Volewica

Friday, October 30, 2026

Trump is good for the climate???

Nighttime solar

Solar met a record 10% of global electricity in H1 2026.
Solar's share in global power generation rose from 8.9% in H1 2025 to just over 10% in H1 2026, nearly doubling its market share from 5.6% in H1 2023. Solar generation grew seven times faster than total power generation over the last three years, making it the dominant driver transforming global power systems.

Over a quarter of global electricity demand at midday becomes near-zero at night.
On the average day in H1 2026, solar met over 25% of global electricity demand between 11am and 2pm, before dropping to near zero between 8pm and 5am. In more mature markets, solar met over half of midday demand before again dropping to near zero after sunset. Without storage, the non-sunny hours remain a stronghold for fossil power.

Batteries deployed in 2026 could shift over a third of new daily solar generation.
Expected battery additions of 459 GWh in 2026 (+50% year-on-year) could shift 34% of new daily solar generation to non-sunny hours, nearly doubling from 18% in 2025. This is a theoretical ceiling: in practice, not all batteries are used to shift solar, and many remain underutilised. Better market design and optimisation are needed to ensure batteries are used to their full potential.

Leading markets added enough batteries to shift over three-quarters of their new solar.
Bulgaria (77%) and Chile (76%) installed enough new battery storage in 2025 to shift over three quarters of their new daily solar generation, making them global leaders, followed by Australia (60%). Bulgaria jumped from almost no batteries in 2023 to 3 GWh in 2025, then more than doubled again to 8.6 GWh by May 2026, showing how quickly markets can move.
Batteries are already moving solar into non-sunny hours in leading markets.
In California, solar plus batteries met over a quarter of electricity demand during the evening peak (7–9pm) on the average day in H1 2026. In Chile and Bulgaria, solar was effectively absent from the evening in H1 2023 but on the average day in H1 2026, batteries delivered over 10% of evening electricity demand (7–9pm) in Chile and nearly a quarter (24%) in Bulgaria.
Cheap daytime solar has become the most powerful transformative force reshaping power grids globally, growing faster than any other source of electricity.
Now batteries have become cheap and good enough to unlock the next stage of solar growth with anytime solar. Delivering solar in non-sunny hours, the current stronghold of fossil power, changes everything: solar's role in global power systems can be far bigger than previously thought possible.

Solar panels can be fixed- or variable-tilt. With variable-tilt solar, the panels rotate during the day to face east in the morning and west in the afternoon. This produces a much "squarer" output profile than fixed panels, where output looks more like a conic, as the chart below shows. I discuss this output profile here.

From the shape of the country profiles that EMBER shows, solar in all countries is clearly still dominated by fixed-tilt panels, though variable-tilt have become more common recently. New solar farms are likely to be variable-tilt and to have co-located, integral batteries. From the POV of the grid operator, they would look like baseload power plants.

The problem of dunkelflaute (cold, dark, still) remains. Prudent grid operators would plan for dunkelflaute conditions on 8-10% of the days each year, even though in practice, it's more like 4%. The EMBER report discusses some potential solutions, but except for demand management, where consumers are offered financial incentives to reduce demand when dunkelflaute conditions emerge, or hydro, the technologies are all new. For now, we'll need to use gas peaking.

EMBER's conclusion is that in sunny places, solar can reliably supply 90% of electricity demand. By "sunny places" I assume they mean the sunbelt, say between 30 or 35 degrees north and south of the equator.

But what about places further north (or south), closer to the poles?

This chart, from Jan Rosenow's Bright Spots (on Substack) shows how wind and solar at a higher latitude (Germany) are seasonally inversely correlated with solar (useful) but also how wind is very variable day to day (less useful). This day-to-day variability is reflected in wind's capacity factor. (If the wind blew all the time, its capacity factor would be 100%.) However, the further apart wind farms are, the less their output is correlated, which reduces average variability. Wind farms in Sweden, for example, might be producing high output when wind farms in Germany are not producing much, and vice versa. This reduces the hour-to-hour and day-to-day fluctuations of the two combined, moving wind's output closer to a baseload pattern. However, in my opinion (and I haven't done the calcs), some storage capacity for wind output would be necessary even before we consider dunkelflaute. But see this piece Getting to Zero Carbon in Germany