[jaidhyani]

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

Quick stats for the US:

In 2022, 11.3% of energy was generated by renewables (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, wave, and tidal). It's been growing at just under 0.5pp/year since 2007, when it was at 4.4%.

This is primarily driven by wind and solar. Wind power took off around 2000, and in the years since has grown from 5.6TWh to 434.3TWh in 2022. Solar power took off around 2011 and has since grown from 1.82TWh to 205.1TWh. Hydropower remains the #2 renewable in the US, with a noisy-but-nondirectional generation between 200TWh and 350TWh going back to the 60's, but solar appears poised to overtake it by 2024. All other renewables combined are holding steady or slightly dropping at ~75TWh (though anecdotally there may be some large geothermal capacity coming online in the medium-term future that would change this).

Narrowing the focus from all-energy-generation (e.g. including fuel) to specifically electricity, the US is currently generating 22.3% of its electricity from renewables, a number that has been steadily increasing at about 1pp/year since it was 8.4% in 2007.

Naïve extrapolation suggests we're about 75 years out from 100% renewables for electricity, but of course there are reasons to doubt that. For one, we've recently passed the tipping point where renewables are just straightforwardly cheaper than other sources of energy in many circumstances, and improvements in technology and infrastructure will just continue to make this true in more and more cases.

[vlovich123]

There’s actually every reason to believe we’ll plateau sooner rather than later because solar doesn’t work in the dark and I don’t think there’s a single grid scale battery system installed yet (the famous one in Australia that Tesla made so much news about is an arbitrage play that has nothing to do with solar energy storage). Cost is not the only factor that determines the energy mix.

There’s literally no existence proof yet that solar can supplant fossil fuels so everything is prognostication and articles of faith that to me seem overly optimistic. All existing growth in solar and wind is paired with a growth in fossil fuels too. So the argument is look at other positive data and yet nuclear somehow seems to directly correlate with fossil fuel usage in the grid without having to look at anything. In other words, our energy usage grows faster than solar and wind power plant construction can come online / it’s when solar/wind isn’t available meaning the difference is supplied by fossil fuels.