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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU

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From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy.

Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.

That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.

Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing

The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost.

It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.

Then you store that energy or find a way to use it. Melt ore when its abundant, then make metal when it is abundant, then dig holes when it is abundant, then use the metal to turn the hole into a reservoir when it is abundant and eventually use the reservoir to pump in and out water as a way to store the abundant energy for use when its not.

We’re working on it!

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/09/10/new-alliance-aims-to-unl...

All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.

Not saying we should continue using fossil fuels forever, but being unrealistic about how hard the transition to intermittent renewables will be isn't sensible

Having more generation capacity also makes renewables less intermittent though, becuase for example with enough solar capacity then even on a cloudy day they may produce enough energy to cover demand.

It doesn't solve the problem completely, but it surely helps.

> All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.

There’s quite a bit of complexity leading to the “simply storing in a tank” step.

On the other hand, the additional solar capacity during overcast days might still be worth the additional investment.

Electricity might become free on sunny days, but you'll still have to pay serious money for it during cloudy windless days. Even a solar panel operating at 10% capacity becomes worth the effort.

It's a little easier to read if you translate different types of production to CO2 per kWh:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.

Using more energy is not itself "wasteful". For example, the US spends a bunch of extra energy on air conditioning, and as a result less older people die of heat deaths in the summer compared to Europe (and of course the population at large is generally more comfortable).

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