The growth is still slow compared to China and the evolution of the international order though. Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
EU is doing just slightly better than US. US has the advantage of its fossil fuels but it's actually China that is doing the revolution. They are accelerating and at some point not too far away will reach abundance and switch off all the fossils.
It's unwise that the new US administration be pushing for the opposite of China. But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU:
However, electrical solutions are often more efficient, so this can be misleading because a transition means you're getting a large amount "for free" as a result of the improved efficiency.
Instead of moving your car from oil to solar, you're moving the car from oil to electricity, and then electricity is fungible so you don't care that it was made with a solar array - but the efficiency win was from going to electricity.
You have to distinguish between transportation (electricity and oil) and source of energy (only oil).
To have electricity you would need to invest at once in both generation, transport (the grids are not enough), storage and change in use (replace cars with electric ones). Your return will depend as well on the technology developed and none of the above fields is stable yet.
I am a fan of going electric, even if only for more sovereignty, but it is not as simple as "electricity is more efficient".
They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.
Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU
From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy.
Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.
That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.
Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing
The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost.
It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.
Then you store that energy or find a way to use it. Melt ore when its abundant, then make metal when it is abundant, then dig holes when it is abundant, then use the metal to turn the hole into a reservoir when it is abundant and eventually use the reservoir to pump in and out water as a way to store the abundant energy for use when its not.
All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.
Not saying we should continue using fossil fuels forever, but being unrealistic about how hard the transition to intermittent renewables will be isn't sensible
But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.
Look at the absolute values, your kettle doesn't run of fractions it runs on absolute power and EU&US are about the same. USA has fractionally lower renewables because they have very large fossil production. EU is making up for its lack of fossils through high efficiency policies.
> But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If I find myself finding obvious "errors" in other people's plans and easy solutions they "just" have to implement then I'm usually missing something.
Europe's strategy to tie themselves economically to Russia for the purpose of peace didn't work out but a lot of the infrastructure and energy investments were made when that was the strategy. The other thing is that you're talking about electricity, fossil fuels have thousands of uses so you can't "drop everything".
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If this is not happening without government's help then it's not profitable. Which means a forced transition to solar requires to "drop everything" quite literally.
In 2014 Russia decided to attack Ukraine because its political ambitions had been thwarted.
A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine.
Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010.
Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.
You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining.
> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.
You factored in a new grid and backup nuclear plants/gas power plants requiring >100B investments in Germany or Tesla Megapacks in excess of 100 metric tons?
Take a look at what is needed to make Germany “green” by a reputable and independent institute:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
No need to obsess with solar if it doesn't work for you, its just that solar is so good. It uses manufactured devices that you just point to the sky and makes your machine run. For stability of course you need something like nuclear or storage.
Industrialized countries generally need stability when it comes to electricity. People also want to watch TV whenever they like and take a hot shower whenever they feel like it.
There is another under discussed alternative UHV power transmission, e.g. south to north: Morocco has great conditions for solar.
Or East to West, the sun rises and sets at different times.
We still need more storage and generation, but a better grid would help a lot.
Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.
What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight?
I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.
> And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day
You can't generate excess electricity because you don't have enough land or rooftop (I mean maybe you do, I'm talking about the typical homeowner). Utilities can overbuild panels because they're extremely cheap.
LFP batteries have a self-discharge rate of 2-5% per month. Once they're cheap enough, over-building batteries to move summer sunshine into the winter months also becomes an option*. At $100/kwh, you could power Sweden 6 months a year for about $60bn in batteries (yes labor and everything else will probably double that cost). And that doesn't even account for recent advances in sodium batteries, which reportedly bring that price down to $20/kwh
* (Any battery experts know why this might be wrong? I'm using basic arithmetic, not physics. That tells me a battery charged to 100% in July or August will still have > 70% charge left in December)
Germany would require a ballpark of 100 MILLION tons of Teslas Megapack grade batteries to run on battery for 2 weeks - which is even shorter than what we had to endure due to “Dunkelflauten”.
Why would Germany need to run solely on battery for 2 weeks? Do you expect 2 weeks with 0 sun and wind all over continental Europe?
In any case, at $100/kwh, it would cost $250bn in batteries and maybe the same in installation costs to power Germany for 6 months a year. At the lower $20/kwh price tag, it's a no-brainer. But even assuming the higher price point, $500bn is 1/8 the GDP of Germany. Spending that over 10 years (1/80th of the GDP) to get free power forever doesn't sound like a sweet deal to you?
Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need (read up on Fraunhofer on the thinking: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... ) . But that infrastructure will sit there idle most of the time. That’s not driving down electricity prices. And you’ll still end up with higher carbon emissions than France.
> Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need
Paying for the plant but not having to pay for it to run most of the time is probably cheaper than having it running most of the time.
Maybe there's opportunities for net metering for customers with backup generators. At the right price per kWH, I would run my generator and feed into the grid... personally, my fuel cost is likely too high for that to make sense very often, but I think there's likely some hidden capacity there with the right incentives.
Germany will require 100-150 GW capacity which cost about 1000 EUR/kW and would require an investment of 100+B EUR.
Electricity prices already skyrocketed in Germany and no end in sight.
Listen: I invested in PV, in low energy houses, in heat pumps - but the PV/wind strategy doesn’t work the way people would like them to in their ideology and Germany has proven that.
You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).
I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.
OK and did they increase not renewables by 54%? You can't really increase overall capacity from solar, wind etc. Look at what happened in Portugal when it gets cloudy.
Isn't there a sweet spot where solar is too much of your energy mix -- due to its intermittency? I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )
If you're in the Atacama Desert, I doubt it's 40%, but not really relevant.
This is ALL renewables, not just Solar - the article states that Solar is ~20% now in the EU.
Wind typically counts for ~15%, and Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.
So most places can pretty easily get to ~40% solar, ~15% wind, ~15% hydro = ~70% renewable.
Throw in ~20% Nuclear (basically all of Europe before Germany sh*t the bed), and you're at ~90% - with limited need for storage - a large portion of which could come from infra that already exists for pumped hydro and regular overnight solar storage.
We're quite a ways away from diminishing returns.
We're ~8 years away from a global ~40% of electricity coming from solar EVEN IF it continues to grow at ~30% YoY.
>I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
You can get pretty high before the economics get sketchy. Below analysis concluded that for many sunny places that point is in the 90%+. Most of EU will be lower than said sunny places, but point is it's not 40%. And the sprinkling of wind, nuclear, geo, hydro means there is a fair bit of room to still push.
Plus both solar and storage tech is still moving rapidly
I don't know of any specific thresholds, but it's worth mentioning that 54% of Q2 was renewable, and solar peaks in Q2. Solar was also only 36.8% of that renewable generation (just under 20% of Q2's total), so there's a long way to go before solar is 40% of the total energy mix.
If there is an important threshold when solar reaches 40% of the full year's production, then solar will need to almost quadruple before that's a concern. For all of 2024, solar was 22.4% of renewables, and renewables were 47% of the total[1], meaning that solar was 10.5% of total electricity over the full year.
The issue is not sorely about negative price. It’s about keeping base capacity profitable so the grid doesn’t collapse.
The energy strategy of the EU was hopeless for a long time and is only marginally better now. It’s not as braindead as the monetary union but close. Germany was actively sabotaging France for a long time while having to restart coal power plants and investing in gas fuelled capacity.
Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left.
I’m French. Unless something major changes, I hope we will be out before the UK comes back. I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.
I’m not too surprised about my original comment being downvoted while being entirely factually true. It was a bit much from me to expect people to understand the underside of running too much intermittent energy sources and how this is currently dealt with (the braindead part). I invite the champions of solar to explain to me the current plan of the EU for actually running the whole grid past 2050 while phasing out the coal and gas (hint: there is none).
Anyway I invite everyone to take a look at what the EU used to do nuclear, how it was purposefully omitted from the definition of clean energy for years, how they used to fine France despite its energy being clean, how it forces the French energy operator to sell at a loss, how it impedes France properly managing its dams and then look at who actually pushed for these policies while buying Russian gas and burning coal. The whole thing is a complete joke. At least they apparently saw the light on nuclear. That’s a start.
Different situation. France has only itself to blame for the current situation and has plenty of things it can still do to avoid a crisis. Plus the debt holders are very diversified.
The Greek crisis is very different because the debt was mostly held by German banks - the German did to do something of all these excess savings and the Greek economy suffered a lot from the euro. Reforms were needed but the way the whole thing was handled is a disgrace.
Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.
That’s a risky bet but I personally prefer that to the current situation. I would honestly be ok with staying in the union if we could exit the euro while staying but I don’t think it’s possible.
It’s me being dramatic for useless flair. I edited it out a minute after posting because it adds nothing to the discussion but you read it before I did.
It’s a monetary union with no common fiscal policies and no mechanism to correct disparity between members. Complete train wreck since it has been put in place.
Germany has been abusing it from the start running huge trade surplus, compressing salaries, using its excess savings to buy foreign debts instead of investing and being shielded from monetary appreciation by the consumption and investments of other countries. The euro is basically Germany robbing blind the other members while pretending to be virtuous and blocking most of what could have improved the situation.
> and no mechanism to correct disparity between members
AFAIK, they created some mechanisms after the 2008 crisis. Every country there now effectively prints money in differing rates, and the EU only regulates some limits.
not really. At this point, solar is basically free, and having extra free energy has all sorts of benefits. For the EU, in particular, it greatly reduces their dependence on Russian oil and gas. if all you do with extra solar is replace 2 extra hours a day of natural gas consumption, you effectively make yourself have 12% more storage, which decreases Russian leverage.
in EU: gas, oil is still 60% of usage. You are not going to heat you home during winter with electricity anytime soon, same like we are not all gonna drive electric cars this decade.
Heat pumps account for 2/3 of new heating installations in Germany [1].
Modern buildings with effective insulation seem to make them quite viable, but that hinges on the availability of attractive electricity prices.
The second factor is that carbon-based fuels may become more expensive over time, so perhaps electricity costs “just” needs to remain stable to become attractive.
I'm sorry but this thread does not talk about using PV to heat your home in the winter. But it is absolutely possible to use electricity to heat homes, it's widely used in northern countries. And the nice thing about electricity is that it can be generated in one place and used in another.
This thread is talking about reduction of dependence on oil&gas supplied by various nefarious regimes, though. Still quite a challenge in the winter, with barely any sun out there.
"it can be generated in one place and used in another."
It can, but we are far from having such a robust grid all across the continent. I am not even sure if we are getting closer. Both economic and political aspects come into play, which might be harder to address than the purely technical ones.
For example, France really does not want cheap Spanish solar energy to flood the French market, hence the inadequate connection over the Pyrenees.
Everyone knows that, including the European Commission, but France is one of the two really big continental players who can do anything they want and cannot be effectively punished. The "everyone is equal, but some are more equal" principle.
If you mean getting rid of oil and gas on a short scale, there won't be majority for that. By 2040 or 2050 maybe, with some significant exceptions (I don't believe in large electric jets; small aircraft maybe).
During winter, France uses ~50% more electricity per day than during summer.
And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
If you don't have month-long battery storage, in order to be fully solar based France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer.
> And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
This doesn't matter. If you look at the monthly stats, solar panels in France produce ~3x more in the summer than the winter at a month by month view. As such, you only need 3x extra overall, and some day to day storage.
Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology. Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) or long term thermal storage.
Yes, its because it is still short of %100 renewables and EU is importing its fossil fuels. When Russia invaded Ukraine it caused a spike in prices, now its coming down. Prices will go down as renewables proliferate, probably we will pay some fixed amount as equipment maintenance fee once its %100.
Only when it’s dark, overcast, winter or really cold. Otherwise it’s mainly due to the extreme overcapacity required to handle distributed unreliable energy sources as well as an increasing fleet of electric cars, stressing every last kilometer of the grid.
And windmills, a reliance on methane gas as gap-filling and a few other issues.
(Sorry, I know snarking is frowned upon on HN - but we choose this collective delusion over the hellish, yet stable, Cherenkov light of nuclear)
I really hate this kind of article. Because they do twist numbers to serve a narrative (on renewable energy) instead of showing the complete picture fairly.
> June 2025 was a milestone month: Solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time ever.
Yes June was a record for Solar power production due to an amazing weather....
But it was a pure disaster for Solar power profitability with an all time low.
The peak was too large for the grid to consume and the price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours.
That should bring serious questions on the ROI of any future investment in solar capacity and about Europe electricity storage capacity.
> Some countries are already nearly 100% renewable. Denmark led with an impressive 94.7% share of renewables in net electricity generated
This is also miss-leading. Production does not mean Consumption.
Denmark is very far from 94% consumption based on renewable. It rely heavily on import from German grid (Coal and Gaz powered) almost every night and this is a disaster in term of CO2 emission.
That leads to emissions over ~140CO2g/kwh in average, meaning way over what other Scandinavians countries are able to do (e.g Sweden < 15gCO2/kwh)
> In total, 15 EU countries saw their share of renewable generation rise year-over-year.
Yes but that does not mean CO2 emissions are falling (which should be the only thing that matter).
Belgium is closing perfectly working nuclear powerplants recently that are providing around 30% of the country consumption.
Meaning the country CO2 emission are expected to increase significantly this year due to that and this is just plain stupid.
Spain might follow a similar track and this is disastrous.
- Renewable are good but what Europe need is massive investment in energy storage through battery and/or pump hydro. And this is nowhere here. Blind praise in solar capacity is counterproductive.
- If we do not carefully control our current capacity of non-controllable renewable in Europe, we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come. And this is the taxpayer will have to sponge all this mess financially speaking.
- What matters is CO2 emission and CO2 reduction, not renewable capacity. This kind of article favors wrong political decisions by putting first and foremost renewable capacity as the only metric that matters. The Belgian nuclear situation is one of these terrible decisions.
To provide some numbers on the storage side of things. On European battery storage [1]:
* 2024 - 21.9 GWh installed.
* 2025 - 29.7 GWh predicted to be installed.
* 2029 - Between 66.6 GWh and 183 GWh to be installed.
The UK also recently received applications for 52.6 GW of storage Long Duration Energy Storage cap and floor scheme [2]. LDES in this context is classed as 8hrs or greater. Seasonal storage is not included.
I don't know if this sufficiently plugs the gaps, but it does show a large increase in installed battery storage, which appears to be accelerating.
The growth is still slow compared to China and the evolution of the international order though. Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
I love exploring these graphs: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
EU is doing just slightly better than US. US has the advantage of its fossil fuels but it's actually China that is doing the revolution. They are accelerating and at some point not too far away will reach abundance and switch off all the fossils.
It's unwise that the new US administration be pushing for the opposite of China. But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
However, electrical solutions are often more efficient, so this can be misleading because a transition means you're getting a large amount "for free" as a result of the improved efficiency.
Instead of moving your car from oil to solar, you're moving the car from oil to electricity, and then electricity is fungible so you don't care that it was made with a solar array - but the efficiency win was from going to electricity.
You have to distinguish between transportation (electricity and oil) and source of energy (only oil).
To have electricity you would need to invest at once in both generation, transport (the grids are not enough), storage and change in use (replace cars with electric ones). Your return will depend as well on the technology developed and none of the above fields is stable yet.
I am a fan of going electric, even if only for more sovereignty, but it is not as simple as "electricity is more efficient".
They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.
How much of total transportation is trains?
So 20% from renewbles, 10% from nuclear, and roughly 25% from fossil fuels and 45% lost as waste heat when using fossil fuels.
So we're more than half way there.
Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU
From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy.
Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.
That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.
Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing
The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost.
It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.
Then you store that energy or find a way to use it. Melt ore when its abundant, then make metal when it is abundant, then dig holes when it is abundant, then use the metal to turn the hole into a reservoir when it is abundant and eventually use the reservoir to pump in and out water as a way to store the abundant energy for use when its not.
All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.
Not saying we should continue using fossil fuels forever, but being unrealistic about how hard the transition to intermittent renewables will be isn't sensible
We’re working on it!
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/09/10/new-alliance-aims-to-unl...
It's a little easier to read if you translate different types of production to CO2 per kWh:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.
You must have some other sources than that site. Downloaded the CSV, and at the risk of misinterpreting the columns here is some simple filtering:
% of total energy generation
Largest generation source This ofc only says something about generation and not consumptionLook at the absolute values, your kettle doesn't run of fractions it runs on absolute power and EU&US are about the same. USA has fractionally lower renewables because they have very large fossil production. EU is making up for its lack of fossils through high efficiency policies.
> But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If I find myself finding obvious "errors" in other people's plans and easy solutions they "just" have to implement then I'm usually missing something.
Europe's strategy to tie themselves economically to Russia for the purpose of peace didn't work out but a lot of the infrastructure and energy investments were made when that was the strategy. The other thing is that you're talking about electricity, fossil fuels have thousands of uses so you can't "drop everything".
> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
If this is not happening without government's help then it's not profitable. Which means a forced transition to solar requires to "drop everything" quite literally.
I'm also loving projects like these [1] popping up all over the place. Looks like they are installing Tesla Megapacks with LFP cells. [2]
[1] https://vcrenewables.com/medway-grid-energy-storage-system/
[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-greenli...
> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
They might've just started the war 4 years earlier, then.
In 2014 Russia decided to attack Ukraine because its political ambitions had been thwarted.
A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine.
Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010.
Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.
You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining.
There is an interesting in-depth analysis by Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... (see page 25, for example).
Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
PS: I built a low-energy house, heat it with a heat pump, and have PV on my roof.
If solar or wind are cheaper than the fuel for gas plants you can save money by deploying them.
Here a blog with an interactive website to explore that:
https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...
> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.
You factored in a new grid and backup nuclear plants/gas power plants requiring >100B investments in Germany or Tesla Megapacks in excess of 100 metric tons? Take a look at what is needed to make Germany “green” by a reputable and independent institute: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
No need to obsess with solar if it doesn't work for you, its just that solar is so good. It uses manufactured devices that you just point to the sky and makes your machine run. For stability of course you need something like nuclear or storage.
Industrialized countries generally need stability when it comes to electricity. People also want to watch TV whenever they like and take a hot shower whenever they feel like it.
Storage helps even out spikes.
In Germany: probably not so much when wind and PV aren’t busy for a month straight and we still need to keep our industry up and running.
We’ll, I’ll take that back - we probably solved all that by running our economy into the ground
Yes that's what nuclear and storage helps with
There is another under discussed alternative UHV power transmission, e.g. south to north: Morocco has great conditions for solar. Or East to West, the sun rises and sets at different times.
We still need more storage and generation, but a better grid would help a lot.
Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.
What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight? I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.
> And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day
You can't generate excess electricity because you don't have enough land or rooftop (I mean maybe you do, I'm talking about the typical homeowner). Utilities can overbuild panels because they're extremely cheap.
LFP batteries have a self-discharge rate of 2-5% per month. Once they're cheap enough, over-building batteries to move summer sunshine into the winter months also becomes an option*. At $100/kwh, you could power Sweden 6 months a year for about $60bn in batteries (yes labor and everything else will probably double that cost). And that doesn't even account for recent advances in sodium batteries, which reportedly bring that price down to $20/kwh
* (Any battery experts know why this might be wrong? I'm using basic arithmetic, not physics. That tells me a battery charged to 100% in July or August will still have > 70% charge left in December)
Germany would require a ballpark of 100 MILLION tons of Teslas Megapack grade batteries to run on battery for 2 weeks - which is even shorter than what we had to endure due to “Dunkelflauten”.
Yes, we had these scenarios of 2+ weeks w/o sufficient renewable energy source MULTIPLE times: Google “Dunkelflaute”.
Why would Germany need to run solely on battery for 2 weeks? Do you expect 2 weeks with 0 sun and wind all over continental Europe?
In any case, at $100/kwh, it would cost $250bn in batteries and maybe the same in installation costs to power Germany for 6 months a year. At the lower $20/kwh price tag, it's a no-brainer. But even assuming the higher price point, $500bn is 1/8 the GDP of Germany. Spending that over 10 years (1/80th of the GDP) to get free power forever doesn't sound like a sweet deal to you?
Gas? Which you then only use 5-10% of the time.
At least that's what I hear people saying.
Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need (read up on Fraunhofer on the thinking: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... ) . But that infrastructure will sit there idle most of the time. That’s not driving down electricity prices. And you’ll still end up with higher carbon emissions than France.
> Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need
Paying for the plant but not having to pay for it to run most of the time is probably cheaper than having it running most of the time.
Maybe there's opportunities for net metering for customers with backup generators. At the right price per kWH, I would run my generator and feed into the grid... personally, my fuel cost is likely too high for that to make sense very often, but I think there's likely some hidden capacity there with the right incentives.
Take a look at this study: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Germany will require 100-150 GW capacity which cost about 1000 EUR/kW and would require an investment of 100+B EUR.
Electricity prices already skyrocketed in Germany and no end in sight.
Listen: I invested in PV, in low energy houses, in heat pumps - but the PV/wind strategy doesn’t work the way people would like them to in their ideology and Germany has proven that.
Solar panels are cheap enough that it pays to have gas plants that never run.
One complements batteries with hydrogen (burned in turbines) or long term thermal storage.
Germany has plenty of salt formations for very cheap hydrogen storage, and there are no geographical constraints on thermal storage.
Tell the Fraunhofer about that.
> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
Because solar is ~5x cheaper and 1000x more deployable
Is solar, in terms of pure amortized cost, given the actual solar power collected, really 5x cheaper?
I'm not doubting you, but we know that in some countries solar will have a power ceiling (cloud cover, etc)
It mystifies me that more people dont get this.
5x cheaper means you can add the cost of storage on top and it's still cheaper than nuclear power.
Because it’s not correct.
You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).
I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.
Solar , wind and batteries are easier to add piecemeal though. Nuclear for countries that don't already have it is a huge investment.
> You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
I'm not aware of that, because it's a lie. Storage is another alternative.
Read up the Fraunhofer study on how Germany can become renewable: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Hint: we’ll still end up producing more carbon emissions than France. Storage doesn’t exist in the magnitude needed.
Ugh, can we stop with the negativity every time anything environmental or energy related comes up.
Regardless of how fast anything was progressing there will always be someone saying NOT FAST ENOUGH, you're not adding anything here.
If you're not the fastest, it means that you're not doing good enough.
OK and did they increase not renewables by 54%? You can't really increase overall capacity from solar, wind etc. Look at what happened in Portugal when it gets cloudy.
Isn't there a sweet spot where solar is too much of your energy mix -- due to its intermittency? I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )
If you're in the Atacama Desert, I doubt it's 40%, but not really relevant.
This is ALL renewables, not just Solar - the article states that Solar is ~20% now in the EU.
Wind typically counts for ~15%, and Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.
So most places can pretty easily get to ~40% solar, ~15% wind, ~15% hydro = ~70% renewable.
Throw in ~20% Nuclear (basically all of Europe before Germany sh*t the bed), and you're at ~90% - with limited need for storage - a large portion of which could come from infra that already exists for pumped hydro and regular overnight solar storage.
We're quite a ways away from diminishing returns.
We're ~8 years away from a global ~40% of electricity coming from solar EVEN IF it continues to grow at ~30% YoY.
>I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
You can get pretty high before the economics get sketchy. Below analysis concluded that for many sunny places that point is in the 90%+. Most of EU will be lower than said sunny places, but point is it's not 40%. And the sprinkling of wind, nuclear, geo, hydro means there is a fair bit of room to still push.
Plus both solar and storage tech is still moving rapidly
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/Ember-24-Hour-S...
Given the development of battery prices (and especially LFP and sodium ion) most new solar capacity will he solar+battery.
With some software tweaks, these are not only base load compatible, but can even take on grid frequency stabilisation.
Check out recent episodes of Tue Volts podcast. It's actually a bit crazy.
I don't know of any specific thresholds, but it's worth mentioning that 54% of Q2 was renewable, and solar peaks in Q2. Solar was also only 36.8% of that renewable generation (just under 20% of Q2's total), so there's a long way to go before solar is 40% of the total energy mix.
If there is an important threshold when solar reaches 40% of the full year's production, then solar will need to almost quadruple before that's a concern. For all of 2024, solar was 22.4% of renewables, and renewables were 47% of the total[1], meaning that solar was 10.5% of total electricity over the full year.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/...
I hope not. More times when electricity prices go negative is hopefully going to open up new market opportunities (outside crypto mining).
Generating chemical feedstocks from CO2, intermittent desalination, whatever process which is predicated on cheap energy.
The issue is not sorely about negative price. It’s about keeping base capacity profitable so the grid doesn’t collapse.
The energy strategy of the EU was hopeless for a long time and is only marginally better now. It’s not as braindead as the monetary union but close. Germany was actively sabotaging France for a long time while having to restart coal power plants and investing in gas fuelled capacity.
Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left.
>Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left
Don't worry, you'll join again eventually.
I’m French. Unless something major changes, I hope we will be out before the UK comes back. I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.
I’m not too surprised about my original comment being downvoted while being entirely factually true. It was a bit much from me to expect people to understand the underside of running too much intermittent energy sources and how this is currently dealt with (the braindead part). I invite the champions of solar to explain to me the current plan of the EU for actually running the whole grid past 2050 while phasing out the coal and gas (hint: there is none).
Anyway I invite everyone to take a look at what the EU used to do nuclear, how it was purposefully omitted from the definition of clean energy for years, how they used to fine France despite its energy being clean, how it forces the French energy operator to sell at a loss, how it impedes France properly managing its dams and then look at who actually pushed for these policies while buying Russian gas and burning coal. The whole thing is a complete joke. At least they apparently saw the light on nuclear. That’s a start.
Funny you would mention the Greek debt crisis, because the next debt crisis looks to be in France.
Different situation. France has only itself to blame for the current situation and has plenty of things it can still do to avoid a crisis. Plus the debt holders are very diversified.
The Greek crisis is very different because the debt was mostly held by German banks - the German did to do something of all these excess savings and the Greek economy suffered a lot from the euro. Reforms were needed but the way the whole thing was handled is a disgrace.
Wouldn't leaving the EU be far worse economically than any of these penalties you mentioned?
Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.
That’s a risky bet but I personally prefer that to the current situation. I would honestly be ok with staying in the union if we could exit the euro while staying but I don’t think it’s possible.
>Better ruined than a colony.
Not sure what you're referring to here?
It’s me being dramatic for useless flair. I edited it out a minute after posting because it adds nothing to the discussion but you read it before I did.
Pray tell, why is the monetary union braindead? Asking for a friend stockpiling lire for collection value
It’s a monetary union with no common fiscal policies and no mechanism to correct disparity between members. Complete train wreck since it has been put in place.
Germany has been abusing it from the start running huge trade surplus, compressing salaries, using its excess savings to buy foreign debts instead of investing and being shielded from monetary appreciation by the consumption and investments of other countries. The euro is basically Germany robbing blind the other members while pretending to be virtuous and blocking most of what could have improved the situation.
> and no mechanism to correct disparity between members
AFAIK, they created some mechanisms after the 2008 crisis. Every country there now effectively prints money in differing rates, and the EU only regulates some limits.
https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/outlooks/european-...
Six-fold increase in battery capacity in Europe predicted by 2029.
Just solar without wind is a terrible idea. Which is why no one's doing it.
It's quite feasible in some places, like India.
not really. At this point, solar is basically free, and having extra free energy has all sorts of benefits. For the EU, in particular, it greatly reduces their dependence on Russian oil and gas. if all you do with extra solar is replace 2 extra hours a day of natural gas consumption, you effectively make yourself have 12% more storage, which decreases Russian leverage.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
in EU: gas, oil is still 60% of usage. You are not going to heat you home during winter with electricity anytime soon, same like we are not all gonna drive electric cars this decade.
Plenty of people are heating their homes with electricity already, that's what heat pumps are for.
North of the Alps, using solar to heat your home in the winter is unrealistic.
In Czechia, winter is already dark enough to make solar in the coldest months a rounding error.
Further north, uh.
Heat pumps account for 2/3 of new heating installations in Germany [1]. Modern buildings with effective insulation seem to make them quite viable, but that hinges on the availability of attractive electricity prices.
The second factor is that carbon-based fuels may become more expensive over time, so perhaps electricity costs “just” needs to remain stable to become attractive.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...
I'm sorry but this thread does not talk about using PV to heat your home in the winter. But it is absolutely possible to use electricity to heat homes, it's widely used in northern countries. And the nice thing about electricity is that it can be generated in one place and used in another.
This thread is talking about reduction of dependence on oil&gas supplied by various nefarious regimes, though. Still quite a challenge in the winter, with barely any sun out there.
"it can be generated in one place and used in another."
It can, but we are far from having such a robust grid all across the continent. I am not even sure if we are getting closer. Both economic and political aspects come into play, which might be harder to address than the purely technical ones.
For example, France really does not want cheap Spanish solar energy to flood the French market, hence the inadequate connection over the Pyrenees.
Everyone knows that, including the European Commission, but France is one of the two really big continental players who can do anything they want and cannot be effectively punished. The "everyone is equal, but some are more equal" principle.
Yes, there are and will be issues. We should have started much sooner. But we absolutely have to do this.
"But we absolutely have to do this."
This = what precisely?
If you mean getting rid of oil and gas on a short scale, there won't be majority for that. By 2040 or 2050 maybe, with some significant exceptions (I don't believe in large electric jets; small aircraft maybe).
Some numbers:
During winter, France uses ~50% more electricity per day than during summer. And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
If you don't have month-long battery storage, in order to be fully solar based France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer.
> And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
This doesn't matter. If you look at the monthly stats, solar panels in France produce ~3x more in the summer than the winter at a month by month view. As such, you only need 3x extra overall, and some day to day storage.
> France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer
So, it's ~15 years away at current growth rates?
But they'll probably just get months-long storage at some point.
> in order to be fully solar based
I don't think anyone is suggesting that.
France has 70% of their power provided by Nuclear.
Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology. Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) or long term thermal storage.
For the latter, see standard-thermal.com
The better way to think about the grids energy mix is some matrix of reliability, predictability, and rotational mass.
Solar and wind have no rotational mass, are unreliable and unpredictable
Is that why electricity in EU is so expensive? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...
Yes, its because it is still short of %100 renewables and EU is importing its fossil fuels. When Russia invaded Ukraine it caused a spike in prices, now its coming down. Prices will go down as renewables proliferate, probably we will pay some fixed amount as equipment maintenance fee once its %100.
Only when it’s dark, overcast, winter or really cold. Otherwise it’s mainly due to the extreme overcapacity required to handle distributed unreliable energy sources as well as an increasing fleet of electric cars, stressing every last kilometer of the grid. And windmills, a reliance on methane gas as gap-filling and a few other issues. (Sorry, I know snarking is frowned upon on HN - but we choose this collective delusion over the hellish, yet stable, Cherenkov light of nuclear)
for an entire year?
I really hate this kind of article. Because they do twist numbers to serve a narrative (on renewable energy) instead of showing the complete picture fairly.
> June 2025 was a milestone month: Solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time ever.
Yes June was a record for Solar power production due to an amazing weather.... But it was a pure disaster for Solar power profitability with an all time low.
The peak was too large for the grid to consume and the price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours.
That should bring serious questions on the ROI of any future investment in solar capacity and about Europe electricity storage capacity.
The article ignores that entirely.
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche#
> Some countries are already nearly 100% renewable. Denmark led with an impressive 94.7% share of renewables in net electricity generated
This is also miss-leading. Production does not mean Consumption.
Denmark is very far from 94% consumption based on renewable. It rely heavily on import from German grid (Coal and Gaz powered) almost every night and this is a disaster in term of CO2 emission.
That leads to emissions over ~140CO2g/kwh in average, meaning way over what other Scandinavians countries are able to do (e.g Sweden < 15gCO2/kwh)
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/3mo/daily
> In total, 15 EU countries saw their share of renewable generation rise year-over-year.
Yes but that does not mean CO2 emissions are falling (which should be the only thing that matter).
Belgium is closing perfectly working nuclear powerplants recently that are providing around 30% of the country consumption.
Meaning the country CO2 emission are expected to increase significantly this year due to that and this is just plain stupid. Spain might follow a similar track and this is disastrous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Belgium
In short, please stop this kind of article.
- Renewable are good but what Europe need is massive investment in energy storage through battery and/or pump hydro. And this is nowhere here. Blind praise in solar capacity is counterproductive.
- If we do not carefully control our current capacity of non-controllable renewable in Europe, we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come. And this is the taxpayer will have to sponge all this mess financially speaking.
- What matters is CO2 emission and CO2 reduction, not renewable capacity. This kind of article favors wrong political decisions by putting first and foremost renewable capacity as the only metric that matters. The Belgian nuclear situation is one of these terrible decisions.
To provide some numbers on the storage side of things. On European battery storage [1]:
* 2024 - 21.9 GWh installed.
* 2025 - 29.7 GWh predicted to be installed.
* 2029 - Between 66.6 GWh and 183 GWh to be installed.
The UK also recently received applications for 52.6 GW of storage Long Duration Energy Storage cap and floor scheme [2]. LDES in this context is classed as 8hrs or greater. Seasonal storage is not included.
I don't know if this sufficiently plugs the gaps, but it does show a large increase in installed battery storage, which appears to be accelerating.
1. https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-e...
2. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/LDES%20...
gold comment
Not everybody seems to think so when I see the number of downvotes on this post.
Sadly, any criticism on renewables, even constructive, is often straight downvoted without any comments nor justifications on Hackernews.
Checking in from Spain, looking forward to our next national blackout (compulsory Earth Day).