Despite the doom & gloom here in the states where renewable energy is under a sustained assault by the Trump … Read more
Renewable Energy
Like California, Australia has an enormous amount of solar. The country’s climate-change-and-energy minister just announced that, starting in July, electricity suppliers will be required to offer at least three free hours of midday power in some regions. This will give people a reason to charge their electric vehicles, use heat pumps to precool or preheat their homes and water, and store more clean electricity in batteries when cheap energy is abundant.
Europe should seek constructive cooperation with China on energy policy. Even though the two regions are developing very differently in socio-political terms, cooperation in the field of energy and climate policy offers enormous opportunities for the whole world. Europe and China can play a key role in the global energy transformation and in the global fight against climate change by using their resources for this purpose. This naturally requires constructive dialogue on an equal footing, in which both blocs formulate their own and shared interests and develop their relations on a clear basis. This also means that Europe and China can and should work together to convince numerous other countries that the path of renewable energies is the path to a good future for all people, a prosperous and more peaceful world that successfully overcomes the climate crisis.
With the rise of low-cost wind and solar power, this baseload paradigm has come under strain. Utilities and regulators interested in keeping electricity prices low are starting to introduce variable renewables like wind and solar at scale instead: since the latter have zero marginal costs, they typically get dispatched first, making them by default the new foundation of the power system. In the process, other generating units are having to ramp and flex around them.
Solar power and wind power are now the cheapest options for new electricity on the market. For this reason, solar and wind actually dominate new power plant capacity around the world. (Myth: Solar and wind power are expensive.)
But today, in a world with abundant and inexpensive solar and wind power, the economics have shifted – variable renewables are becoming the new foundation of the system, and other resources are starting to flex and ramp around them.
This shift represents one of the most fundamental changes to the way power systems are designed and operated since Tesla and Edison waged battles over AC vs. DC.
All in all the anti-renewable forces of Trumpism on both sides of the Atlantic, are, in effect, puffing up the prospects of SMRs to obscure their vandalism of renewable energy programmes. However, whilst large renewable deployments will continue, there will be meagre results from the SMR programmes. These will constitute a much lower amount of total capacity compared to the programmes for building conventional reactors.
The conclusion is straightforward. Addressing Christophers’ challenges does not require abandoning capitalism. It requires writing rules that make clean, reliable power profitable to build and cheap to buy. Capitalism will not save the planet on autopilot, but it can be harnessed if governments are willing to set the terms. The measure of success is not ideology but delivered clean terawatt-hours at stable prices. The faster policymakers align markets with that outcome, the faster the transition will proceed.
Renewable energy will overtake coal to become the world’s top source of electricity “by 2026 at the latest”, according to new forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The rise of renewables is being driven by extremely rapid growth in wind and solar output, which topped 4,000 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 and will pass 6,000TWh by 2026.
Wind and solar are increasingly under attack from populist politicians on the right, such as US president Donald Trump and Reform in the UK.
Nevertheless, they will together meet more than 90% of the increase in global electricity demand out to 2026, the IEA says, while modest growth for hydro power will add to renewables’ rise.
Solar became the EU’s largest source of electricity for the first time in June 2025. National records for solar and wind rolled in across EU countries in May and June, pushing coal to an all-time low.
