| HN Mirror

If consumers want cheaper power, they should advocate for more rapid deployment of wind, solar, battery storage, transmission and interconnectors, demand response, and other technologies to make the price of fossil fuels irrelevant in their electrical costs. Data centers are not a component of cheaper energy bills, importantly. They are demand, and compete with consumers for electricity in the market. Fossil fuel prices are volatile; if you do not want to be exposed to volatile fossil fuel pricing, do not use fossil fuels in your electrical grid. It is unlikely fossil fuels get cheaper in the future, as they will be starved for investment. You cannot control the global fossil fuel market (with the primary suppliers being OPEC+ and the US), but you can control your domestic supply and demand for energy. Europe fossil gas prices are never going to go back down to pre-2020 levels as long as they rely on LNG imports vs supply from Russia, for example. The faster Europe pushes out fossil generation in its grid, the faster energy prices go back down (cost of solar at a certain points during the day goes to 0 once enough solar has been deployed; eventually, the cost of generation becomes a much smaller component of electricity prices, as the dominate factors become distribution and infrastructure to get generation to loads).

The above is crystal clear in the graphics in my citation above "Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs."

Additional citations:

EU expects to add record renewable capacity in 2025, industry sees headwinds - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... - April 10th, 2025

> EU countries are expected to add 89GW of new renewable energy capacity in 2025, including 70GW of solar and 19GW of wind, according to Commission projections shared with Reuters. The projections are based on industry data.

The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025

> US financial markets are favoring renewable energy over fossil fuels, with global investment for new renewable energy development reaching a record $386 billion during the first half of 2025.

> Revenue forecasts show a widening dichotomy between clean and dirty industries, with renewables expected to report 16% sales growth next year and 21% in 2027, while traditional energy companies report 1% and 6% sales growth.

> Global renewable power is forecast to increase by 4,600 gigawatts by the end of the decade, an amount equivalent to adding the generation capacity of China, the EU and Japan. (my note: 4 years to add 4.6TW of renewables globally)

> Even as the US and European Union recently increased their reliance on coal, solar dethroned the fossil fuel mainstay last year, becoming the world’s most installed energy generation technology according to BloombergNEF’s 2025 Power Transition Trends report. “In 2015, solar power seemed far from overtaking coal, constrained both by scale and economics,” BloombergNEF said in report this month. Yet, within a decade, solar costs have fallen so dramatically that the dynamic has entirely reversed. Solar is now two times cheaper than the fossil fuel.” So-called green energy is the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy power generator in the US, even without incentives, according to Lazard Inc.

Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+) - https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... - June 2025

(enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year, and we're fighting over ancient sunlight pumped from the ground; why? we already solved fusion, just at a distance using the sun and batteries; 1GW of solar is installed globally every 15 hours as of this comment)