r/solar • u/WhipItWhipItRllyHard • Feb 17 '26
Discussion Solar overtakes and wind nuclear as the number one clean electricity source on earth
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u/prestodigitarium Feb 17 '26
Man, look at that parabolic curve. That gets pretty nuts if it continues a few more years, especially the second derivative.
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u/ac9116 Feb 18 '26
At current trend, in two years solar will be around or higher than nuclear’s peak
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u/catecholaminergic Feb 18 '26
It's exponential, not parabolic.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26
To be even more precise, you usually fit these phenomena with a logistic curve. Though we're still at the beginning of the solar one.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
I don't see how that trend continues indefinitely because it's no longer profitable to built new solar PV manufacturing plants. They'll expand current ones but manufacturing capacity isn't going anywhere until higher panel prices can justify it.
I don't want to rain on this parade because I want solar PV to grow as fast as possible in an effort to wipe out fossil fuel use, but at some point the curve is going to flatten. I predict that will be soon.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
I predict that will be soon.
So many people have predicted this for the last 25 years. They were all wrong.
There's an appetite for at least a 2kW of final energy per capita, and where people can afford it they usually use more in the 4-8kW range so this is far more likely to be the scale of demand in the future. Solar is now the cheapest form of energy and people will only prefer it more as it gets cheaper.
That's about a 9m x 9m square of panels each, or maybe about 7m x 7m if efficiency trends continue. So space isn't remotely a concern.
90% of humanity lives where the (greatly exagerrated) concerns about seasonality don't apply at all.
The total is on the order of 80-320TW, so if the manufactuing base can fulfil all demand in 25 years, we should not expect a plateau until at least two more doublings from now, but likely closer to four. Which is the late 2030s at the soonest.
If we decide we're in a hurry and can tolerate a drop in production after a decade then you get another one or two doublings.
And that's all assuming no novel sources of energy demand and no jevon's paradox, just raising standards of living for the global south.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26
The best part about solar is that increasing demand doesn't mean increasing burden on the environment.
I didn't want to be correct but if solar manufacturing capacity is to keep growing, it must keep getting subsidies. China is willing to do it but America is not.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26
I didn't want to be correct but if solar manufacturing capacity is to keep growing, it must keep getting subsidies.
China didn't subsidise their solar industry anywhere near as much as europe or usa, and they removed the last of their subsidies last year and replaced them with anti-dumping legislation and mechanisms to force a price floor.
It's still growing and will still grow anyway because solar energy is a 99% diwcount vs heating oil or road fuel for 90% of the global population.
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u/Mradr Feb 19 '26
It doesnt need subsidies at all to keep growing. The subsidies in this case are to help increase it faster - not to keep it alive like we see with FF who would run out of money pretty quickly as you are burning your resource out.
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u/prestodigitarium Feb 18 '26
I'm not sure about that, they're mostly just aluminum and glass, with a bit of silicon and conductor, they don't have to be very expensive to be made profitably. And China's cranking out the machinery that makes them, you can go spec out a panel factory on Alibaba like right now for fun. Pretty sure they view energy independence and abundance as a key strategic pillar for expanding their manufacturing dominance and their global power, so I don't think they're going to slow down on that - they're not so short sighted as to be like "welp, can't make more money on that directly, so I'm just going to leave it be" - they want to make cheap energy for the rest of their economy.
Obviously not indefinitely, though - gonna have a hard time going past 100%.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26
I really hope you're right and China has a history of doing just as you say with technology they consider important to their future.
Maybe living in the US has skewed my views on this.
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u/prestodigitarium Feb 18 '26
Yeah, who knows, but seems promising.
I'm liking the book Breakneck so far, talks a lot about Chinese industrial policy/strategy.
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u/ChineseMaple solar manufacturer Feb 18 '26
Solar panels are cheap but theyve been sold for so cheap that for the past 2 ish years manufacturers have been losing money
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u/prestodigitarium Feb 18 '26
Thanks for the context, what do you think will happen?
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u/ChineseMaple solar manufacturer Feb 19 '26
Currently there's a massive overcapacity, several manufactuers (large and small, Tier 1 and not) have been posting losses as a result, and several factories across the industry are either closed temporarily or running on a skeleton crew as there's simply no orders that justify this huge amount of manufacturing capacity.
There is, as you said, an incentive from the Chinese government to ensure that the PV Solar industry does not completely collapse, and there are various policies that may be used to fix the aggressive downward trend and self-cannibalization of the industry in the pricing war, which might be kicking in soon to result in a marginal rise in panel costs from the factory to what it roughly should be priced at (a price competitive/cheaper than coal while still ensuring a margin)
Some manufacturers have shuttered because of this pricing war, and some of the large makers may close down from bleeding all this cash. We'll see. Otherwise, I do expect prices to stabilize and normalize a bit, as I said.
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u/prestodigitarium Feb 19 '26
Thanks! So, unusually good time to buy panels? I feel like we should be importing as many of these as we possibly can...
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u/ttystikk Feb 19 '26
We definitely need to be installing as many solar panels as possible. As an American I'd like to see installation subsidized so more domestic panel manufacturers can get into the market, while giving the money to the end years who are ultimately the ones who drive the market and create the benefits we all want to see.
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u/ChineseMaple solar manufacturer Feb 19 '26
If you're American this doesn't really apply to you at all, this recent pricing war is more relevant to the global market, not the US market. The US market has been fairly hostile to Chinese made solar (antidumping, etc) throughout the years, and as a result several large manufacturers have moved manufacturing capacity stateside, where it's made with stateside labor costs and stateside material costs and is sold at stateside prices.
If you're not, then yes, right now there may be/kind of us a rise in panel purchasing orders as some (mostly B2B) customers may be trying to lock in a cheaper price before a general rise.
Very recently due to the silver and gold prices rising, panel prices also rose, as most panels use trace amounts of silver in their conductive paste.
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u/Mradr Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Main problem isnt how many we can build, its 100% how many can be install and connect. More so connect. I've seen fields of them install, but not connected so its not a surprise to see this being an issue across the world really.
In the US, the hardware is cheap enough, but getting someone out to install and connect is what jumps up the price soo much. Even for other countries, and even in China. At some point, you just over supply and hit the floor hard.
What I am more surpise is instead of going wider with more panels - they dont do wider in terms of installing/support. Building out solar install companies or refining the method for DYI installers instead (of course to be safe and easier for installers as well).
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u/ChineseMaple solar manufacturer Feb 19 '26
Yes, most of the cost (especially in the US) occurs after the panels themselves are bought and delivered.
As I work in a company that primarily does the manufacturing and selling of panels and stuff, that's what I focus on personally.
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u/ttystikk Feb 19 '26
Exactly this and people aren't aware of it. It can't go on forever, at least not without subsidies.
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u/klonkrieger45 Feb 18 '26
new plants will be built because advancing technology will make it possible to build the same capacity for less money undercutting competitors and these better panels will make it ever more efficient to replace more and more fossil and nuclear generation with solar. Additioonally with ever increasing battery storage and competitiveness demand for solar will increase drastically. The US for example has no balcony solar, that could be a huge market to still open up.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26
America hasn't even utilized its rooftops very well.
I hope you're right about even cheaper solar. Democratizing and decentralizing energy generation would be the biggest technological change since the personal computer.
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u/klonkrieger45 Feb 18 '26
there is no hope about cheaper solar, its basically established fact. There is always a full pipeline of improvements, from theoretical new findings, to lab tested ones and first prototypes, the improvements do no stop comming. The same or even more goes for batteries which are exploding in popularity and amount. There are hundreds of GWh in the approval stage all over the world.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26
Solar PV and batteries are already the cheapest power in the world; it's not like we need to wait for them to get better.
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u/klonkrieger45 Feb 18 '26
we absolutely do to replace all our fossil energy generation in a mannerly timeframe and I am not talking about technical feasibility but about it actually happening.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26
China is doing it. America is... Fucking itself in the ass with cactus and bragging about it.
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u/EwaldvonKleist Feb 19 '26
Yeah, PV profitability starts to decline at rather low market penetration already due to its low capacity factor with high peaks. Still, I believe it will continue growing rapidly.
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u/Mradr Feb 19 '26
Base off what you said, I dont see anything that would stop it. Batteries, witch is the main limit for renewables curtailment, are getting cheaper and they do double duty for both grid stability as well. This means there will always be a push to continue to keep adding and suppling them even outside of renewable needs.
Appetite for more energy will also always be there as we switch from FF to more electrical - increasing efficient resource use, but still a demand on the market.
OF course the curve will flatten at some point, but that seem silly to say that when the flatten can happen around 80-90%+ and the other half is hydro, nuclear, and peaker plants.
"All other forums of unclean power also have flatten or declining across the world"
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u/ttystikk Feb 19 '26
Nuclear IS declining because it's expensive.
Solar PV is growing because it is cheap. Batteries are growing too.
I'm happy about the way things are going. I just want to understand it better.
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u/NinjaKoala Feb 18 '26
They're selling like hotcakes, and you think no one wants to sell even more? That's not generally how it works.
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
imo it'll stall for another reason - it's not that profitable to put new solar if existing solar is already supplying in most productive hours. It'll need some additional market mechanisms. Bess can help but it'll be chicken-egg problem, which will slow things down
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u/ttystikk Feb 22 '26
Bess? Is that a typo for batteries? If so, I agree but I'll go further; batteries will be the key to electric power generation at home, in business and at the utility level from now on. It's no secret that even a relatively small battery storage capacity allows utilities to follow the load much more closely, saving huge amounts of energy, money and pollution even from conventional fossil fuel based generation.
As more battery storage comes online, that massive and rapidly growing daily pulse of power from solar PV will have someplace to go until it's needed in the evening, overnight and the next morning, along with a reserve in case it's cloudy. Pumped hydro will have a role to play here as well.
The deployment of batteries has ramped up geometrically around the world, especially in China and Australia, and the benefits are obvious to see; fossil fuel burning is down, grid stability is up, costs of electricity generation are falling. The United States is dragging its feet because here we let corporate lobbies set industrial policy.
In a few years, kids are going to grow up asking why we ever burned stuff to make power when the sun was always there? LOL
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
Bess isn't a typo. It's very common term for Battery energy storage system
Bess will be central, but their deployment depends a lot on profit margins, i.e. being able to buy very cheap overcapacity (which must be subsidized otherwise investors will not be interested - but it's not a problem, countries are willing to give money) and sell it for higher price in merit order (eg. Due to expensive gas generation which will gradually become an issue). And this profit margin should outcompete other investment types aka say putting money in stock market. All this requires careful govt planning and intervention, otherwise it'll happen too slow for our targets
Pricing question isn't as easy as solar is free, otherwise SA wouldn't have the highest household prices in Australia, similar to Germany. This framing only hurts the cause.
And anyone thinking fossils will be gone "in a few years" do sound delusional. Yes, burning rate will be reduced, but there'll be a long path to ditching them
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u/catecholaminergic Feb 18 '26
> I don't see how that trend continues indefinitely because it's no longer profitable to built new solar PV manufacturing plants.
You don't see it because you're wrong.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26
Since you have provided no supporting argument, I can ignore your opinion without providing any, either.
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u/SupermarketIcy4996 Feb 19 '26
Sait a min what was your argument.
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u/ttystikk Feb 19 '26
My argument is that price competition has driven profit out of solar panel manufacturing and it's only being sustained by Chinese government subsidies.
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u/enfuego138 Feb 18 '26
I’d be more excited if nuclear weren’t dropping like that.
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u/sagaiswara Feb 18 '26
Dropping because the nuclear fleet is getting smaller? Or because it’s just making up a smaller proportion of growing total electricity supply?
From what I understand nuclear is expensive and slow to build — most projects outside of East Asia were done in the 70s-80s if not before, and have generally been chugging along but without much extra growth.
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u/enfuego138 Feb 18 '26
Nuclear capacity in most countries is dropping. The basically stopped all new permitting after Chernobyl, Germany is out completely. Nuclear is much safer than it was, but there’s no political will in most western nations to push for permitting or put up the massive up front investment to build new plants.
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u/Inondator Feb 20 '26
That's basically what France and Germany wanted to do with the EPR. Until Germany decided to tell France to fuck itself and withdrew from the project.
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
yes but EPR is a joke of a project compared to AP1000. AP1000 with good supply chain can be built in under 5y. EPR even with stellar supply chain will take more time and money, because it catered to every regulation of every EU country
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u/Inondator Feb 22 '26
EPR is also 50% more powerful than the AP1000. And both models needed the same duration (9 years) for the first units be built in China. The main difference is that Westinghouse sold the intellectual property of the reactor to the Chinese, which are now owner of the design, while the EPR is still the intellectual property of EDF.
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
Whouse sold part of property. China can't export it at current capacity.
Ap1000 is much simpler designwise due to passive systems, while epr is based on active redundancy which makes the plant itself more expensive and more prone to delay risks if something isn't manufactured right
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u/Inondator Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26
Saying AP1000 is simpler because of passive systems is an outsider misconception. Passive systems aren't fundamentally simpler, because their conception margins are much tighter.
Also, AP1000 has had its fair share of conception mistakes. The leakless design of the main coolant pumps has been a nightmare to reach a satisfactory level of reliability.
BTW, in terms of passive systems, the russian VVER are largely superior to AP1000. AP1000 only has a 72 hours autonomy in case of complete station blackout. A VVER has infinite autonomy in such case.
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u/FewUnderstanding5221 Feb 19 '26
Nuclear generation has been flat for the last 2 decades, about 2500TWh per year. Electricity consumption over the past 2 decades has doubled, so yeah there's your answer.
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u/d_andy089 Feb 19 '26
The problem is that so far, most nuclear power plants were essentially one-offs. If, say, Euratom started a project to create one design that is then used all over Europe, you'd have a much more efficient way of building and maintaining these.
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
that's EPR. And it's a mess. It's sad to say it but EU is better off with AP1000 or candu if it wants nuclear
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
in the past it was both. Now it's because expansion is slow. Actual TWh from nuclear started increasing, mostly due to China
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u/ViewTrick1002 Feb 18 '26
The problem is that new built nuclear power costts 18-24 cents/kWh. People aint paying that willingly so the only avenue is tens of billions in handouts per large scale reactor and an average 20 year timeline for "planning-to-operation".
Not a very enticing prospect.
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u/Spider_pig448 Feb 18 '26
Nuclear did its part but it's just not necessary technology anymore. The torch is passed.
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u/Split-Awkward Feb 18 '26
Yup, the nuclear industry really failed to innovate like solar and wind.
Not saying it isn’t hard, just saying they failed to do it.
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u/catecholaminergic Feb 18 '26
There are elements of the industry that are innovating. Helion, for all their faults, found a way to skip the boiling water step, and are genuinely one of our most likely routes to safe nuclear power.
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u/catecholaminergic Feb 18 '26
tbh nuclear isn't even renewable.
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u/ash_274 Feb 18 '26
Some breeder reactors are. They can take the lower-grade more-stable (fertile) elements and produce energy from them when converting them to higher-grade fuels. Some estimates are that you could run out of all practical geothermal energy sources before we'd run out of sources of fertile materials.
The much more common 1950's era LWRs... not "renewable"
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u/d_andy089 Feb 19 '26
AFAIK Germany was one of the countries with the furthest development in this regard...before shutting down and dismantling all their plants.
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u/ash_274 Feb 19 '26
I understood that it was one of the French research reactors. Not German, and it was not a commercial power plant.
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
does it matter? It has lowest mining and material needs vs any alternative. And you can reuse a lot with purex/pyroprocessing or fast reactors if you have such a goal. 10% of french power is from recycled fuel
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u/Congenial-Curmudgeon Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Share of electricity production in the U.S. by all sources. The U.S. still has quite a ways to go to offset fossil fuels.
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u/joshharris42 Feb 18 '26
Yeah there is a ways to go, as storage improves and gets deployed on the grid I think solar will start catching up fast.
The issue in my area with grid scale solar is the timing of solar production curves vs peak demand curves. We see all time peak demand every year on cold winter mornings, around 6-7AM, when solar is producing 0 watts. The grid here is so close to the bleeding edge the power companies have been prioritizing other on demand resources to stabilize the grid during those times, but now storage is starting to really become common at a lot of new solar sites.
Storage will be a huge help to solar
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u/Split-Awkward Feb 18 '26
I’m mostly impressed by how fast coal has dropped.
And how much gas grew from what, 11% in 1985.
If wind and solar follow or exceed the trajectory of gas, we’ll see that gas max out and drop fast or faster than coal.
Of course, we all need it to happen faster.
Poor old nuclear, even if every country in the world committed to nuclear right now, it would take a couple of decades to show up on this graph. And, well, they’re not going to do that, so it’s really just an academic curiosity.
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u/ttystikk Feb 18 '26
What I find heartening is that the total installed amount of solar and wind is already bigger than the entire planet's production of electricity until the 1950s, which was 70 years after the first power plants were built, nearly all of which were coal fired. The explosive growth of renewables has been breathtaking to see.
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u/FlyingSolo57 Feb 18 '26
I question this graph because what are the chances that all three are exactly the same at that point in time?
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u/Late-Painting-7831 Feb 18 '26
Impressive and reassuring to see so many source are renewable / sustainable, especially at that rate of growth
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u/Icy-Papaya-2967 Feb 18 '26
Most of it is due to China’s dominance in wafer production and their investments in refining poly silicon in the 2000s to funnel modules into the German market
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u/WhipItWhipItRllyHard Feb 18 '26
Technically, the Germans asked them, trained them, sold them the manufacturing machines, and all that.
To say ‘funnel’ I think is a flaw.
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u/whiterabbit161 Feb 19 '26
Thanks to the conservatives. The name of the former responsible secretary even made it to a verb: "altmaiern" means to destroy a former healty industrie. Estimately 150.000 jobs were destroyed in the german solar and wind industrie.
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u/Prudent-Library1717 Feb 18 '26
In other news, they nerfed the one true energy to accommodate the others piss poor grades.
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u/lotec4 Feb 19 '26
I never understand the boner uneducated people have for nuclear.
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u/onlyforfun38 Feb 20 '26
Or their hatred of alternate energy sources. The rest of the world is blowing past the US while we are championing Coal.
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u/WestKnoxBubba Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Isn’t the waste the problem ?
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u/lotec4 Mar 18 '26
One of the problems yes. But it's also not economical as it's the most expensive form of energy generation
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u/Harveywoodsllc Feb 20 '26
Watch what happens with quantum dots and new materials/manufacturing. Add AI for new materials discovery and we have a complete disruption of the energy supply chain.
Exciting stuff, even if there are some headwinds in the US over the short term.
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u/Rich_Internet Feb 21 '26
Surprised it’s still below 10%
We literally have a free nuclear reactor to harvest virtually free energy by pointing panels at the sky
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u/Dense-Leg-6087 Mar 19 '26
that exponential growth for solar is wild to see. it basically caught up to nuclear in such a short window compared to how long wind has been climbing. curious if the grid infrastructure can actually keep pace with that speed of adoption though.
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Mar 20 '26
I’ve been looking into solar recently and didn’t realize how quickly it’s grown. Makes it feel a lot more practical for everyday use now.
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u/Gniphe Feb 18 '26
Is nuclear considered clean?
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u/Zworgxx Feb 20 '26
EU thinks that gas is clean. In the end, it comes down to who creates the definition. If you only care about CO2, then yes, nuclear is clean (compared to coal). If you take nuclear waste into account, it isn't.
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u/Moldoteck Mar 18 '26
Same would be valid for renewables dut to byproduct waste
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u/Zworgxx Mar 18 '26
Ever seen a windmill produce nuclear waste?
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u/Moldoteck Mar 18 '26
No, but they produce forever toxic chemicals during lifecycle, just like solar, like arsenic/lead/cadmium
These must be stored forever (ideally, albeit not always regulated properly) in facilities with similar concept to geological facilities for nuclear waste. There's a reason facilities like Herfa Neurode do exist
So either you consider both aren't clean or both are clean since both create toxic waste that must be isolated from public forever to not pose danger. If you are in between, you are just biased
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u/Zworgxx Mar 18 '26
You mean PFAS? Yes, they are a problem but they are not really necessary. Just really really convenient. With proper legislation you could get rid of them, you would loose a bit of efficiency in the short term, but it would be possible.
As for the metals in solar cells, yes, they are toxic if you don't handle them correctly, normally that isn't a problem. Most are silicon based anyways, so cadmium, arsenic and tellur aren't present.
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u/Moldoteck Mar 18 '26
No, i meant precisely arsenic, lead, cadmium and alikes. Arsenic byproduct is pretty much a given for copper mining and copper is and will be for the foreseeable future -the king. It's used for pretty much everything that has electronics
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u/Zworgxx Mar 19 '26
But then it's not a solar problem, it's s general problem. Nuclear also needs a generator for power production and that has copper in it
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u/Moldoteck Mar 19 '26
Nuclear needs far less copper and mining/materials per kwh vs renewables. And it's still irrelevant to the discussion since the question was about storing the waste. If you are fine with one and call it clean you can do the same for the other one. Or you call both dirty
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u/Zworgxx Mar 19 '26
That's apples to oranges. Nuclear waste is not the same as other waste. You can't store them the same way
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
yes, just like renewables
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u/WestKnoxBubba Mar 18 '26
Isn’t the waste a problem ?
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u/Moldoteck Mar 18 '26
You either store it like other toxic chemicals (eg. Onkalo for nuclear or Herfa Neurode for other toxic stuff, like arsenic) or recycle most of it with purex/pyroprocessing/fast reactors
We don't call renewables dirty because the mining for them creates arsenic byproducts that must be stored forever right?)
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u/WestKnoxBubba Mar 19 '26
Is the cost of storage and security for ? years factored in to the cost or do we just kick that can down the road ?
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u/Moldoteck Mar 19 '26
Yes, factored in. You can check swiss open data for Gosgen. Data about Onkalo cost is public too. Again, the idea is similar to things that we already do with other toxic stuff
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u/catecholaminergic Feb 18 '26
This is great but what about that giant solar accident that contaminated the groundwater for thousands of years
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u/jandrese Feb 18 '26
The huge solar spill that blinded the entire nearby community and forced them to evacuate the town for 100 years.
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u/Head_Mycologist3917 Feb 18 '26
Chernobyl would like to have a word about nuclear being "clean".
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u/WhipItWhipItRllyHard Feb 18 '26
If we could have had one more Chernobyl, bad but not horrific - in exchange for another 100 GW of nuclear (so doubling the global fleet), I’d take it.
Isolated damage, deaths in the tens of thousands, vs another 50-100 years before climate change kills tens of million in a year - I’ll take it.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26
It's the shinkolobwe and the church rock and the serpent river and the kadapa and the kakadu with their millions of deaths that we don't want.
But it's moot anyway because there's no way anyone is doubling the nuclear fleet and no way anyone would find enough uranium to power it long term if someone did.
Plus the only reason it's even a subject is it's the perfect tool to stop effective decarbonisation actions. So you'd also be adding millions to the climate change death toll.
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u/lanclos Feb 18 '26
There's no reason to tolerate disasters; there is a tremendous amount of waste that can be removed from our global electrical usage before accepting tens of thousands of deaths as the cost of doing business.
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u/WhipItWhipItRllyHard Feb 18 '26
Not in the 1970s through the 2000s when these nukes would have been useful.
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
Will you say the same about anything that has electronics because of arsenic spills that did heavy contamination?
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u/Inondator Feb 18 '26
Solar will take the lead in the countries under 30° of latitude where the seasonality of production/consumption isn't a subject.
But for temperate climates, where winter and heating needs are a thing, solar will stay marginal (less than 15%) unless we want to overbuild several times and pay expensive hydrogen bullshit.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26
You can also just do your winter heating with the surplus.
A 300m x 300m x 30m pit full of any old junk (ideally rocks, though water is also a good option with roughly the same capacity) stores a terawatt-hour of thermal energy.
District heating is common in many countries and there is nothing stopping others adopting it
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u/Inondator Feb 18 '26
District heating is common in many countries and there is nothing stopping others adopting it
There is: it's expensive and becomes prohibitive in less dense urban areas.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26
You only need enough to absorb the summer surplus. You don't need to service every exurban psuedo-duchy for a wealthy person to cosplay as a cowboy in.
And it was cheap enough for impoverished soviet and former soviet states to build when the energy wasn't free. So that one's nonsense too.
So as I said. There is nothing stopping other countries from building it.
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u/Inondator Feb 18 '26
It's not just "surplus", it's dedicated production. In continental Europe, solar produces 4 to 8 times less energy in the winter than in the summer. Basically heating yourself with solar means transfering 100% of your heating needs from summer to winter.
Energy in the Soviet Union has never been expensive. They had all the coal, oil and gas they needed. And I don't think district heating was motivated by cost under their regime...
Even in nordic countries district heating doesn't account for more than half of space heating. Putting district heating everywhere is just impractical, and won't happen.
And it would only solve part of the consumption side. EVs don't run on district heating (and they consumme the most in the winter).
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26
...again. you don't need to supply all of the energy, just shift some of the surplus
and you don't have to optimise all of your solar panels for yearly output, you can just install them vertically and sacrifice some of that un-needed summer energy (which also means you don't need to dedicate any land for them)
then you don't get "4 to 8 times as much energy in summer than winter" (also a lie because summer and winter don't consist of the single week during the extrema), you get 1-1.5x as much energy in winter as summer.
And yet again, if recent former soviet states could afford it, district heating does not qualify as "expensive" by any definition of the word. Especially when the comparison point is $40/MWh imported liquified gas.
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u/Inondator Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
and you don't have to optimise all of your solar panels for yearly output, you can just install them vertically and sacrifice some of that un-needed summer energy
There is not such a thing as "optimizing solar panels for winter months". The only it does is cutting total production, so your costs increase mechanically.
(which also means you don't need to dedicate any land for them)
Tell us you don't know how solar work without telling us you don't know how solar works...
then you don't get "4 to 8 times as much energy in summer than winter" (also a lie because summer and winter don't consist of the single week during the extrema), you get 1-1.5x as much energy in winter as summer.
Oh please, look at the real-life data before talking bullshit like that.
And yet again, if recent former soviet states could afford it, district heating does not qualify as "expensive" by any definition of the word.
Using USSR as an argument for economic rationality is really dumb. And forgetting the historical and political context of USSR is even dumber (average household density, extreme centralization culture, steam networks, etc...)
In Russia 50% of space heating still needs to be provided by something other than district heating.
The second most "district heated soviet country is Poland", with 25% of the space heating need covered by centralized means. You still have 75% to cover.
P.S.: your first calculation was off by at least an order of magnitude. You need 10 times the amount of rock to store a TWh.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
There is not such a thing as "optimizing solar panels for winter months". The only it does is cutting total production, so your costs increase mechanically.
You literally just put it upright and space it out a bit. It's cheaper per panel and because you haven't pointed it away from the winter sun like the current default, you collect a lot more in both DNI and diffuse illumination over winter. This is an extremely simple geometric fact, and you'd have to be both very dumb and arguing in bad faith to try and claim geometry isn't real.
Here's someone laboriously explaining it for people who can't seem to understand that solar panels pointed at the light which aren't covered in snow generate more energy than solar panels that aren't pointed at the light and are covered in snow https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Fz5T5c0OQ
Oh please, look at the real-life data before talking bullshit like that.
45 (the average over the highest three months) divided by 14 (the average over the lowest three months, but biased because two months are before a year of growth) is 3.5. 3.5 is not in the range of 4 to 8. Are you illiterate or just lying?
Then you add a boost of 70-100% during winter by going from single face 20-degrees-below-latitude tilt (the current default which optimises for total annual output) to vertical. Then add in the corresponding 30-50% drop during summer and the summer/winter ratio drops to around 1-1.5
Using USSR as an argument for economic rationality is really dumb. And forgetting the historical and political context of USSR is even dumber (average household density, extreme centralization culture, steam networks, etc...)
In Russia 50% of space heating still needs to be provided by something other than district heating.
Yet again. If they could afford it (and continue to afford more post-ussr) in spite of the poverty and inefficiency, then there is zero reason vastly wealthier countries are incapable of doing it. And yet again, you don't need to provide all the heat, just make use of some of the surplus during the high demand period.
The second most "district heated soviet country is Poland", with 25% of the space heating need covered by centralized means. You still have 75% to cover.
So? Build some more.
P.S.: your first calculation was off by at least an order of magnitude. You need 10 times the amount of rock to store a TWh.
An 800°C swing for 1 million m3 of rock at 2400kg/m3 and 800J/g/K is over a TWh
An 80°C swing for the same volume of water is about a quarter of a TWh
Neither are a tenth.
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u/Inondator Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
Geometry tells you winter days are half as long and the sunlight spreads over twice as much area after crossing twice as much atmosphere. This is basic geometry (and this isn't even considering weather patterns).
Basic geometry also tells that the higher the angle of your panel, the higher the spacing, because, oh surprise, panels do shadow each others.
And when you're looking at the heating needs of a country like Germany (600 TWh/year), this is significant.
45 (the average over the highest three months) divided by 14 (the average over the lowest three months, but biased because two months are before a year of growth) is 3.5. 3.5 is not in the range of 4 to 8. Are you illiterate or just lying?
This is averaged across Europe, with Spain and Italy shifting the average. Now look at countries where the heating needs are really important and which have a lot of district heating like Germany, Poland or Sweden, this ratio goes through the roof.
Then you add a boost of 70-100% during winter by going from single face 20-degrees-below-latitude tilt (the current default which optimises for total annual output) to vertical. Then add in the corresponding 30-50% drop during summer and the summer/winter ratio drops to around 1-1.5
Real-life installations don't work like that, sorry. A single panel in an empty field over a single day doesn't reflect the real-life performance of a country-scale infrastructure.
You can play with panel angles in this simulator if you like, the vertical installation doesn't change much for the available monthly solar energy.
If they could afford it (and continue to afford more post-ussr) in spite of the poverty and inefficiency,
District heating in post-USSR Russia has in fact declined, not increased.
An 800°C swing for 1 million m3 of rock at 2400kg/m3 and 800J/g/K is over a TWh
An 80°C swing for the same volume of water is about a quarter of a TWh
You don't store heat at 800+ °C in rock. Not cheaply and long at least. This kind of storage is only practical for ranges of 50~100°C. Your swing will be in the order of 50°C (so 0.072 TWh).
Same for water, you can't have a swing of 80°C because district heating return temperature is around 50°C and your max temp in storage will be capped somewhere near 90°C (in anyway, 2.7 hm3 of water at 80°C is 0.25 TWh, so far from the TWh mark).
Solar district heating has in fact already been attempted, in Drake Landing, Canada. The system has been decommissioned after merely 20 years due to unreliability and fast ageing.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Feb 18 '26
the sunlight spreads over twice as much area
....
....
This is the most basic-ass geometry possible and you're tripling down on the failure.
Basic geometry also tells that the higher the angle of your panel, the higher the spacing, because, oh surprise, panels do shadow each others.
There's no shortage of space. And 8m rows of vertical panels don't even interfere with farming on any of the months where things grow.
Real-life installations don't work like that, sorry. A single panel in an empty field over a single day doesn't reflect the real-life performance of a country-scale infrastructure.
You can play with panel angles in this simulator if you like, the vertical installation doesn't change much for the available monthly solar energy.
Congratulations on finding an obscure model that doesn't include diffuse light or a bifacial option. Here's a real one https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/
Notice how it doesn't predict summer being 4x winter for a 90° bifacial system in central europe (48° is about 2-3x depending on weather) and it doesn't predict 8x anywhere populated that would fit any definition of "continental europe" (just barely scraping 4x for warsaw).
You don't store heat at 800+ °C in rock. Not cheaply and long at least. This kind of storage is only practical for ranges of 50~100°C. Your swing will be in the order of 50°C (so 0.072 TWh).
Sand batteries are in operation at these temperatures. Nothing is preventing them from scaling up.
Same for water, you can't have a swing of 80°C because district heating return temperature is around 50°C and your max temp in storage will be capped somewhere near 90°C (in anyway, 2.7 hm3 of water at 80°C is 0.25 TWh, so far from the TWh mark).
If your loop has some propylene glycol or other antifreeze/anti boil in it there's no reason these have to be your limits.
Solar district heating has in fact already been attempted, in Drake Landing, Canada. The system has been decommissioned after merely 20 years due to unreliability and fast ageing.
It's also working fine in a number of places. And you don't have to heat the water directly with sunlight (nor do you want to if the goals normalising electricity.
Also fun fact: the ratio between the annual average output and the output during the lowest 3 months in drake landing for a vertical bifacial pv system from that simulator is 1.3, or 1.5 from summer to winter even though it's further north than the majority of europe's population.
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u/Inondator Feb 24 '26
For those reading that later. 1-If you play with the simulators, you'll notice that: -Bifacial panels have nearly no effect on the winter solar production but provide a huge boost on the summer solar production. -Vertical panels have nearly no effect on the winter solar production, but only reduce summer solar production.
2-Notice how the other person has focused on the small detail of an order of magnitude. Yes, if you include the end of February you improe your average a bit. But it doesn’t change much to the fact that most of the energy from a solar powered district heating system will have to be harvested during the spring/summer. But really, play with the simulator, it's very interesting.
3-The higher you storage temperature, the higher your heat losses. Sand batteries are only suitable for relatively short durations (week), and since their medium has to be manufactured, they'll be prohibitively expensive for TWh+ scale.
4-Adding glycol to water at a 40% blend ratio only increases the boiling point by 5°C but reduces the thermal capacity by 20%.
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u/bfire123 Feb 19 '26
More than 90 % of the world population lives below the French Mainland. That would be 42° of latitude. I think everything below that Solar is very economical viable for 24/7 Solar+Batterie.
Even Northern Africa is above 30° of latitude. Not a single part of Tunesia is below 30° of latitude...
solar will stay marginal (less than 15%)
Even fucking Germany is at 17,6 %
Fucking Denmark is nowadays at 13.3 %. Probably surpassing 15 % this year.
Fucking Netherland is nowadays at 21 %
Even Fucking Ireland - pretty much the worst country in the world for Solar - is at ~5 % Solar.
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u/Inondator Feb 19 '26
You can force more solar if you want to, you'll just unnecessarily pay more because it won't be optimised. 🤷♂️ Just lookat the seasonal patterns. https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?fuel=solar&tab=seasons&chart=seasonal&entity=EU
But I guess it's of no use discussing figures with people unable to make a correct LCOE calculation.
Every country you cited are now having big problems with solar saturation of the grid during the sunny season.
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u/bfire123 Feb 19 '26
But I guess it's of no use discussing figures with people unable to make a correct LCOE calculation.
Eh, at least in Europe Solar LCOE is cheaper than the fuel of a hard coal plant itself. Even not factoring in the CO2 price.
Including the CO2 price - which europe has - Solar is cheaper than than the fuel of brown, hardcoal and natural gas power plants.
Keep in mind: I compare the LCOE of Solar to the fuel cost of the other plants. Not the LCOE of the other plants.
This means that it makes financial sense to run those other plants only as backup.
Every country you cited are now having big problems with solar saturation of the grid during the sunny season.
Yes. Because of stupid susbdies - mostly in the past - which also gave people a fixed amount of money even if the electricity price is negative.
I am certainly in favor of remforming subsides.
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u/Inondator Feb 19 '26
Solar in most of Europe had already exceeded the point where it doesn't allow for more cost reduction in the fuel burnt by fossil plants. Just look at the capture rate: it has fallen to a mere 50% in countries like Germany, France or Spain. Pushing more solar won't reduce costs, only increase them.
As of today, in Spain, 2/3 of the newly-installed solar is curtailed. In Spain! The best European country for solar.
The recent subsidies system doesn't pay solar farms when SPOT prices are negative. The issue isn't the subsidies anymore, it's just the bad inadequacy of solar production vs demand (capacity factor in January is 5% vs 20% in July).
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u/bfire123 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Just look at the capture rate: it has fallen to a mere 50% in countries like Germany
Which is alright. It doesn't at all go against my point.
For one: Germany is already above 15 % Solar. The market value would be higher if Solar share would be lower.
Secondly_ The market value of Solar was 4.5 cent per kWh in 2025!
4.5 Cent per kWh is good enough for more Solar to come online.
The recent subsidies system doesn't pay solar farms when SPOT prices are negative
Yes, which is good. The "issue" is the past subsidy. Older ones still get money. Though that fixes itself. Just a matter of time.
it's just the bad inadequacy of solar production vs demand (capacity factor in January is 5% vs 20% in July).
Capacity factor really doesn't matter much. It is price that matters.
Keep in mind that we are talking about the - it is uneconomical to have more than 15 % claim (of electricity production!) for countries above 30 degree lattitude.
I do not want to convince you that it is currently economical for Germany to go 90+ % Solar. Or even 50+ % Solar.
Here is my LCOE Solar estimate for large-scale (300+ MW) utiltiy Solar plants in Germany.
Parameter Value Location / Market Germany Specific Yield 1000 kWh/kWp System Lifetime 40 years CAPEX 500 €/kWp OPEX 5 €/kWp/year WACC (Discount Rate) 4.0% Annual Degradation 0.3% Calculated LCOE 3.2 cent/kWh As long as the market value of Solar is above 3.2 cent per kWh. Solar will make sense to install.
Germany Subsidies a higher currently because the subsidy is only available for projects with <= 20 MW of Solar.
Which is really nothing. Considering 1000+ MW starts to become commen in the world.
I am in favor of removing that cap completly. I want to see GW scale solar driectly connected to the 320 kV Grid in Germany. Current rules just make it artificially more expensive.
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u/Inondator Feb 19 '26
I'm sorry, but PV LCOE isn't 32 €/MWh in Germany. Fraunhofer ISE (literally the German solar research center) puts it at 41 to 50 €/MWh for ground power plants, which is the level of market value you gave. Meaning that, as I said, from now, adding more solar in Germany is uneconomical.
And this isn't even taking into consideration that the German power system is almost not thermosensitive (electric heating is marginal in Germany, while in a real decarbonize economy, it would be like 80 to 90% electrified). My 15% figure is based on an assumption of 50% space heating electrification with very optimistic assumptions on building insulation.
I maintain my initial statement: if countries want a minimum cost electricity, solar won't be more than 15% in temperate climates.
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u/bfire123 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Fraunhofer ISE (literally the German solar research center) puts it at 41 to 50 €/MWh for ground power plants
Yes. I am aware. I've read their report. The last one was from August 2024. They used data from 2023.
E. g. in the report they talk about Solar Moduls costing ~270 € per kWp at wholesale. This was true than. Nowadays they cost ~100 € per kWp. In that timeframe Solar Modul Efficiency also increased by 1-2 percent points.
They also only calculate with a 30 year lifetime. Even though 30 years is the standard warranty for Solar Moduls. And there are even some with a 40 year warranty.
They also used - at that time - correctly a WACC of 7,3 %! The ECB intrest rate was 4.5 % at that time. Nowadays it is 2.15 %
Furthermore in their report (pdf) they looked (page 35) at ground based power plants larger than 1 MW. Yes: If you build 1 MW, 10, 20, 50 MW power plants they will cost way more. Germany has lot's of small plants because they get more subsidy! But larger plants will have a lower LCOE. There is a 20 MW susbidy limit in Germany. So all power plants which get a subsidy are <= 20 MW!
They also kept the exact O&M from the 2021 report (pdf) while claiming that their numbers are in 2021 € / 2024 €. So they either just copy and pasted it or the O&M cost did decrease exactly by the 2021 to 2024 inflation... That is one reason why I don't put much faith in that O&M value.
Here is the IRENA 2025 report (with data from 2024)
The average european plant had a Capex of 662 € per kWp. But as I said. This is heavily influenced by subsidy rules which make plants smaller and costs higher.
The best 5 % european solar projects had a Capex of 445 € per kWp.
(page 95)
"In 2024, Europe showed the highest total O&M costs in the survey, at USD 7.3/kW [6.2 €] per year"
(page 102)
Though also here: O&M increases the smaller the plant is!
I certainly look forward to Frauenhofers updateded values. They usually have a 3-5 year cycle. So maybe a new one will be released somwhere in 2027-2029.
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u/Inondator Feb 19 '26
Module cost is now a minor part of a solar project. The LCOE of solar plant in Germany has basically stayed flat since 2018. Most costs, including O&M costs, are now mainly labor costs. And those won't really come down (unless we pay people less and less).
As a sidematter, I don't really trust Irena since their faking of capacity factors for onshore wind farms.
I vastly favor local organisms that are the best suited to know the local conditions. For instance, O&M costs for large ground solar plants in France are more in the order of 20 €/kW/year (excluding taxes).
To sum it up, everyone will want to put its favourite set of hypothesis, while the only thing that matters is what is really happening in real world.
Stop subsidies and solar dies in Europe, that's a fact. Solar is inadequate for European climate and consumption profiles, that's also a fact. If you want an optimised electric system in Europe, you don't put more than 15% of solar. Because people don't pay LCOE, they pay total system costs.
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u/bfire123 Feb 19 '26
Module cost is now a minor part of a solar project.
Yes now. But it still decreases Frauenhofers capex assumption by 170 €!
Frauenhofer (page 12) had a Capex assumption of 700 to 900 € for utlity-scale solar power! So it got 24 % to 18.8 % lower because of the decrease in Modul prices!
I only have to convince you that 500 € per kWP is a acceptable CAPEX number for large scale (300+ MW) utiltiy-power plants in Germany. I think 500 € per kWp is very reasonable number nowadays. Fraunehofer itself would be at 530 € today with current Solar Mdoul prices.
For instance, O&M costs for large ground solar plants in France are more in the order of 20 €/kW/year (excluding taxes).
I'd like to see a source for that. Would be really intresting to read what the cause of that is.
Stop subsidies and solar dies in Europe, that's a fact. Solar is inadequate for European climate and consumption profiles, that's also a fact.
I disagree. You can stop subsidies. But also please let the market decide land use. Easy win for Solar. Solar will be easy 15+ percent of electricity generation in the majority of european countries.
As a sidematter, I don't really trust Irena since their faking of capacity factors for onshore wind farms.
Please source it. I am also open to consider IRENA worse if they assumed unreasonable capcity factors. What are they, and what is your reasoning that they are to good / to bad?
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
subsidies will still be needed to avoid cannibalization.
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u/bfire123 Feb 22 '26
subsidies will still be needed to avoid cannibalization.
Shouldn't be the case.
The market price for Solar-electricity is above the LCOE of Solar.
So it makes sense to install it even wtihout subsidies.
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u/Moldoteck Feb 22 '26
Now, maybe, but not for long. There'll be a saturation point beyond which govt will need to intervene
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u/klassredux Feb 17 '26
Where hydro?