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Comment by runlevel1 | Hacker News Reader

Renewables are growing, but not at the rate people often assume. Natural gas is by far the fastest growing energy source in the US by total output.

Here's a chart of net energy generation in the US by source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/

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That was true for the first 15 or so years of this century, it's no longer true as Wind and Solar have caught up and have been neck and neck in added output.

The last couple of years are noisy (gas actually went down and coal bounced back up one year) but the long term trend is for wind and solar to continue to extend their lead.

edit: to be clear, because this is a little ambigous

> Natural gas is by far the fastest growing energy source in the US by total output.

Gas is still the biggest energy source for electricity in the US by far, but it's not the fastest growing by far. Definitely not in percentage terms but also recently, not in absolute change either.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

Even so, replacing fission reactors (negligible air pollution) with a mix of wind, solar, and natural gas will still probably increase air pollution. Of course, there are arguments that this is an acceptable tradeoff for cost or safety reasons.

From the data you cited, between 2020 and 2022, in terms of thousand megawatthours per year:

Natural gas increased 62,675 from 1,626,790 to 1,689,465.

Wind increased 96,874 from 337,938 to 434,812.

Utility-scale Solar increased 56,399 from 89,199 to 145,598

And the deployment of solar seems to be rapidly picking up speed.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

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