A recent story by The New Yorker dove into the astonishing growth of solar energy over the past few years. Among other extensive data, the magazine notes that renewables made up 96 percent of demand for new energy throughout the globe in 2024; In the United States, 93 percent of new energy capacity came from solar and wind.
But while renewables writ large are having their day, the speed at which solar energy in particular is growing blows everything else out of the water.
For example, it's now estimated that the world is now installing one gigawatt worth of solar energy infrastructure every 15 hours — or about the output of a new coal plant.
For some historical context, the New Yorker notes that it took 68 years since the invention of the first photovoltaic solar cell in 1954 to construct a single terawatt's worth of solar power. It took just two years to hit the second terawatt in 2024, and the third is expected within mere months.
This explosive growth has been fueled by huge efficiency gains in solar energy output, breakthroughs in manufacturing, and streamlined installation processes. There've also been huge developments in panel recycling, meaning the darker side of solar energy — mineral extraction and panel fabrication — might one day be a thing of the past.
I'll give another factoid:
In a sunny day, around noon, many EU countries have below-zero prices for electricity exports:
It comes with a different set of issues, but this is not prospective or a hypothetical: this is the world we are living in, with the operator of the French grid warning that we are currently at solar saturation.
Now we need the other part of the puzzle: energy storage. On a HUGE scale.
China is already on it.
https://sopuli.xyz/post/29917584
Yes, and that is good. Now we need to be able to do it in Europe as well and in much larger quantities, both for heating and electricity.
The first commercial heat batteries have already been built. Hopefully, the technology will become more widespread, as heat is such a nice form of energy. My guess is, it's mostly a political and financial problem at this point.
Storing energy in other forms is a lot trickier, but at least there's no shortage of potential technologies to try. It's just that most of them tend to be in lab or pilot scale at the moment. That Chinese RFB facility was a notable exception though.
Yeah, I know. Unfortunately Polar Night are hard to reach, which is why we've had to go to others to develop heat batteries.
The Chinese example was great to see, though! I wish we could get something similar going here, to be able to store energy. Extracting hydrogen is step 1, but also finding a good way to store it is crucial! There has been a lot of innovation in that regard lately, though.
Where is this graphic from? It's awesome!
RTE (French national grid operator)'s realtime data. It is indeed awesome to have realtime trackers of that!
EDIT: looks like the link in english is dead right now, here it is in french: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-aux-frontieres
negative prices only exist because the operators of big solar parks have not considered implementing circuit breakers into their solar parks in the past.
with these breakers, whenever the energy prices are about to go negative, the breaker disables the solar park and it stops feeding into the grid. it's a very simple measure but very effective. in theory, negative energy prices should not exist that way.
Circuit breakers cost money and provide no benefit to the park operator, so it makes sense that they would prefer to sell the electricity for a negative price instead as long as that negative price costs them less than the circuit breaker.
Also, solar parks in Europe are subsidized, so beholden to government demands. From the perspective of the government and the public good, it's better if the electricity is sold for a negative price than if the capacity to produce it for free is wasted, because it can still be used for productive ends. The value for buyers is positive, but because it's a buyer's market the electricity is still sold at a loss because the buyers can threaten to go to a different solar park operator.
Circuits breakers are an obvious solution and there seems to be reasons why these are not implemented. I am not knowledgeable enough about the question but there seems to be a lot of counter-intuitive incentives that makes the energy market drop sub-zero occasionally. It is more of a market artifact than the absence of circuit breakers.
I have seen people in France explain that this is Germany undercutting prices to ensure France can't have profitable private solar power companies but this sounds a bit conspiracy-theory to me, as Germany is not the only one doing it (but the biggest one in terms of volume)
If energy has a negative cost wouldn't this make it worth doing things that take a lot of energy at that point ~~like mine bitcoin?~~
Not sure how much would fit that though, industry that can use a lot of power and is ok with irregular running times. Hydrogen production through water electrolysis is a popular idea but not sure if it's at a point of being useful at scale.
Careful: negative price ≠ negative cost. Below zero prices are a market artifact usually.
The fact that this happens during peak HVAC use is a nice thing though.
And yes, we need intermittent industries, but the problem is, when you invest money in hardware, even to mine bitcoin (I would rather sell GPU time to train deep learning models personally) or to produce hydrogen, every hour not spent running your capital-intensive hardware is considered a cost that is not really compensated by energy price unless you run on donated hardware.
Where are these negative prices? I'm in Switzerland and my electricity price just keeps going up.
These are the prices on the European market for electricity exchange between countries. It has a whole can of worms when it comes to problematic incentives, but it is indeed not consumer prices and (IMO) designed to enrich useless intermediaries.
We pay for our electricity based on the market price, and it indeed goes negative. Although the separate transfer fee means we still pay.
The negative prices are partly caused by the way the grids are designed. Basically, where the solar parks are today, used to be end of the line in the coal power days. So the grid can't handle the influx of energy in that area. It remains to be seen if this will still be the case in a few years, assuming the grid will be expanded in these areas. We would still need some form of storage though.
Another option would be electro-chemical processing of metals which uses a lot of electricity and could in theory be only turned on when there is surplus power.
I've read that this phenomena - near zero energy at times of peak production, is producing some interesting effects on some areas of energy use.
For example, one potential use of this excess energy is hydrogen electrolysis. Traditionally, industrial electrolyzers have been built to maximize energy efficiency. They'll use expensive platinum anodes to get the absolute most out of every watt of power.
However, in this application - taking advantage of dirt cheap intermittent electricity - we might not actually want to optimize for efficiency. These machines are expensive. And if you're only running them for a few hours a day, making the machines cheaper to build may trump making them maximally efficient. You need a machine cheap enough to run for just a few hour a day and let sit idle the rest of the time. So some companies are developing electrolyzers that are designed to use the cheapest materials possible, even if they're less efficient than those made with platinum anodes. Dirt cheap electrolyzers might have 20-30% less efficiency than the expensive ones, but if they cost a small fraction to build, it can be worth it. That extra energy was just going to go to waste anyway.
When energy is essentially free but highly intermittent, it starts changing the whole calculus for how you build industrial machinery. You start optimizing more for lower CAPEX and less for efficiency.
To illustrate, we (Netherlands) have industries getting PAID to absorb the surplus electric energy. Mainly when they need to heat water for all kinds of processing.
i think that current electricity prices are a good way to regulate which consumer runs at what time
after all, prices are lowest when there's lots of renewables feeding into the grid. and that is also when the consumers get the cheapest power, then that is when they should be consuming the energy that is available.
Or storing it. That's the ideal time for EV charging.