How much of it is being sucked up by AI?
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Hmmn, as far as I can tell they've not presenrted any de-rated capacity data. I much prefer de-rated capacity for planning electricity supply. Unless you're doing detailed half-hourly despatch simulations. It's probably still a large share but I doubt the exagerated growth shown here. Solar in particular needs to be scaled down in relation to say hydro and nuclear for planning purposes.
That's why the green bit in this supply chart most likely won't grow as sharply as the OP graph. (Ok it's change in stocks vs total flows too.) https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2025/supply
Hydro and nuclear and geothermal will scale near 1:1 from capacity to output. So they are a lot better. Solar will only average 4:1 and wind at about 3:1 from memory.
Here in the UK where there is a lot of wind gen they're already runnung some pumped storage motors into effectively operating as inertial stabilisation most of the time. It is very interesting that the grid is preferring frequency stabilisation instead of the "battery" function that pumped storage is really designed for. We really need more hydro and pumped storage capacity a lot more than wind and solar. If you only like uplifting news please don't lookup the recent news about Cruachan power station.
It'd also be interesting to know how many GW worth of non-renewable energy generation is decommissioned every year.
2GW coal plant (the last in Britain) near me got shut down late last year.
So it's some at least.
As an added bonus my hayfever hasn't been anywhere near as bad since they closed it.
Little to none so far. This might change in the future, but not that quickly.
The additional renewable capacity added year on year is not enough to cover the additional electrical load, which originates mainly from 2 things: transport/infrastructure (including EVs, data centres, AI) & environmental loads (more heatwaves in populated cities, where people then need to cool).
As far as I understood, 2024 was a substantial year for the environmental side of the equation, otherwise additional renewables installations would have been able to cover just about all the additional power load.
So if we'd have started building renewables a couple years sooner, we'd already be fixing the problem and it would be cheaper, but because we waited, we have to pay more?
I think it's more nuanced than that as the technologies needs time to mature and the supply chains need time to establish. The price of renewables, especially solar and wind, has plummeted faster than anyone ever expected, so arguably it's cheaper (economically) now.
There's also the saying "the best time to buy a house is always 50 years ago, the second best time is now". I don't see much benefit in regretting yesterday's decisions.
Well the lesson here is twofold.
1: we better put every dollar we have into renewables now, or it'll take more dollars later on
2: conservative governments who told us they were saving money with climate change inaction are liars and we shouldn't trust them
Don't forget ~~data centers~~ spy warehouses.
Is there a breakdown per country?
Edit: I was looking for a graph but it was in the conclusion
New renewable energy capacity was dominated by China, with the country accounting for almost 64% of global capacity additions. (What would the industry do without China?) Together, G7 countries accounted for 14.3% of new capacity, while G20 countries accounted for 90.3% of new capacity (of course, 64% coming from China, as already mentioned).
Yeah.
China does hydro too - which is the best by far. In the west we're far to precious about landowners.
We have a whole area in my country called the lake district used for nothing but tourism and a few sheep, and lots of godawful poetry. (plus maybe one coppermine).
We really need to make it live up to it's name, flood the whole thing into one giant lake and run the worlds largest hydro off it. Stop pissing around with piddly little windmills, and putting solar panels over perfectly good arable land in s country where we have a lot of cloud cover.
Fossil fuels isn't just power. There's also transportation, chemical synthesis, and heavy industry. The good news is that if you incentivize heavy industry they will actually switch. What has been happening was that heavy industry was shielded from CO2 taxes because they used so much fossil fuel.
transportation is a massive one. London is a grimy stinky mess of a place from the massive amount of car exhaust.
Haha, London used to be so much worse. Like, you would spend a couple of days there and when you blew your nose everything came out black.
I remember going to the natural history museum as a kid and feeling sick from all the pollution.
Now it's not a problem at all there.
What decade are we talking about here?
Probably 20 years ago
Yep I remember the black snot days in the late 90s.
Red Ken ftw! Good luck to NYC with their CC too.
By all accounts, it was even worse the 60s though before clean air acts, gas central heating and when all those art galleries were power stations. I don't think Alec Guiness actually did blackface, he probably just walked around in the smog for a few hours (/jk).
Things really have got better if you look long enough.
By Jiminy, those peasoupers used to enough to turn your bowler black. What, what.
I'M NOT THAT OLD
God, I am. I'm as old as the youngest cardinal in the Vatican (45).
And I was a tourist in London so I spent more time outdoors than some office worker.
ironically that was probably worse for your health than staying inside back then 😭😭😭
The fact that literally any of the new power capacity isn't renewable energy is very bad.
Everything has a shelf life, which means that there's non-renewable power generation that was decommissioned to offset that. Please stop being a mindless doomer, especially in the uplifting news community
Is that actually true? Total energy capacity increased, which gives the impression that renewable energy is just being added on top of the existing fossil fuels with very little being decommissioned.
Is this supposed to be a community for real uplifting news or just a circlejerk where no one can question anything?
No, the fact that it's 92.5% renewable is very good.
Adding 7.5% additional fossil fuels is extremely bad! It needs to be 0%
No it's not
We will not survive if we add literally any additional fossil fuel capacity. It has to be negative or we die.