Hacker News Reader

Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Right. According to https://eandt.theiet.org/2024/12/20/predictions-2025-road-de...:

> According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), 2025 will see renewables surpass coal to become the largest source of electricity generation. It also predicts that the next five years will see almost 3,700GW of new renewable capacity come online.

Looks like we got a good strategy. 3,700GW or 3.7TW versus the over 110,000TW provided by fossil fuels. Right on there...0.003% replacement in 5 years. Seems like a quick response to the climate crisis. /sarcasm.

View on HN

You're comparing TW vs TWh, according to Our World in Data, the global fossil fuel production in 2023 was 140231TWh vs 8988TWh for renewables.

- https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

- https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

Where does 110PW come from? Wikipedia quotes global energy production at 19.6TW which makes 3.7TW in five years not too bad?

110PW is about the total amount of sunlight striking the Earth.

Please provide a source for 110E3 TW for all fossil fuels, the US electrical grid time averages over a year about 0.4 TW in generation [0]. Did you actually mean TWh over a year, comparing instantaneous generation with annual production? was such a choice deliberate or accidental?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

Accidental. I made a mistake.

One thing I love is the continuing comparison to coal, even though coal is being phased out mostly from the expansion of natural gas, not the expansion of renewables. (keyword: mostly). Natural gas has risen to almost half our energy.

This is still a very good thing in terms of CO2 and air pollution. One can hope that renewables continue to expand at an exponential rate, eventually offsetting natural gas.

Right; natural gas in the US has gotten cheap. This has been a progressive trend (with some pauses) since natural gas was deregulated under Carter. The nuclear renaissance here in the US was knifed in the cradle because of natural gas prices becoming so low after a misleading burp upwards.

Technology adoption usually follows an s-curve.

/earnestness

Reply on news.ycombinator.com