Renewable Energy – WIND WORKS

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Solar and wind power are dominating new generation capacity around the world. This is to such an extent that, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA), 90 percent of the net increase in global electricity generation capacity came from wind or solar and 93 percent from renewable energy as a whole. Solar PV provided the lion’s share of this increase, at 72 percent, with wind providing 18 percent, fossil fuels 7 percent, hydro 2 percent, bioenergy 1 percent, and nuclear power less than 0.5 percent.

By contrast the IEA grossly underestimated increases in renewable energy generation. As can be seen in the Figure 1 below, reproduced from a recently published academic paper the IEA has had a consistent habit of projecting much smaller increases in world solar PV generation than has happened in practice. The vertical axis represents annual solar PV additions in GW. The IEA projections consistently have solar pv capacity more or less levelling off in the future, whereas in reality there has been exponential growth of the technology.

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Californians pay some of the nation’s highest electricity rates. They’re also being devastated by the consequences of fossil fueled climate change, including more deadly and expensive wildfires, droughts and heat waves.

Politicians need to stop promising they’ll confront these challenges and start doing it.

The recent fires in Los Angeles County should serve as a political rallying cry to accelerate the phaseout of oil and gas. Instead, they’re threatening to derail Sacramento’s long-promised focus on more affordable energy.

During the Cultural Revolution, scientists and intellectuals were violently persecuted, universities were shut down, and research was labeled as counter-revolutionary, leading to a complete halt in scientific progress.

In contrast, the Trump administration’s cuts to NASA, NOAA, and other research institutions so far represent a more bureaucratic form of suppression, targeting funding and dismantling programs rather than physically persecuting scientists. However, both cases reflect a distrust of intellectualism, a prioritization of political loyalty over expertise, and long-term damage to national scientific progress. While China’s purge created a generational knowledge gap, the U.S. risks ceding global leadership in multiple areas of scientific research and climate science to other nations, likely echoing the stagnation China experienced post-1976.

A fire broke out at the Moss Landing Power Plant, not too far from San Francisco, on January 16, 2025, prompting the evacuation of approximately 1,500 residents and the temporary closure of Highway 1. No one was harmed in the incident. Given the massive growth in grid storage battery systems, is this something everyone should be worried about, and is it likely to recur? No and no.

Meanwhile, incumbents (utilities), long used to dominating the debate and government policies have been caught on the receiving end of the anti-renewables propaganda they spewed in the past, and which have been weaponized wittingly or unwittingly by the political opponents of the greens, usually the rightwing populists, who are ascendant right now. So the current debate on energy is highly polarized, mostly tribal, and renewables are on the losing side in the public debate. It does not matter much because the march of solar and batteries is relentless and irreversible, but it makes policy making harder, and investment decisions scarier.

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The newest and most powerful nuclear reactor in Europe that was delivered more than a decade late and nearly four times over budget is also proving to be a headache for grid operators now that it is finally up and running.

On Sunday, the 1,600 megawatt Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor tripped again, the latest in a series of faults and outages that have plagued the new facility and caused the market to reach out for back-up power to fill the gap.

Overall, we believe that this handful of relatively straightforward measures could materially enhance the transition towards a low-carbon Electricity System at low cost. The Energiewende gets a bad rap in the English-language press, even though it has helped create a competitive renewable energy industry from scratch – something the whole world benefits from, even though mostly German ratepayers pay for it. Our proposed reforms would help reduce that last item.