elite". But that Elite nature is recent and fleeting, its based on what the government has been able to deliver its citizens. The same things that the US government has failed to deliver its own citizens.
We aren't just comparing regions of land, but polities. Otherwise its moot. I think the US can do better, and it can do better by improving the performance of its polity. Germans however cant exactly vote to directly improve Russian literacy.
> Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela
Because they aren’t part of the USA.
You didn’t address their point at all, which was to demonstrate that the USA is a rich country, and that both the top and bottom tiers are higher in wealth than top and bottom tiers in Europe. Even excepting Russia and other non-EU countries this holds true.
A more apt analogy would be that everyone is going up the hill in 1st, and the US is going up in 5th, lugging the engine. It's a matte rif when and not if the engine stalls
The US is being run according to what a weak and cowardly person thinks a strong person looks like.
It's bad decisions again and again, fundamentally from insecurity and incompetence. It all with the idea of trying to impress some really scared people with blustery demonstrations of force, because the scared people imagine themselves using lots of force if they were ever to have power in their lives.
By the time re-industrialisation kicks in, the US will be well placed to replace China as a source of cheap labour, once living standards decrease to that level.
China hasn't been where the cheap labor is for many years now. Cheap labor is in SEA (Mayasia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc) Bangladesh/India, Mexico, Brazil, and African nations like Nigeria.
> By the time re-industrialisation kicks in, the US will be well placed to replace China as a source of cheap labour, once living standards decrease to that level.
That's going to take some a serious baby boom, I'm not seeing it.
Winning here, means "are able to supply power at a price, which makes their backers money without having to invest in mines and wells"
If you hold assets which embody mines and wells, you are concerned at this point you're going to have a stranded asset. Strategically, you need the market to endure and so decisions of short term pain like dropping pricing, become important so you can stop people fleeing to other forms of energy. But, if the pricing has to drop below your cost of extraction and processing, there's a limit to how far you can go. Well, that point, for some forms of energy, was reached some time ago.
I think when the Saudi Arabian government started seriously diversifying their economy, it was a pretty strong signal.
Even in my home state (Queensland, Australia: Liberal/National right wing government, backed by coal and mining interests) the commercial realities of owning coal fired power stations has reared it's head, and the state government is making market interventions to prop up coal. It also fixes pricing decisions in state to return a significant profit to the state government with that coal price backed energy supply, which I believe is not dissimilar to Ontario. (happy to be corrected) -People are voting with their feed for rooftop domestic solar and batteries, and the pricing spiral continues.
They could do what the other (Labor) states are doing and get with renewables. They just cancelled pumped hydro, wind and solar deployments on pretty thin logic, but they can't stop the private sector and the move there is pretty clear: It's just cheaper as a path to profit, to sell electricity based on renewables right now. If you don't own a giant hole in the ground of coal generation, you get your money back faster building anything else BUT coal fired power now.
When Labor flipped the licence plate tagline to "the smart state" in 2001 a lot of people thought it was a poor attempt at humour. Apparently the "the sunshine state" was brought back by popular acclaim, but I can't say I felt consulted or cared.
Duh? The US has a lot of easy and cheap access to fossil fuels. With Russia cut off, solar is a really easy part of the equation for a lot of countries.
Here in the US, I'd expect we wouldn't be adding much new coal or nat gas either if it weren't for all the data centers going up everywhere. The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.
> The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.
I know these things use a lot, but relative to the national usage is it a significant number? I’ve read this statement a few times but the amount is never quantified to something that makes sense. Like, how much has electricity usage increased in the last two years and can be directly attributed to data centers?
Yes. The amount of gpu power required to train a foundation model is staggering. Inference isn’t cheap either. There’s a massive boom in datacenter construction. If you remove investment in AI infrastructure and related investments is growth in 2025 would be .01%
According to this - 4% of all electricity used in the US in 2023 was used by AI data centres, predicted to go up to 7-8% in 2028. In some countries like Ireland it's already over 20% of all electricity usage.
Um, the Netherlands is not a mid-sized country. Areawise its smaller than West Virginia. Population is around 17 million. (Contrasted to a world population of 8 billion ish.)
If bitcoin is using the same as 17 million people, that'd really not that much in relation to the overall population.
The Netherlands is entry 71 in a list of countries by population, making it very 'mid' indeed. You're comparing it to the USA, which is the third most populous nation on earth, of course it's significantly smaller!
The problem with the "Olympic Pool" scale of measures is that it has no real meaning to most people.
Yes the Netherlands is "mid table" in a list of countries, but absent a good knowledge of statistics, population distribution, and geographic energy consumption, especially with relation to the Netherlands, it's a meaningless measure.
Since I had none of the above, I went to look it up. And frankly I have no idea if you actually compared Bitcoin to the Netherlands (in terms of energy consumption) or just randomly picked a country.
Let me be general. I have no idea about the Netherlands. I have no idea if you know anything about the Netherlands. That's the root of my concern with your comparison. It "sounds" like a useful comparison- but is it?
Now, had you said that Bitcoin consumes about 0.5% of global energy, and that there are just under 200 countries (meaning on average 0.5% each) then that's a measure I can absorb.
I might then point out that the US consumes 25% of the world energy supply, despite having 5% of global population, so the 0.5% of bitcoin consumption is really not moving the needle.
Apart from the obvious, another aspect of renewables that I hope will make the world a better place is the potential to be fucking free from oil and gas. Imagine the geopolitical impact of that. But, here’s a lesson from WW2. Unless we can pack the energy produced by renewables into tanks, jets, aircraft carriers and such effectively (cost, scale, etc.) nothing is gonna get meaningfully better there.
Its probably also going to trigger a bunch of wars in the short term.
Wars tend to happen when power dynamics change. Either someone is on the rise and thinks they can get more or someone is on the decline and can no longer hold on to what they used to have. I think the middle east is going to be a blood bath once the oil stops making bank. But its not just them, when oil goes away it changes the power dynamics across the world.
Theoretically, with enough cheap renewable energy, synthetic hydrocarbons could fuel the war machine.
It would need possibly big, vulnerable plants to refine, but so does jet fuel and diesel now.
Adding that much electrical capacity is a civilisational task, but an electrical "JP-8 at home" plant in theory is a good security asset, especially for countries with poor oil supply.
Will these still be relevant in 15 years time, given the pace at which military drones are developing?
Perhaps long-range drones/missiles will be using fossil fuel, but not nearly as much as the heavy, bulky military vehicles designed to carry personnel.
Whether they are manned or not doesn’t matter. They still need power which is mostly oil based except the smaller, short range drones. The longer range, bigger drones and missiles are jet powered
I can tell you one area in renewables that's NOT winning. Offshore. In the industry, there was some talk about how GE is pulling out of the offshore wind turbine market. Sucks to be wind farms that were built using those GE turbines.
Offshore’s doing fairly well globally, but I’m not sure how much of an export market GE has, and in the short term ol’ minihands has wrecked it in the US. Again, however, he won’t last forever.
‘World’s largest’ solar plant in Calif closing – $1.6 billion Ivanpah casts a shadow on DOE loans – ‘Federal data concluded the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year’
The 386-megawatt plant lagged in producing promised electricity levels and faced criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of its associated bird deaths. While estimates vary, some federal data concluded that the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year flying into concentrated beams of sunlight.
That is not the largest solar plant (I’m guessing the article was written by our good friends the magic robots); there’s one with almost 10x the nameplate output in China, though likely more in reality, as concentrated solar thermal plants don’t work properly. It’s the largest concentrated solar thermal plant; it’s a dead-end technology (it looked plausible in the 90s when PV tech was expected to progress far less quickly than it actually did). You might as well claim that cars are dead on the basis that Wankel engines were a failure.
It doesn't matter if they used Plutonium solar panels. It was over hyped and made tons of promises and then massively underdelivered and now has to be decommissioned, at a huge cost to tax payers.
Presumably commenters are talking about the fact that the current US administration has taken an anti-renewables position and cut funding for renewable energy projects. With a hostile federal policy, it somewhat calls into question whether the US can sustain it's progress in renewable deployment. Personally though I think we will continue to make progress, just slower than before.
That's one project. It's a big project but I bet that the private installations that will happen in the period it would have taken to build that will be significantly more megawatts.
I'm not saying that Trump isn't cancelling things, I'm saying that the projects he can cancel aren't a significant portion of the market. Renewables don't really need government help anymore. Storage does though.
After many months of delay because Trump said he was going to be really hard on the permit review, it was apparently cancelled for no reason.
Previously, Trump tried to retroactively revoke permits on offshore wind projects that were mid construction, with billions spent. Even if he didn't win in court, the scheduling of ships for this is so delicate that a delay of months could scuttle the build for years as ships move on to other engagements, basically ending any profitability.
This is having a huge chilling effect on our renewables buildout as the magus shakedowns are capricious and massive increase investment risk.
Even if there is growing investment in renewables in the US, it will be a shadow of what it would be otherwise.
And with gas turbines on many year back order, Trump is locking in higher electricity prices fire to shortages because he's trying to block one of the only fast ways to bring new generation into the grid.
This piece would be more useful if it explained what it means by winning. Early on, it seems to define winning as the amount of taxpayer subsidies going towards it, at least in the US; but then it talks about the growth in the rest of the world without showing, at least before I stopped reading, how much of that growth is driven by tax and regulatory incentives.
Despite all the noise renewables make up 90% of new capacity in the US.
We are witnessing the complete transformation of the grid to renewables. The question is if it takes 10 years or 20 years depending on how quickly we deploy incentives to phase out existing capacity.
Renewables have been the unsubsidized cheapest energy source for a while now.
Recently unsubsidized renewables and storage started undercutting fossil fuels in major markets around the world.
This is what is so interesting with renewable energy. They are the first energy source since the advent of fossil fuels lowering the price floor of energy globally.
Removing the credits will like I said only shift the implementation period due to using tax money to tilt the scale in one way or the other.
> According to a recent study by the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry, annual investment in the energy, industry, building, and transport sectors would have to more than double if current energy policies were to continue: from an average of around €82 billion between 2020 and 2024 to somewhere between €113 billion to €316 billion in 2035. Early transition models had projected a fraction of that.
We'll see, but I don't know what to believe anymore. In particular, Germany's deindustrialization is unmistakeable and expensive energy may be the culprit.
If you visit the German study cited you will see that only a third of those transition costs are for electricity generation and transmission networks. The remainder is spent on climate change adaptations of housing, transport and industry.
I personally believe the transition to electric vehicles will soon reach a tipping point due to reduced battery prices and won't add much cost. Costly building upgrades (insulation and heat pumps will be delayed), but renewable installation will continue strongly. It is just to cheap not to do it.
Let me understand the AI argument you are making: Are you saying that if AI is valuable (which is likely) then not having cheap electricity is going to be downside?
I would have two objections:
- Data center operation and construction is only a fraction of the value creation. If Europe is behind on the AI race it won't matter where the data centers are because the profits are going to go to US companies (as with Google and Facebook so far).
- What makes you think that Nuclear would help in any way to have cheap energy? Nuclear has become by far the most expensive energy generation method. Building new nuclear is unfeasible in the west.
Germany tried to go 100% renewables and then found out it wasn't possible, then made a deal with Russia to supply what they needed to cover what renewables couldn't. Right up until Russia invaded Ukraine:
A huge increase in gas prices triggered by Russia’s move last month to sharply reduce supplies to Germany has plunged Europe’s biggest economy into its worst energy crisis since the oil price shock of 1973.
Gas importers and utilities are fighting for survival while consumer bills are going through the roof, with some warning of rising friction.
“The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German housing enterprises GdW. “Germany’s social peace is in great danger.”
They did eventually move to get off of their reliance on Russian energy over a year later, but what they did as go back to coal and nuclear to keep the lights on after divesting from Russian energy imports:
In its race to find alternate sources of energy, the country has reopened coal-fired power plants, delayed plans to shut down its three remaining nuclear power plants, and pushed to increase capacity to store natural gas imported from other countries such as Norway and the US.
At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Lindner pointed to the speed with which a new liquefied natural gas terminal had been built in Germany - in a record of around eight months, he said. More infrastructure investments were planned, he added.
The Energiewende wasn't an attempt to go 100% renewable
Germany's dependency on Russian gas goes back to the 1990s and beyond
While people were worried about the impact of sanctions on Russian gas, the actual impact was lower than expected. Consumer bills did not go through the roof, partly due to government intervention
Combined power generation share from coal compared to before Russia started a war with Ukraine is slightly down, nuclear is 0 (or a percent or two if you consider imports), gas is marginally up
Renewables are winning in the USA too. A few tens of billions in handouts to Trump's crony capitalist pals and general regulatory and legislative chaos (in renewables specifically but in everything else too) isn't going to change that.
Yes, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act had tons of provisions to help out renewables in general and solar energy in particular. Most of them were in form of tax credits which I'm sure helped Texas a lot. Many of Biden's policies helped out red states quite a lot.
Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill (ugh..) has already rolled back most of those policies. Additionally DOE and EPA have announced termination of many projects, canceled previously approved funding, banned words such as "climate change", among tons of measures aimed at curbing the progress made.
You, of course, knew that and were being disingenuous.
The luddites were 100% correct though. They saw that machines werent the problem per se, but the fact that labor wasnt getting their share anymore. And we're seeing it time and time again. Labor invents new machines and methods, and capital takes all the profit.
The most remarkable details about solar panels I've heard recently came from the environmentalist Bill McKibben[1] on a podcast[2]:
I was standing in a cornfield in Illinois this time last summer, with a farmer who grew corn for ethanol and was converting much of his fields to solar arrays. He said, I can grow in this acre, and he pointed to an acre in a good farmerly way, he said, in this acre, I can grow enough ethanol to run my Ford F-150 pickup, most beloved vehicle in the American iconography. It’ll run 25,000 miles off the ethanol I can grow on an acre in a year. If I cover that same acre with solar panels, then I can produce enough electrons to run my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, I can run that not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles.
Not to mention that the cornfield has to be essentially torn down and rebuilt every year, while the panels will just sit there quietly working for at least 20 years with very little maintenance.
An acre of solar is about 350-450,000 kWh/year. An F-150 Lightning does 2 miles per kWh. So that's about right.
One acre of corn makes about 400 gallons of bioethanol. Even the newest F-150s do an atrocious 18 mpg in real usage, so you need nearly 1500 gallons to go 25,000 miles. So this figure is presumably ignoring the non-ethanol content of the fuel, which is most of it.
Yea, but it says more about how bad corn biofuels are than how good solar is. Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW. If you want solar, move to Mexico (or even New Mexico) where it actually makes environmental sense.
It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has people there, the costs and losses of getting energy from Mexico to Iowa may outweigh much of the advantages for quite some time.
Assuming solar isn't displaced by something else, one day we'll presumably see highly insolated areas exporting power over huge interconnects, but for now, fitting a panel basically anywhere is still better than not fitting it at all.
> Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW.
Absolutely not, Iowa is great for solar, it often provides more income than corn (and corn has massive subsidies), and is certainly better than most of Europe. Iowa really is not very far north
Generating solar power in Mexico won't keep Iowans from warming their homes with natural gas and powering their F-150s with petroleum, so solar panels in Iowa are needed for the fight against AGW.
It also ignores the reason why corn biofuels exist, because we subsidize corn production for national security reasons and there's a ton of extra produced so they try and find profitable uses for it.
From what I’ve seen, solar panels end up being quite good for plant life since they provide partial shade from the sun. Basically a shade cloth that’s productive on its own.
We've cleared nature for farms for so long that the fields feel like nature that should be preserved.
Not content with cutting down the forests, now even the hedgerows are in the way.
Compared to what was there before (often forest), a gigantic monocrop industrial field is about as ecologically friendly as a car park. And the car park won't dump fertiliser into the water courses either.
The industrial park also takes a tiny fraction of the amount of land as does growing food. Even better, it allows enough food to be grown on a fraction of the land. So on balance, that powerplant allows far more land to be returned to a natural state. Ironic but true. Its why we shouldn't allow the scientifically illiterate to make decisions about this type of thing.
Can full scale solar make a dent in the land available in any country for food? And how does it compare to urban sprawl? (Although suburbs may have the benefit of solar on the roof powering the house below pretty well).
Another option is of course put the solar where you cant for whatever reason grow food. Hopefully there is enough shitty land to so that.
In any country? Yes. For example, Luxembourg (1200km² of farmland, 677,000 people).
In most countries: not really. And not to the extent that meat farming does, which is land-use broadly considered to be acceptable. One cow needs from under 1 to to 8 acres depending on how good the land is, and grazed land is roughly double cropland in the US. One cow produces roughly 10 people's beef intake in the US. Not to mention much of the cropland is already used for biofuel: diverting 60 million acres of arable land for energy is already a thing the US does. That 60 million acres of solar could produce 5 times current US electrical consumption.
One acre of solar makes roughly 30 US households (not people) of energy. Say 5-10 if you also need to cover current fossil fuel heating and transport. And obviously the energy mix won't be 100% solar.
So, on the face of it, it doesn't seem that solar power is an especially inefficient or wasteful use of land in most cases compared to other uses generally considered reasonable. And it also doesn't (further) damage land like intensive farming does. Whereas clearing natural land for solar could be more damaging.
Solar on roofs is not great in terms of coverage and is inefficient in terms of operational costs. Yes, the land was already used, so it's better then nothing and you can probably more or less recoup the house, so it's economical for the people who live there and the more the better. But you will still need to power denser housing and increasingly-electrified industry and transport.
Urban sprawl in the US is big, but still the US is only 3% urban. Even the UK, which is much denser is 8%. Farmland is far and away the biggest land user in most places.
Panels can endure hail as well as cars and roofs, so we’re talking catastrophic hail; where we’ve seen economic losses as bad as tornadoes.
So, I’d worry about wind wrecking and broadly casting those slivers.
Rather than pick them up, maybe consider further crushing them into the ground. While that’s not good for farmland, the area under the plume of a coal plant is already broadly contaminated.
> “The IEA has, consistently over the last couple of decades, way underestimated how fast renewables are growing,” said Robert Brecha, a senior climate and energy adviser at Climate Analytics,
> The policy outlook for renewables in the United States is so bleak that the IEA lowered the country’s renewable capacity growth expectations by 50 percent compared to last year’s projections.
Maybe room for optimism they are underestimating what non govt supported solar growth would be in the US?
Solar at least is a much faster way to add capacity to the grid than coal or natural gas, particularly residential rooftop solar. In a competition with China for AI predominance, trump shot the USA in the foot by deep sixing renewal incentives.
The US is choosing to make itself increasingly redundant. Increasing speed whilst in Reverse gear whilst talking as if they're highway cruising in 5th.
It's nice to know that the rest of the world is still pushing forwards, up a steep hill, in first gear. I hope it can continue, and the hill shrinks.
Not the rest of the world, but China. 80% of all panels come from there, and they want to keep it that way.
It'll lead to sone interesting and unpleasant political fights in the future, I suspect.
It doesn't really matter where the panels come from. Yes the manufacturer captures some of their value, but that's in the range of 20% of their overall value (and dropping).
In my country there is no govt subsidy for solar. But math doesn't lie. A typical residential system returns 16% on capital invested. Not surprisingly residential solar here is now measured in Gw.
The good news for the US is that it really doesn't matter if they fall behind. Solar can be installed so quickly that any lost impetus can be made in in a year or two. There's basically very little lead time required between decision and implementation.
You can install panels quickly but increasingly we're seeing that the grid isn't up to the task, and those projects are far from quick
Yes, the grid votes into play. Especially for commercial solar installations. If I drop a 200Mw facility in a sunny area the grid needs updating to accept that 200Mw at that point.
Bit that's "boring" infrastructure. Cables, trenches, transformers. It can be done in "months" (perhaps a couple years) not decades.
For residential solar of course it's a non issue. The inverter caps the amount sent to the grid, and that cap is most often set to 0. (The 16% return I mentioned earlier is before feeding to the grid.)
Soon the grid will be just for backup
Backup works for a few outliers. But when everyone needs that backup at the same time, it's not a backup anymore.
From what we know...
- baseload electricity generation is not economical or practical (reactive) as a pure backup.
- a few grid-level mega-storage prototype projects, but nowhere near the scale of powering modern cities for a couple of off-weather days, or events where people congregate.
The hope is that – a combination of "couple of hours" of grid-level battery, and use that time to bring up a baseload. But the economics of that is abysmal (high capex/opex for what's essentially "hoping as an investor" for a few off-days so that this thing gets used after all). Those micro-nuclear-plants seem to still have a place.
As of now, grid as a backup is still only wishful thinking. Except for those who are already off-grid and changed their lifestyles to accomodate a few no-power days as a compromise.
Or seasonal demand. Batteries can probably smooth the daily demand but not seasonal yet. Still the existing grid is probably ok for that.
This. Largest datacenters need gigawatt scale power now so they just go with gas turbines.
It does matter where critical infrastructure components come from. Whether you can call solar panels critical or not, China has a virtual monopoly on them due to lower production costs. The same story plays out with virtually EVERY product that we in the West need.
True. Given their lifespan it behooves folks to "get them while they can".
A warlike country with a history of antagonism to China is probably less secure than countries that have chosen to behave like good neighbors.
If you feel like panel production is strategic, which is an easy argument to make, and given that the US has a substantial ability to produce panels [1], perhaps a useful strategy would be to consume those panels as much as possible, subsidizing production to make it a growth area.
Indeed it might become a surplus, allowing for export, which in turn improves foreign relations. And the simple existence of the domestic market leads to improvements, better quality and so on.
I'm no economist but the above seems like a solid strategy to me. It would be most interesting to see the outcomes where a country pursued this strategy versus one that actively worked to marginalize solar, killing domestic production instead.
I wonder if there are more countries in the same boat which could be used to see the long-term outcome of the various strategic options?
[1] Solar systems comprise of more than panels. But the other parts are just electronics so not important in the context of managing solar as a specific product.
>A warlike country with a history of antagonism to China is probably less secure than countries that have chosen to behave like good neighbors.
That is naive. China will become imperialistic if given a chance. Look at how they treat their neighbors.
>If you feel like panel production is strategic
I don't necessarily. But many strategically important things suffer the same fate. We cannot compete with China and other low-wage countries without restructuring the monetary system and probably our lifestyles. The Chinese know this and have used the situation to hoover up production capacity for many things that are critical to national security.
>US has a substantial ability to produce panels [1], perhaps a useful strategy would be to consume those panels as much as possible, subsidizing production to make it a growth area.
It would make far more sense to simply ban the import of cheaper panels, and let those who need the panels pay the true cost. The reason is that you could apply the same logic to every offshore-made item, and these subsidies would make random people pay for stuff that random other people are using.
>I'm no economist but the above seems like a solid strategy to me. It would be most interesting to see the outcomes where a country pursued this strategy versus one that actively worked to marginalize solar, killing domestic production instead.
I don't think anyone is trying to kill their domestic solar industry in general. But these installations have to be justified somehow. If the domestic panels are not the cheapest/best option available, they won't be used.
>> That is naive. China will become imperialistic if given a chance. Look at how they treat their neighbors.
yeah, but I'm not in the US, so the US is not offering a compelling alternative at the moment (look at how they treat their neighbors...)
China is still way worse. If you think otherwise, you have bought into the anti-US propaganda.
Aren't panels commodotized? Many western countries could probably spin up production at scale if needed and economically viable. But why do so now?
Also why talk only about panels. Inverters are cost wise in the same order of magnitude, but much more complex artifacts.
Inverters have more electronic parts, but the parts themselves are very off-the-shelf, and the electronic design is pretty straightforward.
Inverters are still fairly expensive for a couple reasons; Firstly economies of scale. A residential site buys 1 inverter, but 10 to 20 panels. A commercial site has an even bigger ratio.
Secondly Inverters are the bit that connects to the grid. So there are regulatory requirements which need to be tested for. And likely tested in multiple different jurisdictions.
Panels on the other hand are "difficult" to produce in volume. Largely because of the quality of raw silicon that is required. Its not that the panels themselves are complex, but the supplier chain to them is.
Sure but with a 20 year life span it's not like you can easily cut people off from the them. An interruption in supply has an enormous lead time to build a solution.
Panels are often quoted has having a 20 year (or 25 year) lifespan. But it doesn't really work like that.
Panels degrade a bit (about 0.7%) every year. So after 25 years or so they're down to 80% of rated power. Or, put another way, after 25 years they're still delivering 80% of rated power.
Depending on space, it may be advantageous to replace panels at some point. Or you might add more and leave those alone.
But they don't just "stop working" - the performance drop off is pretty linear.
>The same story plays out with virtually EVERY product that we in the West need.
That's not true. And China needs many Western products to keep their factories going.
MIC2025 changed that many to barely any.
US is the only country besides China with significant solar panel manufacturing (although much much much lower). It's not that.
I was checking Google Maps recently. In such places as Islamabad or Cyprus, residential solar is big. I also hear, the price of panels is low % of the entire installation.
What excites me is that solar works one level up. Coal is energy, solar is a source of energy. If you sell solar panel manufacturing equipment, you work in the second derivative.
That literally levels up the game.
Coal is storage.
In the conventional sense, one-directional storage
They also lead the world in emissions and what the US does / doesn’t do won’t be a major driver. Our carbon peaked in 2007
It’s more an issue of US ability to compete in an emerging market IMO.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...
If we exported even more manufacturing abroad we can keep dropping CO2. We could stop smelting steel, making fertilizer, and making cement in the US to drop us 15% to 20% lower. Though we’ll still lead the world in CO2 per capita though of major countries.
Why don't we just commit ritual suicide? Because that makes about as much sense as deindustrializing, and may have roughly the same outcome.
I think(?) you missed the sarcasm.
I may be wrong.
I think you're wrong but it could be a case of Poe's Law. I have met people who argued with me in this way though, in real life, as if per capita emissions is more important than everything else including our existence itself. They just didn't think it over.
Its easy to convince the world that Americans are special because we won WWII singlehandedly and invented gas cars that we can output 3x more CO2 than anyone else. they should be grateful and change the way they live not us. They should focus on reducing their emissions so I can keep driving my ford F150 on my 20 mile commute to work.
The fact is, the rest of the world greatly outnumbers us in the West. We could all die off tomorrow and it wouldn't solve the global warming problem (if you believe it is a problem), nor would it convince anyone else to live greener and give up their own progress. We have our own systems and way of life, are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy in the West as a whole, and cannot wager our existence as a distinct culture on the good will of adversarial countries around the world that greatly outnumber us and outproduce us. We can make gradual progress toward being green, perhaps, but most of the work must necessarily be done by the rest of the world. We don't owe them our lives.
The third largest country by population in the world doesn't matter. So that means every country smaller than us could die off tomorrow and it doesn't matter so they can use as much as us. Also not a problem, its not like we don't have water problems and all our cattle have died off because of it or that 3rd most populous state is having coastal flooding issues thats get worse every year. Just install more pumping stations in Miami to solve the issue and we can switch from beef to eating soy products instead.
The US is today the biggest exporter of refined petrol products. It also consumes products manufactured elsewhere, including China.
China is in some ways the world's factory.
This is a funny accusation considering that the U.S.’s advantage over other countries has only grown over the last decade: https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2022/02/05/comparing-e...
Germany’s per-capita GDP was 76% of the U.S. in 2015 and is 61% today.
I think when I was very young, the US briefly offered an appealing lifestyle.
But its one of the few countries these days where I believe emigration would send me significantly backwards.
GDP isnt an interesting metric for this conversation tbh. The US can be "Winning" the monetary accumulation race while still being a terrible place in most other aspects.
Why dont you use "Adult literacy rate" as a comparison.
Quality of life Index, Cost of Living Index, or Happiness Index would seem to be better for comparison, than just GDP.
> The US can be "Winning" the monetary accumulation race while still being a terrible place in most other aspects
The US is definitely not "a terrible place in most other aspects". The US is at the top (or near the top excluding small countries like Switzerland) in:
- Consumer spending;
- Disposable income;
- Size of housing afforded;
- Top university rankings;
- Research and development;
Europe suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the US. Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes. This causes real problems. In 2024, there were 62,700 Europeans who died from extreme heat, compared to ~3,000 Americans.
For consumer spending and disposable income, as for gdp per capita, averages are irrelevant as they can (and are) skewed by high earners/spenders and tell us little about the experience of the other 70% of the population.
Air conditioning is simply not necessary in many places in Europe. Either because of climate or building standards (ie proper insulation and/or traditional building styles with a lot of thermal mass).
The size of housing is more due to limitations on development permits designed to limit urban sprawl, as well as differing traditions and preferences.
Having top universities is nice, but won’t help you if the rest of your education system sucks, because 99% of people do not visit the top universities.
Same with wealth and quality of life: the strength of a society is probably measured best by asking where you’d rather be poor, than where you’d rather be rich.
> Air conditioning is simply not necessary in many places in Europe.
67 thousand people are dying each year in Europe from extreme heat, compared to 3k in the US. I'm sure AC "is not necessary in some places in Europe", but this lack of AC is a real material difference and has real, obviously negative consequences.
Maybe climate change just doesn't affect most parts of the US as hard as parts of Europe?
E.g. see: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/09/23/more-than-62000-di...
Historically you didn't need air conditioning in Europe to survive the summer, but that seems to change very quickly.It may be the case that those are not the things people actually care about.
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Better housing is not the same as larger house. US tends to build large houses far away from everything where you have to drive just to get the groceries. For many people, having smaller house/apartment somewhere you can walk to shop, school, visit friends, whatever and take car out only for longer trips is massively preferable. Likewise, smaller house with better insulation is better.
At some point, bigger house translates to "more chores" and that is it.
You forgot the stuff that actually matters:
- Universal healthcare: I have never needed to pay for my medicine, and I can rest assured that my family won't go bankrupt if I ever get cancer or something.
- Extensive paid leave: I have 1.5 month of it every year.
- Retirement age: 62 years here (for now, at least).
- Public education: I have two masters from public schools, that I got essentially for free.
Americans suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the EU.
> - Consumer spending;
> - Disposable income;
While it is undeniable that the US leads in these areas, it should be pointed out that the distribution of who spends and who has disposable income does matter. As in: if you and your 100 closest neighbors live in poverty, it matters very little if you have a multi-billionaire on the block who brings up the average disposable income.
> - Size of housing afforded;
Europe is a lot more densely populated than the US. You really should be comparing urban areas in both, or rural areas in both.
> - Top university rankings;
> - Research and development;
I'll grant you these.
> Europe suffers from many things that would be hard to imagine in the US. Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes. This causes real problems. In 2024, there were 62,700 Europeans who died from extreme heat, compared to ~3,000 Americans.
As others have pointed out: European homes tend to be much better insulated, and have much greater thermal mass, than American ones. Moreover, a far bigger percentage of the American population lives in warmer climates than in Europe.
That being said, the deaths from extreme heat do show that something needs to change here in order to meet the warming climate. And things are. The push for heat pumps in Europe also opens the door to running them as coolers when needed (when they're the air-to-air type).
> While it is undeniable that the US leads in these areas, it should be pointed out that the distribution of who spends and who has disposable income does matter.
Agreed. But the median American has one the highest consumer spending and disposable incomes in the world.
> Europe is a lot more densely populated than the US. You really should be comparing urban areas in both, or rural areas in both.
OK. But housing in American cities is generally larger than the equivalent in European cities. And housing in American suburbs is likewise larger than in European suburbs.
> Agreed. But the median American has one the highest consumer spending and disposable incomes in the world.
Absoutely. But the differences are no longer insane when considering medians: US at 43 kUSD, and the rest of top 5 at 42, 41, 39, 37. While for the means, the US is 50% ahead of number 5 (top 5 goes 62, 47, 47, 42, 41). That's yaw-dropping, while the lead in medians is not. Randomly sourced from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/disposabl... , which I assume is at least in the ballpark.
> OK. But housing in American cities is generally larger than the equivalent in European cities. And housing in American suburbs is likewise larger than in European suburbs.
Sure. But it's still important to compare apples to apples. And when doing so, the difference, like for disposable income, is far less stark.
>Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes.
Also, screens on windows (to keep out mosquitoes and such) are almost ubiquitous in the US (even in government-funded housing for poor people, the disabled and the elderly) whereas many homes in Europe do not have them (even though Europe has mosquitoes that spread illnesses).
I do not believe for a single second that the lack of those in southern Europe is a matter of cost or availability. To me, as a European (albeit a northerner, where mosquitoes are very annoying, but not a source of disease), those screens are just incredibly tacky and disgusting. They scream American.
If it were a matter of cost/availability, then surely they'd be everywhere on wealthy homes in affected areas in Europe?
I don't find screens on windows tacky & they are nice in summer to avoid all kinds of flying insects getting in when the windows are open in the evening.
But they do make it harder to exchange inside and outside air, as they increase air resistance, especially in hot summer evenings when there is little temperature difference and no wind.
>those screens are just incredibly tacky and disgusting. They scream American.
Do you refer to screens that are held in place with magnetic or adhesive strips? Those are tacky. I mean screens in metal frames that are held in place by metal that was installed by the builder when the home was built. (The builder probably bought pre-made windows, and the screens, frames and hardware to hold the frame in place were an integral part of the window when it was bought.)
Right??? It's sooooo tacky and disgusting not to get West Nile virus!
Everyone who's anyone just invites the mosquitoes in and plays the good host to them!
I didn't say that their function is tacky. I'm saying that not having them is likely a choice, not an indicator of a lack of resources.
I’m a Nordic-phile, but I took the OP to be more about global leadership.
Which country do you live in?
> while still being a terrible place in most other aspects.
When I worked for a multinational company we had a lot of people from foreign offices visit the United States for the first time.
It was really interesting for me to see how many of them, especially those who built their worldview from headlines and internet comment sections, were so surprised to discover that the US wasn’t the dystopian hellhole like they had come to believe. It was almost a rite of passage for us to dispel a bunch of myths over lunches and explain how the things they saw in a headline somewhere were not representative of typical American experiences.
Don’t get me wrong, this country has a lot of things that need to improve. However, the internet comments version of the US has taken on a life of its own.
I’m now old enough to have a lot of friends who either worked in foreign countries for extended periods of time or even emigrated abroad, only to come to realize that the rest of the world isn’t as picture-perfect as they though it would be according to the Internet. There’s a dynamic where no positive comments about the US are allowed, but negative comments about other countries are considered out of bounds, denied, or downvoted away.
For example, the recent US reductions in COVID vaccine availability are something I vehemently oppose, but even the current US system makes it far easier to get a COVID vaccine than in the NHS. Every time I tell people this fact (which is easily verifiable by Googling it) I get shouted down or accused of making it up. Both online and in person.
> even the current US system makes it far easier to get a COVID vaccine than in the NHS
Okay, I'll bite. During covid I got my three injections very easily. Currently you can get them for free if you are older/at-risk, or you can pay £100 to get them private, or your employer might pay for it as part of private insurance (as mine does)
What does the US do?
You do understand the US, much like Europe, is highly bifurcated.
Show me the gap between the top and the bottom in Europe and the EU.
In Western Russia poverty looks like people earning $100-$200 per month. They exist in third world conditions. That's part of Europe.
Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US). Hint: it's not even close.
The US is more like Latin America here, where top 25% does not mean you are immune to the problems of the other 75%. Your average resident of an affluent western European country does not come into daily contact with a poor resident of western Russia (except maybe through some recent drones...?). But in the US, it's hard to escape the poverty and violence unless you're closer to the top 1%. I am probably around top 20%, in an affluent part of an affluent coastal US city (but not Manhattan affluent). Still, I don't walk outside after dark because of the high crime rates. The crime rates are not as high as in the bad parts of the same city, but people are mugged on a daily basis, and even murders are uncomfortably frequent. I didn't have this problem when I lived in several different places in western Europe, which had lower incomes, but also much lower levels of violent crime. I will admit that American pay is better, but not sure about the quality of life.
Western European cities have been getting more violent.
London murder rate per million in 2024: 11.6 NYC murder rate per million in 2024: 43
And from what I read, NYC is exceptionally safe for a US city, and London is exceptionally unsafe for a UK city.
What do you think that difference in homicide rates proves? It’s caused entirely by racial disparities in homicide victimization rate. The NYC homicide rate for white victims is about 9 per million: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_p... (7% of 343 homicides divided by 2.7 million). The homicide rate among white people in London was also about 9 per million: https://aoav.org.uk/2024/londons-2023-murders-examined-key-f... (43% of 103 homicides divided by 4.7 million).
It seems unlikely that this pattern of homicides would be explain by differences in general government policies between the U.S. and UK, such as healthcare policies.
The post I was replying to was edited and originally claimed that London had higher murder rate than New York.
NYC is very safe for an American city, but London is not particularly unsafe for a UK one; its violent crime rate is about average for England as a whole.
You are right. Should not have relied on the most likely LLM-generated description attached to the data. I trusted it because I already had the wrong impression that it was less safe, but that was just because the raw number of crimes is high because it is very populated.
As a general rule of thumb, probably never trust anything an LLM says; they're bad at things.
(I'm particularly unsurprised that they'd get confused about _London_, because, well, what is a London anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London . Even _human_ writers sometimes get confused about stats for London.)
104 murders in London in 24/25, 535 in the whole of the UK for the same period
Overall crime and especially violent crime is falling in the UK but there are some well publicised hotspots - phone theft, shoplifting
I’m sure you can a find a city or two where this is true, but the general trend in most places is slow reduction since a peak in, usually the 80s or 90s. It’s not well-understood _why_ this is.
Social media tends to make people _feel_ like there’s a lot of violent crime.
There was another HN thread recently where someone was commenting about how living conditions in specific parts of Europe were better than the US. When everyone questioned them, they explained that they just didn’t consider various parts of the EU or even certain large cities in major EU countries to be part of the comparison because everyone knew their living standards were lower.
It’s a strange double standard where the US gets evaluated as a mix of the worst headlines from every state, but when commenters talk about Europe being a utopia they actually refer to a cherry picked mix of the best parts of different countries.
I can’t speak to the specific living standards of a bottom half European but I can say I have visited probably a dozen major cities of Europe and never seen a single person living in a tent on the street. In at least half of those cities I have ventured well outside the “tourist” areas.
Meanwhile, I can’t go anywhere in my American city without encountering people living in conditions worse than the average person in a third world country.
Clearly you havent visited Paris, especially the northern part. Tent people are everywhere and it used to be more at the periphery but nowadays even inside the city around popular metro stations, they are right there.
All this tells me that you have rose tinted glass and would rather ignore reality. Sure, there are plenty of things the EU does better than the US but I seriously doubt the bottom part of the population is living significantly better...
> Germany is an elite outcome for Europe for example. Population 83 million. Show me what the top 83 million in the US look like by comparison (roughly the top 25% of the US).
I don't know where you learned statistics but this is like comically bad.
I suggest you pick an even smaller country like Andorra ~82K people and compare that with the top 82K people in the US.
Seriously, it's well known the US is skewed towards the top and it's actually a problem... We all remember how Warren Buffet had to say it was weird how he played a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary, right?
I need to brush up on statistics. Would it be better to compare p95 or p90 between the two? Granted I don’t see a lot of these stats outside the tech industry and I always wondered why.
Yes that's the point that was being made.
So your argument is that Countries:Countries is unfair, and that Europe should be inclusive of Russia, which isn't even an EU member state, and they are at war with by some metrics, for a proper like comparison?
Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela?
The failure of your argument is front and center, you basically admit that Germany has done well for itself, and so you label it "Elite". But that Elite nature is recent and fleeting, its based on what the government has been able to deliver its citizens. The same things that the US government has failed to deliver its own citizens.
We aren't just comparing regions of land, but polities. Otherwise its moot. I think the US can do better, and it can do better by improving the performance of its polity. Germans however cant exactly vote to directly improve Russian literacy.
> Why don't you include Mexico in the USA? Or Venezuela
Because they aren’t part of the USA.
You didn’t address their point at all, which was to demonstrate that the USA is a rich country, and that both the top and bottom tiers are higher in wealth than top and bottom tiers in Europe. Even excepting Russia and other non-EU countries this holds true.
>USA is a rich country
Yes, so the proper comparison is a Country.
Not a Region or a Continent.
You could stretch the EU to fit "Country" but the poster went even further and decided that Germany includes Russia.
Spain gets even poorer if you include Zimbabwe in its data for no reason at all. Crazy.
If you include Western Russia, you can also include Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.
GDP per capita is not the only measure of forward progress.
Specifically not in the current case where almost all of that GDP growth lines the pockets of the already-wealthy.
Not to mention large chunks of it are from American companies cheating foreign tax systems. E.g. Amazon.
I hear that, but then you look at China’s GDP/pp numbers, QoL improvements over the decade, and can’t really take it that seriously.
On the topic of renewables, though, the US has been resistant at best. Prior to turning into the active hindrance it currently is.
Who cares if all that GDP ends up in the hands of the top 0,01% or so.
The average American really does not have a 40% better life than the average German.
Your link points to an article from 2022...
We'll see how that goes.
A more apt analogy would be that everyone is going up the hill in 1st, and the US is going up in 5th, lugging the engine. It's a matte rif when and not if the engine stalls
The US is being run according to what a weak and cowardly person thinks a strong person looks like.
It's bad decisions again and again, fundamentally from insecurity and incompetence. It all with the idea of trying to impress some really scared people with blustery demonstrations of force, because the scared people imagine themselves using lots of force if they were ever to have power in their lives.
By the time re-industrialisation kicks in, the US will be well placed to replace China as a source of cheap labour, once living standards decrease to that level.
China hasn't been where the cheap labor is for many years now. Cheap labor is in SEA (Mayasia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc) Bangladesh/India, Mexico, Brazil, and African nations like Nigeria.
What makes you think reindustrialization will kick in?
> By the time re-industrialisation kicks in, the US will be well placed to replace China as a source of cheap labour, once living standards decrease to that level.
That's going to take some a serious baby boom, I'm not seeing it.
Winning here, means "are able to supply power at a price, which makes their backers money without having to invest in mines and wells"
If you hold assets which embody mines and wells, you are concerned at this point you're going to have a stranded asset. Strategically, you need the market to endure and so decisions of short term pain like dropping pricing, become important so you can stop people fleeing to other forms of energy. But, if the pricing has to drop below your cost of extraction and processing, there's a limit to how far you can go. Well, that point, for some forms of energy, was reached some time ago.
I think when the Saudi Arabian government started seriously diversifying their economy, it was a pretty strong signal.
Even in my home state (Queensland, Australia: Liberal/National right wing government, backed by coal and mining interests) the commercial realities of owning coal fired power stations has reared it's head, and the state government is making market interventions to prop up coal. It also fixes pricing decisions in state to return a significant profit to the state government with that coal price backed energy supply, which I believe is not dissimilar to Ontario. (happy to be corrected) -People are voting with their feed for rooftop domestic solar and batteries, and the pricing spiral continues.
They could do what the other (Labor) states are doing and get with renewables. They just cancelled pumped hydro, wind and solar deployments on pretty thin logic, but they can't stop the private sector and the move there is pretty clear: It's just cheaper as a path to profit, to sell electricity based on renewables right now. If you don't own a giant hole in the ground of coal generation, you get your money back faster building anything else BUT coal fired power now.
Ironically "The Sunshine State".
When Labor flipped the licence plate tagline to "the smart state" in 2001 a lot of people thought it was a poor attempt at humour. Apparently the "the sunshine state" was brought back by popular acclaim, but I can't say I felt consulted or cared.
Duh? The US has a lot of easy and cheap access to fossil fuels. With Russia cut off, solar is a really easy part of the equation for a lot of countries.
Here in the US, I'd expect we wouldn't be adding much new coal or nat gas either if it weren't for all the data centers going up everywhere. The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.
> The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.
I know these things use a lot, but relative to the national usage is it a significant number? I’ve read this statement a few times but the amount is never quantified to something that makes sense. Like, how much has electricity usage increased in the last two years and can be directly attributed to data centers?
Yes. The amount of gpu power required to train a foundation model is staggering. Inference isn’t cheap either. There’s a massive boom in datacenter construction. If you remove investment in AI infrastructure and related investments is growth in 2025 would be .01%
According to this - 4% of all electricity used in the US in 2023 was used by AI data centres, predicted to go up to 7-8% in 2028. In some countries like Ireland it's already over 20% of all electricity usage.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-cen...
Bitcoin famously uses as much as a mid-sized country like the netherlands now. Wouldn't surprise me if AI use follows.
Um, the Netherlands is not a mid-sized country. Areawise its smaller than West Virginia. Population is around 17 million. (Contrasted to a world population of 8 billion ish.)
If bitcoin is using the same as 17 million people, that'd really not that much in relation to the overall population.
> Um, the Netherlands is not a mid-sized country.
The Netherlands is entry 71 in a list of countries by population, making it very 'mid' indeed. You're comparing it to the USA, which is the third most populous nation on earth, of course it's significantly smaller!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
But hey, let's look at some better figures, estimated energy use is now in the region of 200TWh - https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin...
Which puts it somewhere around an Egypt or a Malaysia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
> If bitcoin is using the same as 17 million people, that'd really not that much in relation to the overall population.
That's a value judgement and you'll notice I've been careful not to put any into my comments.
The problem with the "Olympic Pool" scale of measures is that it has no real meaning to most people.
Yes the Netherlands is "mid table" in a list of countries, but absent a good knowledge of statistics, population distribution, and geographic energy consumption, especially with relation to the Netherlands, it's a meaningless measure.
Since I had none of the above, I went to look it up. And frankly I have no idea if you actually compared Bitcoin to the Netherlands (in terms of energy consumption) or just randomly picked a country.
Let me be general. I have no idea about the Netherlands. I have no idea if you know anything about the Netherlands. That's the root of my concern with your comparison. It "sounds" like a useful comparison- but is it?
Now, had you said that Bitcoin consumes about 0.5% of global energy, and that there are just under 200 countries (meaning on average 0.5% each) then that's a measure I can absorb.
I might then point out that the US consumes 25% of the world energy supply, despite having 5% of global population, so the 0.5% of bitcoin consumption is really not moving the needle.
Once again you seem to have taken offence at a pure comparison, absent any value judgement.
That’s on you.
Nat gas, yes.
Coal is largely keeping existing plants going. I’m doubtful we’ll see anything like we saw when 50% of US power in the early 2000s was coal.
Apart from the obvious, another aspect of renewables that I hope will make the world a better place is the potential to be fucking free from oil and gas. Imagine the geopolitical impact of that. But, here’s a lesson from WW2. Unless we can pack the energy produced by renewables into tanks, jets, aircraft carriers and such effectively (cost, scale, etc.) nothing is gonna get meaningfully better there.
Its probably also going to trigger a bunch of wars in the short term.
Wars tend to happen when power dynamics change. Either someone is on the rise and thinks they can get more or someone is on the decline and can no longer hold on to what they used to have. I think the middle east is going to be a blood bath once the oil stops making bank. But its not just them, when oil goes away it changes the power dynamics across the world.
Theoretically, with enough cheap renewable energy, synthetic hydrocarbons could fuel the war machine.
It would need possibly big, vulnerable plants to refine, but so does jet fuel and diesel now.
Adding that much electrical capacity is a civilisational task, but an electrical "JP-8 at home" plant in theory is a good security asset, especially for countries with poor oil supply.
Many countries have some oil and if the civilian economy didn't drink so much -- there probably be plenty to make jet fuel, etc.
> tanks, jets, aircraft carriers
Will these still be relevant in 15 years time, given the pace at which military drones are developing?
Perhaps long-range drones/missiles will be using fossil fuel, but not nearly as much as the heavy, bulky military vehicles designed to carry personnel.
Whether they are manned or not doesn’t matter. They still need power which is mostly oil based except the smaller, short range drones. The longer range, bigger drones and missiles are jet powered
Yes, but if they're not manned they can we a lot smaller, thus no longer consuming quantities of oil that are significant on a global scale.
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I think you missed geraneum’s point. They’re saying that the military is still going to need oil even if industry decarbonizes
Any article saying China is leader in renewables gets the big doubt.
I can tell you one area in renewables that's NOT winning. Offshore. In the industry, there was some talk about how GE is pulling out of the offshore wind turbine market. Sucks to be wind farms that were built using those GE turbines.
Offshore’s doing fairly well globally, but I’m not sure how much of an export market GE has, and in the short term ol’ minihands has wrecked it in the US. Again, however, he won’t last forever.
Offshore is certainly winning in the UK and around the North Sea
And it's cheaper than coal in China and lets them put generation near the populated coast.
And linking the two the Chinese Mingyang Smart Energy just announced an up to $2 Billion investment in a wind turbine factory in the UK.
Terrible for the US, and it means that we will lose out on yet more of the new energy economy.
Also not winning:
‘World’s largest’ solar plant in Calif closing – $1.6 billion Ivanpah casts a shadow on DOE loans – ‘Federal data concluded the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year’
The 386-megawatt plant lagged in producing promised electricity levels and faced criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of its associated bird deaths. While estimates vary, some federal data concluded that the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year flying into concentrated beams of sunlight.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/02/05/worlds-largest-solar...
That is not the largest solar plant (I’m guessing the article was written by our good friends the magic robots); there’s one with almost 10x the nameplate output in China, though likely more in reality, as concentrated solar thermal plants don’t work properly. It’s the largest concentrated solar thermal plant; it’s a dead-end technology (it looked plausible in the 90s when PV tech was expected to progress far less quickly than it actually did). You might as well claim that cars are dead on the basis that Wankel engines were a failure.
Do you understand the difference between solar thermal and photovoltaic?
You missed the point.
It doesn't matter if they used Plutonium solar panels. It was over hyped and made tons of promises and then massively underdelivered and now has to be decommissioned, at a huge cost to tax payers.
The point is that it’s as relevant to a conversation about photovoltaics as hydrogen is to a conversation about EVs.
Isn't US a massive producer of renewables?
Yes, this thead is filled with propaganda.
The US is by a dramatic margin the world's #2 producer of solar.
The US is by a very dramatic margin the world's #2 producer of wind.
None of which takes anything away from China's remarkable production.
In solar the US = #3 + #4 + #5 combined.
In wind the US = #3 + #4 + #5 + #6 combined.
Presumably commenters are talking about the fact that the current US administration has taken an anti-renewables position and cut funding for renewable energy projects. With a hostile federal policy, it somewhat calls into question whether the US can sustain it's progress in renewable deployment. Personally though I think we will continue to make progress, just slower than before.
The American economy isn't (yet) dictated by federal policy. The current president wants to change that, but his conservative supporters do not.
Where renewables make economic sense, government policy and political ideology don't matter. Texas has been installing a ton of renewables.
The influence of the government is vastly overstated/overassumed.
I mean, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...
That's one project. It's a big project but I bet that the private installations that will happen in the period it would have taken to build that will be significantly more megawatts.
I'm not saying that Trump isn't cancelling things, I'm saying that the projects he can cancel aren't a significant portion of the market. Renewables don't really need government help anymore. Storage does though.
It's a growing industry around the world but Trump is trying to reverse that. The only "propaganda" is your own.
Just two days ago, what would be rhe US's largest solar project, the 6.2 GW Esmeralda, was listed as cancelled by the BLM:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-and-environ...
After many months of delay because Trump said he was going to be really hard on the permit review, it was apparently cancelled for no reason.
Previously, Trump tried to retroactively revoke permits on offshore wind projects that were mid construction, with billions spent. Even if he didn't win in court, the scheduling of ships for this is so delicate that a delay of months could scuttle the build for years as ships move on to other engagements, basically ending any profitability.
This is having a huge chilling effect on our renewables buildout as the magus shakedowns are capricious and massive increase investment risk.
Even if there is growing investment in renewables in the US, it will be a shadow of what it would be otherwise.
And with gas turbines on many year back order, Trump is locking in higher electricity prices fire to shortages because he's trying to block one of the only fast ways to bring new generation into the grid.
I had to think for a long time about why Black Lives Matters was cancelling a solar project.
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This piece would be more useful if it explained what it means by winning. Early on, it seems to define winning as the amount of taxpayer subsidies going towards it, at least in the US; but then it talks about the growth in the rest of the world without showing, at least before I stopped reading, how much of that growth is driven by tax and regulatory incentives.
Because drum roll the USAs are not the world.
Despite all the noise renewables make up 90% of new capacity in the US.
We are witnessing the complete transformation of the grid to renewables. The question is if it takes 10 years or 20 years depending on how quickly we deploy incentives to phase out existing capacity.
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2025/10/solar-and-wind...
It's true, but will that 90% hold after the expirations of the credits, etc for solar?
Renewables have been the unsubsidized cheapest energy source for a while now.
Recently unsubsidized renewables and storage started undercutting fossil fuels in major markets around the world.
This is what is so interesting with renewable energy. They are the first energy source since the advent of fossil fuels lowering the price floor of energy globally.
Removing the credits will like I said only shift the implementation period due to using tax money to tilt the scale in one way or the other.
Here's a counterpoint: https://brawlstreetjournal.substack.com/p/dead-man-walking
> According to a recent study by the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry, annual investment in the energy, industry, building, and transport sectors would have to more than double if current energy policies were to continue: from an average of around €82 billion between 2020 and 2024 to somewhere between €113 billion to €316 billion in 2035. Early transition models had projected a fraction of that.
We'll see, but I don't know what to believe anymore. In particular, Germany's deindustrialization is unmistakeable and expensive energy may be the culprit.
If you visit the German study cited you will see that only a third of those transition costs are for electricity generation and transmission networks. The remainder is spent on climate change adaptations of housing, transport and industry.
I personally believe the transition to electric vehicles will soon reach a tipping point due to reduced battery prices and won't add much cost. Costly building upgrades (insulation and heat pumps will be delayed), but renewable installation will continue strongly. It is just to cheap not to do it.
Germany has dropped from 76% of US GDP per capita in 2015 to only 61% today.
If AI turns out to be economically valuable the EU fixation on non-nuclear renewables may have turned out to be a very costly error.
> Germany has dropped from 76% of US GDP per capita in 2015 to only 61% today.
Largely because the USA added $6 trillion to their GDP via fantasy 'hedonic' and 'imputed' components.
Let me understand the AI argument you are making: Are you saying that if AI is valuable (which is likely) then not having cheap electricity is going to be downside?
I would have two objections:
- Data center operation and construction is only a fraction of the value creation. If Europe is behind on the AI race it won't matter where the data centers are because the profits are going to go to US companies (as with Google and Facebook so far).
- What makes you think that Nuclear would help in any way to have cheap energy? Nuclear has become by far the most expensive energy generation method. Building new nuclear is unfeasible in the west.
It's mainly German fixation, not EU fixation.
France is 60% nuclear
Correlation is not causation.
Germany tried to go 100% renewables and then found out it wasn't possible, then made a deal with Russia to supply what they needed to cover what renewables couldn't. Right up until Russia invaded Ukraine:
A huge increase in gas prices triggered by Russia’s move last month to sharply reduce supplies to Germany has plunged Europe’s biggest economy into its worst energy crisis since the oil price shock of 1973.
Gas importers and utilities are fighting for survival while consumer bills are going through the roof, with some warning of rising friction.
“The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German housing enterprises GdW. “Germany’s social peace is in great danger.”
https://www.ft.com/content/d0c5815f-f0a2-49ad-8772-f4b0fbbd2...
They did eventually move to get off of their reliance on Russian energy over a year later, but what they did as go back to coal and nuclear to keep the lights on after divesting from Russian energy imports:
In its race to find alternate sources of energy, the country has reopened coal-fired power plants, delayed plans to shut down its three remaining nuclear power plants, and pushed to increase capacity to store natural gas imported from other countries such as Norway and the US.
At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Lindner pointed to the speed with which a new liquefied natural gas terminal had been built in Germany - in a record of around eight months, he said. More infrastructure investments were planned, he added.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400
Pretty much all of this is wrong or misleading
The Energiewende wasn't an attempt to go 100% renewable
Germany's dependency on Russian gas goes back to the 1990s and beyond
While people were worried about the impact of sanctions on Russian gas, the actual impact was lower than expected. Consumer bills did not go through the roof, partly due to government intervention
Combined power generation share from coal compared to before Russia started a war with Ukraine is slightly down, nuclear is 0 (or a percent or two if you consider imports), gas is marginally up
You cannot trust the numbers out of China and Russia, I would be surprised if this were true when you see the actual numbers.
Beyond that, an increase in CO2 globally seems like it would be countered by an increase in plant mass taking it up?
Renewables are winning in the USA too. A few tens of billions in handouts to Trump's crony capitalist pals and general regulatory and legislative chaos (in renewables specifically but in everything else too) isn't going to change that.
Despite all the tech, the US are so incredibly backwards, in so many ways, that I'm wondering how they're not literally still burning witches.
Capitalism aligns with being green, leaving right wing narrative-driven policy in a very confused state.
American conservatives have long stopped pretending to have any policy other than bowing to their King.
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Yes, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act had tons of provisions to help out renewables in general and solar energy in particular. Most of them were in form of tax credits which I'm sure helped Texas a lot. Many of Biden's policies helped out red states quite a lot.
Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill (ugh..) has already rolled back most of those policies. Additionally DOE and EPA have announced termination of many projects, canceled previously approved funding, banned words such as "climate change", among tons of measures aimed at curbing the progress made.
You, of course, knew that and were being disingenuous.
Or you didn't know what and are simply ignorant.
Luddites can't stop progress. But they'll try to slow it down.
The luddites were 100% correct though. They saw that machines werent the problem per se, but the fact that labor wasnt getting their share anymore. And we're seeing it time and time again. Labor invents new machines and methods, and capital takes all the profit.
The real world doesn't fit into these trite categories and explanations this easily.
The featured image in the article is looks like an ecological nightmare.
https://thebulletin.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/GettyImag...
The most remarkable details about solar panels I've heard recently came from the environmentalist Bill McKibben[1] on a podcast[2]:
I was standing in a cornfield in Illinois this time last summer, with a farmer who grew corn for ethanol and was converting much of his fields to solar arrays. He said, I can grow in this acre, and he pointed to an acre in a good farmerly way, he said, in this acre, I can grow enough ethanol to run my Ford F-150 pickup, most beloved vehicle in the American iconography. It’ll run 25,000 miles off the ethanol I can grow on an acre in a year. If I cover that same acre with solar panels, then I can produce enough electrons to run my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, I can run that not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben
[2] https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/why-is-this-happening/di...
Not to mention that the cornfield has to be essentially torn down and rebuilt every year, while the panels will just sit there quietly working for at least 20 years with very little maintenance.
The figures are, if anything, an underestimate.
An acre of solar is about 350-450,000 kWh/year. An F-150 Lightning does 2 miles per kWh. So that's about right.
One acre of corn makes about 400 gallons of bioethanol. Even the newest F-150s do an atrocious 18 mpg in real usage, so you need nearly 1500 gallons to go 25,000 miles. So this figure is presumably ignoring the non-ethanol content of the fuel, which is most of it.
Bingo. Fermenting (up to) 200 bushels is also a point source for significant CO2. Though you get 1.5t of material for animal feed.
So the eqivalent solar energy is 700 000 miles… a year?
Wow, that's astounding. Thanks.
Yea, but it says more about how bad corn biofuels are than how good solar is. Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW. If you want solar, move to Mexico (or even New Mexico) where it actually makes environmental sense.
It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has people there, the costs and losses of getting energy from Mexico to Iowa may outweigh much of the advantages for quite some time.
Assuming solar isn't displaced by something else, one day we'll presumably see highly insolated areas exporting power over huge interconnects, but for now, fitting a panel basically anywhere is still better than not fitting it at all.
> Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW.
Absolutely not, Iowa is great for solar, it often provides more income than corn (and corn has massive subsidies), and is certainly better than most of Europe. Iowa really is not very far north
https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?c=44.374588,-77.81811,3
It's true that the available solar resource is smaller in Iowa than in New Mexico, but the ratio is only about 2:3. https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali...
Generating solar power in Mexico won't keep Iowans from warming their homes with natural gas and powering their F-150s with petroleum, so solar panels in Iowa are needed for the fight against AGW.
It also ignores the reason why corn biofuels exist, because we subsidize corn production for national security reasons and there's a ton of extra produced so they try and find profitable uses for it.
A regular ICE fuel system will make it 700,000 miles but the battery won’t.
I've only heard a couple of things on the topic, but there is research into multi-use of land for large scale solar with existing agriculture.
https://cleanenergycouncil.org.au/news-resources/new-guide-s...
Wow you're right, a massive coal plant would be much more ecologically friendly.
Nah, burning an entire field of panels produces less heavy metal contamination than a day of coal.
From what I’ve seen, solar panels end up being quite good for plant life since they provide partial shade from the sun. Basically a shade cloth that’s productive on its own.
And for animals. I’ve seen plenty of discussion about grazing sheep around panels. They keep the grass down and enjoy the shade.
Great for lettuce, terrible for corn and wheat. Farming is complicated. Horses for courses.
As does:
* Picture of a city
* Picture of ploughed fields (was wooded preciously)
* Picture of any other type of power generation plant
> Picture of ploughed fields
We've cleared nature for farms for so long that the fields feel like nature that should be preserved.
Not content with cutting down the forests, now even the hedgerows are in the way.
Compared to what was there before (often forest), a gigantic monocrop industrial field is about as ecologically friendly as a car park. And the car park won't dump fertiliser into the water courses either.
The industrial park also takes a tiny fraction of the amount of land as does growing food. Even better, it allows enough food to be grown on a fraction of the land. So on balance, that powerplant allows far more land to be returned to a natural state. Ironic but true. Its why we shouldn't allow the scientifically illiterate to make decisions about this type of thing.
Can full scale solar make a dent in the land available in any country for food? And how does it compare to urban sprawl? (Although suburbs may have the benefit of solar on the roof powering the house below pretty well).
Another option is of course put the solar where you cant for whatever reason grow food. Hopefully there is enough shitty land to so that.
In any country? Yes. For example, Luxembourg (1200km² of farmland, 677,000 people).
In most countries: not really. And not to the extent that meat farming does, which is land-use broadly considered to be acceptable. One cow needs from under 1 to to 8 acres depending on how good the land is, and grazed land is roughly double cropland in the US. One cow produces roughly 10 people's beef intake in the US. Not to mention much of the cropland is already used for biofuel: diverting 60 million acres of arable land for energy is already a thing the US does. That 60 million acres of solar could produce 5 times current US electrical consumption.
One acre of solar makes roughly 30 US households (not people) of energy. Say 5-10 if you also need to cover current fossil fuel heating and transport. And obviously the energy mix won't be 100% solar.
So, on the face of it, it doesn't seem that solar power is an especially inefficient or wasteful use of land in most cases compared to other uses generally considered reasonable. And it also doesn't (further) damage land like intensive farming does. Whereas clearing natural land for solar could be more damaging.
Solar on roofs is not great in terms of coverage and is inefficient in terms of operational costs. Yes, the land was already used, so it's better then nothing and you can probably more or less recoup the house, so it's economical for the people who live there and the more the better. But you will still need to power denser housing and increasingly-electrified industry and transport.
Urban sprawl in the US is big, but still the US is only 3% urban. Even the UK, which is much denser is 8%. Farmland is far and away the biggest land user in most places.
especially this one : https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:834/format:webp/1*A7cL...
- https://medium.com/appalachian-studies-fall-2017-projects/mo... - https://e360.yale.edu/features/a-troubling-look-at-the-human...
On the one hand, there are some benefits to the ground cover that aren't possible in wide open plains.
On the other, a bad hailstorm means a lot of glass and scraps to pick up.
Panels can endure hail as well as cars and roofs, so we’re talking catastrophic hail; where we’ve seen economic losses as bad as tornadoes.
So, I’d worry about wind wrecking and broadly casting those slivers.
Rather than pick them up, maybe consider further crushing them into the ground. While that’s not good for farmland, the area under the plume of a coal plant is already broadly contaminated.