Solar Overtakes Coal in EU | Hacker News Reader

Solar Overtakes Coal in EU

semafor.com

18 pointsbelter16 comments

~60-65GW of new EU solar capacity being added per year. Look at trajectories and their rate of change. Poland went from 0% to 9% of energy sourced from solar in ~5 years (2019-2024).

That's around 150 watts per person. 24 hour average 40 watts. And likely a similar amount of wind.

I use a guesstimate that an developed economy needs around 1000W per capita. So at 80W per year you hit that in 12 years. Probably faster since the rate of increase is accelerating.

This transition is happening now because its cheaper, much cheaper. Solar gets down to about $50 for a MWh whereas Gas is at more like $200. Wind is a little cheaper initially at ~$40MWh but it has higher ongoing maintenance costs and tends to come out roughly equivalent to Solar although its widely expected Solar is going to drop further still.

Batteries are still relatively expensive, in the region of $80 for a storage MWh although pumped hydro is quite a bit better than that. Still what is going to happen is in the next few years on the sunniest days and the windiest days power is going to be free or even at the point where you get paid for using it. Whole businesses are going to be based on storing this power for the long term and using it.

Unlike with Gas/Coal etc where we choose the output with renewables we need to control the consumption more, that means more storage but it also means systems that align power consumption with when its cheap. Some people are already doing this in their homes and charging batteries when the grid provides cheap power but my hope is that businesses will pop up to use that power to capture and store CO2. There is absolutely money to be made in this market and software for building smart systems in homes and across countries that balance these systems.

When it overtakes coal+oil+gas then it will finally be in the middle of the way toward net zero. Which won't be a complete solution neither. But in any case, it is a process going in the right direction.

Why would you compare only solar to all forms of fossil fuels combined? Surely the proper comparison includes all renewables. Solar+wind+hydro+bio combined for 47% of the EU's electricity generation, fossil fuels for less than 30%. (And the rest is nuclear).

The actual gap is in energy used for heating or transportaion directly, not in the electricity generation.

Sad that USA will compensate for all CO2 not emitted. Drill, Baby, Drill.

We've reached the point where adding new wind and solar generation is cheaper than adding new coal/gas generation. American utility companies aren't adding more wind and solar generation to be green; they're doing it because it's cheaper. They just got a positive PR spin for being green.

And yet solar parks must be remotely turned off mid day in summer by a grid operator in Germany to stabilize grid. It’s 8 PM here in Germany, already dark and gas with coal were used to generate 39% today’s electricity. Maybe it’s power accumulation capacity what’s needed and not more renewables.

If optimizing for CO2 reduction, the key metric is marginal cost per unit of low-emissions electricity. If battery storage charged by clean energy has a lifetime cost per megawatt hour of $150 while solar PV has a lifetime cost of $50 per megawatt hour, it's more cost effective to keep building (and curtailing) solar until more than 2/3 of annual solar generation needs to be discarded.

Storage gets more economically feasible when power input gets cheaper, too. If you've got a bunch of solar power that you have to shut off in the middle of the day, it doesn't really matter if that pumped-hydro storage option only gives you about 75% of your energy back, that's 75% that you would've thrown away anyway.

That's assuming you live in a place with abundance of water to use for energy storage. I live in a very dry place and this is a serious issue, government keeps burning diesel and shutting down both solar parks and residential PV during daytime in winter because it's sunny and not very cold.

Everywhere in Europe needs more batteries except France [1] (which is already hitting 95% low carbon for electrical generation with nuclear and renewables; their interconnectors are already at capacity and unlikely the add capacity within the next five years). Spain and Portugal already have mostly low carbon grids (as well as the UK powered primarily with wind), but grids get dirtier as you go east [2].

I am somewhat stumped why Europe has not fast tracked battery production, as China did, and the US did late with the Inflation Reduction Act. Something to solve for if you don't want to be beholden to China or US battery supply chains and availability.

[1] France’s 2024 Power Grid Was 95% Fossil Free as Nuclear, Renewables Jumped - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-20/france-s-... | https://archive.today/Spmqf - Jan 2025

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly

I don't think Nordics will be needing much batteries, Norway and Sweden have so much hydropower that can absorb fluctuations in the power production and usage. But there still will be a lot installed alongside new renewable sites, you can use them to optimize the grid connections.

These aren't alternatives, we can do both.

Do you have a viable idea for widespread power accumulation capacity? Grid batteries or pumped water?

Pumped water is nice, but it would be a large infrastructure project. Current government system is mostly not very good at large infrastructure projects. So more feasible alternative is batteries. Preferably European made redox flow batteries.

Cool that there's a "no peeing" area in this pool...

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