YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Whenever there is a discussion about nuclear I always remember this XKCD https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png

> Global solar capacity increased by 510 GW to 2,383 GW, up 27% year on year, while wind added a record 159 GW to reach 1,291 GW, an increase of 14%. By comparison, installed nuclear capacity rose by just 1.5 GW to 399.5 GW, while operating nuclear capacity declined by 0.5 GW to 368.6 GW.

> More recent data from IEA PVPS indicate that global PV additions reached around 690 GW in 2025, about 180 GW more than the figure used by WNISR. This suggests the gap between solar and nuclear capacity – and their respective growth rates – was even wider than indicated in the report.

> The report identifies falling battery costs as a potential enabler of continued PV expansion, particularly as grids contend with growing volumes of variable renewable generation and periods of low or negative electricity prices. Grid-scale battery deployment accelerated sharply in 2025, with 104 GW and 257 GWh connected during the year. More than 78% of cumulative battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity was installed between 2023 and 2025.

https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

Even though solar power has been a significant part of the energy conversation for decades, the majority of solar growth is very recent. Nuclear power generated 2762 TWh in 2021, when solar generated 1054 TWh. Solar power generated 2779 TWh in 2025.

And no, there will be better solutions for base load as well. Battery storage, for example. Sure, it’s a transformation, but those who refuse to think for the future can see the consequences of stubbornness and backward-looking attitudes today.

What a time to be alive.

The one thing I really wish people would take away from thinking about energy / grid composition and so on is that its a portfolio construction problem.

If you ever, ever, see anyone banging on about how expensive or cheap a particularly type of generation is please just write them off as either an idiot or a liar - what matters is the cost of constructing a portfolio of electricity production that meets the requirements of a nation e.g. running an industrial economy solely off solar power is probably impossible but it seems realistic to imagine a "modern" (politics aside) economy that runs off sending emails on a mixture of solar power and storage.

There is very little actionable information here. Nuclear is still worth building, in countries that don't overregulate it (China is doing it, even while they export the solar panels that everybody is buying). Solar is hitting pretty steep marginal returns on the value of generated watt, because it's all running at the same time and not necessarily when energy is most needed. We still haven't solved cheap battery storage. etc.

So e.g. a few months ago in July because it's Summer in the North, solar production peaked significantly higher than the less fluctuating Nuclear but come January it may well produce less globally than Nuclear.

The cited publication is based on Ember's data, which was published in this case a few months ago. It doesn't cite anybody else, so if you're interested in the data and its sources you should look at Ember themselves. This particular publisher (pv magazine) cares about solar specifically, but the nuclear industry publication actually also talks about wind.

Globally wind is much less seasonal (not entirely non-seasonal, but much less so) and it's also generally only sane to build wind farms where there's plenty of wind because they're relatively expensive whereas solar panels are cheap. As a result there's a smaller fluctuation maybe 5:4 between the windy and less windy seasons. However wind power is also growing much more slowly than solar.

You can wake up tomorrow, buy some panels and stick them on a roof, buy an inverter and next week you have solar electricity. Good luck going from "I want a wind turbine" to owning a working wind turbine in anywhere close to that time, even in the unlikely case that you own a hilltop or somewhere to put such a thing.

We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.