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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

I’m not “in the know” but here is a fun chart showing 2023 solar PV adoption compared to past IEA predictions. You can decide which function class you want to assign it to. (I did not make this, see subsequent post in that thread for credit and sources.) https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507

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Fun fact: we’re deploying, on average, ~1.13GW of solar every day globally and that rate is accelerating. China installed more wind power this year than total UK generation capacity, and more solar than total US solar generation. If you’re not paying attention, this transition will rocket past you.

I think the limit to how much solar, wind, and batteries can be deployed is mostly marginal economics. Like how much money is available to pay for it. It's increasing rapidly because it's the cheapest source of energy in most places now.

That chart is so funny. What will it take for the IEA to consider changing their prediction model?

There's an "world energy outlook" once a year, here's the one from 2023: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023

Haven't yet found the relevant chart, but since the one in the image ends with WEO 2018: They probably already have.

At least as of 2022 they had not: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-evans-53091614_solar-ac...

The followup post (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-...) explains that this IEA outlook is not really supposed to be a forecast, it's an explanation of what would happen if all current government policies remained the same. It intentionally does not take into account proposed or predicted future policy changes.

Some of this is still driven by government policy (definitely required to kick start things), but at this stage economic drivers are the dominant force affecting adoption.

At this point you have to assume they're being malicious....

They’re not being malicious, people just like misrepresenting what that data represents because hur hur look at the dumb green hippies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38668665

The point of my posting the chart was not to crap on the IEA but to just to show how meteoric recent progress has been. I have to be honest, however, that the "defense" you cite is not very strong. It's basically an admission that the model was obviously bad pre-2020 and had to be repaired.

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