Technology

59378 readers

3611 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

254

World now has five times more photovoltaics than nuclear power (www.pv-magazine.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

“But even in the only country that is massively building, China, nuclear development is comparatively marginal. In 2023, China started up one new nuclear reactor, that is plus 1 GW, and more than 200 GW of solar alone. Solar generated 40% more power than nuclear and all non-hydro renewables—mainly wind, solar, and biomass—generated four times as much as nuclear.”
The report also highlights how nuclear power is being challenged not only by the strong growth of solar and wind, but also by battery storage, whose costs are projected to decline below those of coal-fired and nuclear power plants by around 2025 in China. “Solar plus storage is already significantly lower than nuclear power in most markets today, as well as highly competitive with other low-emissions sources of electricity that are commercially available today,” it also notes.
The authors also cite data from investment bank Lazard revealing that solar-plus-storage can already be cheaper than gas peaking and new nuclear. “The competitive cost and large-scale availability of variable renewable energy sources combined with firming options—especially storage—could well turn out to be the game-changer of energy policy in the years to come,” they further explain.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It’s not an exponential curve. It’s slower than that.

It’s more than linear; we are adding more capacity each year than the year before. But added capacity per year as a percentage of the previous years total is a decreasing.

If it was exponential the growth would be a straight(ish) line when plotted on a logarithmic scale… it’s not. On a log scale the line inflects.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's exponential.

https://www.livemint.com/industry/energy/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world-11724312451921.html

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Whoever wrote that article is playing fast and loose with the definition of exponential.

Here’s the actual data of global electricity source on a log scale for the past ~15 years

Notice that the line for both wind and solar is inflecting to the right. If it was exponential it would be straight.

The time between each doubling of output is increasing.

It’s close, but not enough to be exponential growth.

It was exponential for a while but it’s slowing down in the last decade or two.