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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Antipope predicting the imminent demise of coal as an electricity source is a bit premature. Solar panels are a tiny fraction of global energy supply and will remain so. The scale of energy provided by fossil fuels is enormous. This article has a lot of good graphs and charts. Nuclear power is the only thing that's going to make a dent in coal and natural gas usage.

https://bestpracticeenergy.com/2020/08/26/energy101-electric...

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Actually what struck me from your link is how fast renewables are growing.

Your linked article refers to the US only, but from that article, wind was 7% of power generation and solar was 2% in 2019.

By comparison, in the first six months of 2022 the equivalent number for wind is 11.5% and for solar is 5%: https://electrek.co/2022/08/25/us-renewables-first-half-2022...

So wind+solar have gone from 9% to 16.5% of US electricity production in 2.5 years? That is a fairly remarkable growth rate, assuming I am not misinterpreting the data somehow.

The change will happen slowly, and then very quickly.

Look to Australia where renewables are being installed at very high rates.

There are many areas where they are dominating the power mix for large portions of the day.

Renewables produce more energy than nuclear and are at the point where new renewable generation is 20-30% of the nuclear fleet per year.

As one of many reasons nuclear won't help much. There's not enough uranium to replace coal and fossil fuel gas.

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