The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[lpetrich]

US pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects • The Register

As the Iran war pushes up energy prices, the Trump administration is paying offshore wind developers to walk away from projects and invest instead in fossil fuel infrastructure.

The US Department of the Interior (DoI) announced on Monday two "historic" agreements under which the firms behind the Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind projects will voluntarily terminate their offshore wind leases.

In return, the DoI will reimburse the companies with taxpayers' cash, to the tune of $765 million in the case of Bluepoint Wind, and $120 million for Golden State Wind.

There is a catch, of course: the leaseholders must first invest a comparable amount in qualifying US conventional energy projects (i.e., oil, gas, or liquefied natural gas infrastructure) before they can recover the money tied to their offshore wind leases.

• Bluepoint Wind - offshore at New Jersey and New York
• Golden State Wind - Morro Bay floating wind turbines

What justification?

Washington's justification for these actions is that it is all part of President Trump's "Energy Dominance Agenda" to "leverage the nation's natural resources" to benefit American citizens and help lower everyday energy costs.

"President Trump is focused on providing affordable and reliable energy to American citizens," claimed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a prepared remark.

Then claiming that wind energy and solar energy have to be subsidized.

 

[lpetrich]

CATL secures world's largest sodium-ion battery order with 60 GWh deal

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) and energy storage integrator HyperStrong have signed a strategic cooperation agreement for sodium-ion batteries, marking a milestone in the industrialisation of this emerging battery technology.

...
According to the company, the collaboration demonstrates that CATL has overcome all challenges in the mass production chain of sodium-ion batteries and possesses large-scale delivery capabilities.

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Sodium-ion batteries offer several advantages, including wide temperature adaptability, outstanding high-temperature cycle life, lower heat generation during operation, smaller cell expansion stress, and safety stability. In long-duration energy storage applications, they can simplify the overall architecture of storage systems, reduce auxiliary energy consumption, and improve station operating efficiency and overall economics.

It looks like Na-ion batteries are climbing the experience curve that many other new technologies have climbed. Na-ion has an edge over Li-ion from Na being a much more common element than Li.

 

[lpetrich]

Science’s 2025 Breakthrough of the Year: The unstoppable rise of renewable energy | Science | AAAS

This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.

Electrify Europe now: homegrown electricity is the way out of Europe’s energy crisis - WindEurope

The war in Iran is another painful reminder of Europe’s overdependence on fossil fuel imports The EU imports 64% of the energy it consumes – a structural weakness. Electrification with homegrown electricity is Europe’s only future proof energy security plan.

Wind energy is here to deliver. It reduces Europe’s import dependence. It stabilises prices. And it keeps industrial value creation in Europe. Since the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe has produced more homegrown renewable energy and imported fewer energy products.

Solar, wind meet 99 pct of new global demand as batteries help deliver "round-the-clock resource"

Solar – as noted above – was the big star of the year, with new PV generation meeting 75 per cent of the net increase in global power demand, growing by a record 636 TWh in 2025 to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30 per cent jump on 2024.

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The increase in global solar capacity was 18 times as large as that of gas (+36 TWh), which was the only fossil power source that grew in 2025, Ember says.

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In the context of the current Middle East conflict, Ember notes that the solar generation added in 2025 would be sufficient to displace gas-fired electricity equivalent to all LNG exports through the Strait of Hormuz in the same year, estimated at 550 TWh.

 

[lpetrich]

Solar growth in China and India powers clean energy surge by 2025 | AP News

Clean power generation grew 887 terawatt hours last year, exceeding overall global electricity demand growth of 849 terawatt hours, according to a report by energy think tank Ember, released after midnight Tuesday London time.

Even if climate change is not real, clean energy is a good idea | Climate Invested - I particularly like the self-reliance of having solar panels on one's house's roof. Buy them and that's it.

Solar and wind outpace coal as energy crisis fails to spark fossil fuel revival | Euronews - "Fears of a ‘coal comeback’ triggered by the Iran war energy crisis are not supported by the data."

Trump’s ‘fossil fuelled war’ is the perfect opportunity to end reliance on oil and gas, experts say | Euronews - "During a time of massive geopolitical tension, governments will meet to discuss how to transition away from fossil fuels - the source of the current energy shock - and towards abundant, low-cost, reliable renewable energy."

Who’d have thought a fossil-fuel shill like Trump would be the one to spark a green revolution? | George Monbiot | The Guardian - "The US attack on Iran has made the need for renewable energy inarguable. Environmentalists are now being seen for the pragmatists that they are"

Donald Trump has done more to accelerate the energy transition than anyone else alive. Fossil fuel companies bankrolled his presidential campaign to stop the transition in its tracks. But when you back a volatile narcissist, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, you shouldn’t expect to control the outcome.

It’s not that the fossils are suffering yet. As prices have soared since Trump and Netanyahu attacked Iran, oil executives have been selling shares at gobsmacking prices: the CEO of Chevron, for example, has cashed $104m so far this year. Vladimir Putin has also received a massive boost to his Ukraine invasion budget. As promised, Trump has gutted clean energy rules and programmes, green alternatives and environmental science. A fortnight ago, he stated, with the usual quantum of evidence (zero): “The environmentalists, I mean, they are terrorists … I call them environmental terrorists.”

But Trump’s illegal war, waged at terrible cost, is also focusing minds in governments around the world. It’s a demonstration not just that the orange emperor cannot be trusted, but also that fossil fuels cannot be trusted. Concentrated in certain regions, in the hands of either unreliable allies, potential opponents or outright enemies, dependent on long supply lines that can easily be disrupted, subject to price volatility that can trigger regime change in almost any country that relies on them, they now look less like a lifeline than a liability.

 

[lpetrich]

Europe’s Energy Problem Isn’t the Transition—It’s That Europe Never Finished It | OilPrice.com - "Europe’s energy transition problem is not moving too fast, but stopping halfway—investing in renewables without building enough grids, storage, and system flexibility"

Large solar farms in the UAE may accidentally create rainstorms that could reshape how deserts manage water shortages | TechRadar - "Dark solar panels in a massive desert could influence clouds and rainfall"

How South Korea plans to use the Iran crisis to spur a renewables revolution | South Korea | The Guardian

Some selections from Renewable Energy: safe, clean, sustainable energy for our future

Progress on "green" hydrogen, hydrogen generated from renewable sources, is still slow - Hydrogen Societies for a Green Sustainable Carbon Free Future Now! - but it's continuing. It may take some and but I think that it can be done.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Europe’s Energy Problem Isn’t the Transition—It’s That Europe Never Finished It | OilPrice.com - "Europe’s energy transition problem is not moving too fast, but stopping halfway—investing in renewables without building enough grids, storage, and system flexibility"

I just don't get the storage thing. You need how much storage for night-time? How much redundant storage for night-time? How much more redundant storage for emergencies?

The idea of stuffing enough people into a battery to power a country should be absurd enough on the face of it.

Progress on "green" hydrogen, hydrogen generated from renewable sources, is still slow - Hydrogen Societies for a Green Sustainable Carbon Free Future Now! - but it's continuing. It may take some and but I think that it can be done.

In Costa Rica where they have a surplus of hydro energy. But the biggest problem with hydrogen is storage and transfer. Hydrogen only works for cars if you can get the hydrogen created at the station. But you really can't facilitate that. So you'd need a central distribution center in a population area.

It makes a ton more sense to go the avenue of green ammonia than green hydrogen. The world needs ammonia and its creation is the largest global creator of greenhouse emissions.

 

[steve_bank]

Also China is going nuclear.

They have d eloped a standard design which they are beginning to mass produce.

Estimated long term cost about 5% of American start up costs for a nuclear reactor.

China is thinking out a hundred years or more.

Meanwhile Trump is building a new ballroom.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Europe’s Energy Problem Isn’t the Transition—It’s That Europe Never Finished It | OilPrice.com - "Europe’s energy transition problem is not moving too fast, but stopping halfway—investing in renewables without building enough grids, storage, and system flexibility"

I just don't get the storage thing. You need how much storage for night-time? How much redundant storage for night-time? How much more redundant storage for emergencies?

The idea of stuffing enough people into a battery to power a country should be absurd enough on the face of it.

Thou shalt not address the King's attire!!!

Progress on "green" hydrogen, hydrogen generated from renewable sources, is still slow - Hydrogen Societies for a Green Sustainable Carbon Free Future Now! - but it's continuing. It may take some and but I think that it can be done.

In Costa Rica where they have a surplus of hydro energy. But the biggest problem with hydrogen is storage and transfer. Hydrogen only works for cars if you can get the hydrogen created at the station. But you really can't facilitate that. So you'd need a central distribution center in a population area.

It makes a ton more sense to go the avenue of green ammonia than green hydrogen. The world needs ammonia and its creation is the largest global creator of greenhouse emissions.

Yeah, hydrogen is too much of a problem to ship. It should be used on-site.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Also China is going nuclear.

They have d eloped a standard design which they are beginning to mass produce.

Estimated long term cost about 5% of American start up costs for a nuclear reactor.

China is thinking out a hundred years or more.

Meanwhile Trump is building a new ballroom.

Amazing what you can do i you don't really care about low probability problems.

 

[robnisch]

Can flywheels be a part of the storage problem?
From what I have read they are good at smoothing out power lags.

 

[bilby]

Can flywheels be a part of the storage problem?
From what I have read they are good at smoothing out power lags.

Flywheels, like batteries, are good for grid stability tasks. And useless for long-term storage of the kind needed to compensate for the intermittency of wind and solar power.

A grid scale flywheel might have a 20MW peak output, and store enough energy for around an hour; You would only need maybe five or ten billion such units ar a cost of maybe $50 million a pop, to store the necessary electricity to run the USA on intermittent renewables.

Of course, you would need to replace them every few decades.

 

[steve_bank]

Can flywheels be a part of the storage problem?
From what I have read they are good at smoothing out power lags.

You can buy commercial flywheel power back up systems.

The Princeton Tokamak fusion reactor used a large underground flywheel for tor the power spike e needed to initiate fusion. The grid could not suppl;y the peak power, it was spu8n up slopwly.

NSTX-U (National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade): The current primary fusion experiment at PPPL, NSTX-U, uses two 730-ton flywheel generators to power its magnets. These rotors store 2,250 megajoules of energy, allowing them to convert electrical energy from the grid into rotational energy and then release it in rapid pulses to heat plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius.

 

[steve_bank]

Also China is going nuclear.

They have d eloped a standard design which they are beginning to mass produce.

Estimated long term cost about 5% of American start up costs for a nuclear reactor.

China is thinking out a hundred years or more.

Meanwhile Trump is building a new ballroom.

Amazing what you can do i you don't really care about low probability problems.

I have not looked at he designs. There are intrinsically safe reactor designs, they cann ever go runaway.

When you fly a commercial jett here are low probabilities of a fatal failure, but they do occur.

In the 80s or early 90s a commercial jet lost the electrical generator on one engine, then on the other engine. When hey switched to emergency battery power the battery failed. The company I pwored at made a componernt in the charging system. It was not the problem

Wat saved the pane was the controls had cables to the control surfaces. Fly by wire would have crashed.

Triple redundancy failed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Also China is going nuclear.

They have d eloped a standard design which they are beginning to mass produce.

Estimated long term cost about 5% of American start up costs for a nuclear reactor.

China is thinking out a hundred years or more.

Meanwhile Trump is building a new ballroom.

Amazing what you can do i you don't really care about low probability problems.

I have not looked at he designs. There are intrinsically safe reactor designs, they cann ever go runaway.

I'm not thinking of a runaway, but of a Fukushima.

When you turn off a reactor the power drops to about 3%, not to 0%. If you can't cool that 3% it will destroy itself.

When you fly a commercial jett here are low probabilities of a fatal failure, but they do occur.

In the 80s or early 90s a commercial jet lost the electrical generator on one engine, then on the other engine. When hey switched to emergency battery power the battery failed. The company I pwored at made a componernt in the charging system. It was not the problem

Wat saved the pane was the controls had cables to the control surfaces. Fly by wire would have crashed.

Triple redundancy failed.

Note that Chinese (and Russian) planes are not competitive on the world market due to the lack of adequate reliability.

 

[bilby]

I'm not thinking of a runaway, but of a Fukushima.

When you turn off a reactor the power drops to about 3%, not to 0%. If you can't cool that 3% it will destroy itself.

So what? Expensive industrial gear destroys itself every day. The owners are sad when that happens, so they try to make it unlikely, particularly when the expense is very high.

The death toll as a consequence of the destruction of Fukushima Daichi was zero (one, if you agree with the courts that a heavy smoker suffered instant onset cancer due to ionising radiation). There were two cases of radiation burns that sent the victims to hospital overnight.

This is one of the world's least dangerous industrial accidents, and occurred in the context of the largest earthquake ever recorded, and the subsequent tsunami.

The idea that Fukushima even needs worrying about when building a nuclear plant anywhere not directly on an active geological fault is insane; The idea that that concern should be felt by anyone other than insurers and underwriters is absurd.

Nothing is perfectly safe, but the technology that is closest is nuclear fission power. It's so safe it makes commercial aviation look like a bunch of devil-may-care clowns, wantonly careless of human life.

The biggest problem in the nuclear industry is that they (or rather, their regulators, driven by unreasoning fear) care too much about genininely negligible risks with utterly trivial consequences, and as a result price themselves out of a market that they should easily dominate, as producers of ultra-low carbon emissions electricity.

In a reasonable world where all technologies allowed similar levels of risk, wind and solar would be struggling to get a look in.

 

[steve_bank]

Fukushima was caused by loss of the power suppl;y to keep coolant flowing in the redactors. Poor site planning did not take into account flooding from a tsunami.

The government report also said a contributing issue was the Japanese cultural deference to a hierarchical power structure. Immediate initiative on site might have limited the damage.


IT is easy to shut down the core. Simple weighted mechanical systems tat inset control rods when power fails. The problem is it takes time for the core to cool. Result is core meltdown..

A nuclear plant's core fission reaction (chain reaction) can be stopped in seconds (1–5 seconds for small reactors, 30–60 seconds for larger ones) via a process called a scram. However, radioactive decay heat continues, necessitating active cooling to reach cold shutdown (below \(200^{\circ}\text{F}\)), which takes about 24–48 hours

A core meltdown is a runaway condition, 'the China syndrome'.

As I member Three Mile Island was a combination of instrument and human error. A control room gauge did not properly show the loss of coolant in the core.

The 1979 Three Mile Island accident was primarily caused by a combination of equipment failure, design deficiencies, and operator errors, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The Kemeny Commission and other investigations found that Met-Ed (the operator), Babcock & Wilcox (the designer), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shared blame for failing to handle the

Chernobyl was caused by a known bad design and human error. Operators deliberatlyy disabled safety systems to run a test

Airplane safety today is the result of a long history of jet failures and crashes that led to improved safety over decades. The process is ongoing.

My point of the jet failure is that we all in daily life ace small probabilities of death and injury everyday, without realizing it.