The coming cheap electricity boom

 A comment by Jilles van Gurp, on Electrek's Solar and wind are covering all new power demand in 2025. 

Basically the penny that hasn't dropped yet with a lot of people is that there are going to be two types of countries. 1) the type of country that covers all their power needs with self-generated, cheap, clean power 2) the type of country that are hopelessly dependent for most of their power needs on both expensive fossil fuel imports and domestic fossil fuel companies taking huge chunks of their GDP out of the economy.

One of those will do really well in competing with the other. That's China vs. the US right now. Everything the US does, China can do cheaper, faster, and better. That really matters when you are selling to the rest of the world like China is and the US seems to be struggling to do. It really is that simple. If the US wants to have an export market in the future, it needs to let go of fossil fuel. The sooner it figures that out the better it's chances.

China is on a track to go cold turkey on fossil fuel by the 2060s. Yes they are building coal plants. But those are not running at full capacity anymore. They are hitting peak coal even as they build more plants. Solar/wind are growing faster. Compound growth curves mean all that coal capacity is rapidly becoming less relevant. Just like the Chinese have been planning. If anything, that's speeding up because they are doing unexpectedly well with solar and battery.

After WWII, the world entered a period of sustained high growth, with declining inequality, low unemployment, and a belief that their children would be better off.  In retrospect, a golden age. 

It was driven by three forces:

• High taxes on the rich, which were used to boost education, science, transport and economic progress.
• Keynesian economics, which advised governments to increase spending during recessions, instead of embracing austerity, which is the current failing orthodoxy.
• Cheap energy.  The global oil price was controlled by the Texas Railroad Commission, and remained stable until the oil crisis.

These three drivers of prosperity failed with the Vietnam War; the surge in the oil price as US supply declined and OPEC flexed its muscles and instituted an oil embargo; and the rise of neo-liberalism.

Today, solar and battery costs continue to decline, battery costs precipitously.   This means that the cost of energy will once again be low, and even better than stable---it will be falling.   Countries which embrace renewables will have low and falling energy costs.  Countries which don't, will reduce their growth rate and standard of living.  As Jilles van Gurp says, it's obvious.  

As an aside, the countries which will benefit the most from cheap solar are in the sunbelt, between latitudes 30 North and South, and they're mostly developing countries, which have hitherto been held back by poor access to electricity.  That is all changing.  Since they are so far inside their production possibility frontier, these poorer countries embracing renewables could achieve very high growth rates.  China sees this.  The US, blinded by racism and arrogance, calls them "shithole" countries, and completely missed the point.

(Source)

Renewables covering all new power demand this year

 From Electrek

Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember. The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generation won’t increase. [Recall that the Covid Crash led to a deep, though short-lived, recession.  2025 is not a recession year, though 2026 may be]

Solar and wind aren’t just expanding; they’re outpacing global electricity demand itself. Solar generation jumped 498 TWh (+31%) compared to the same period last year, already topping all the solar power produced in 2024. Wind added another 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they supplied 635 TWh of new clean electricity, beating out the 603 TWh rise in global demand (+2.7%).

That lifted solar and wind to 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of the year, up from 15.2% year-over-year. That brought the total share of renewables in global electricity – solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy, and geothermal – to 43%. Fossil fuels slid to 57.1%, down from 58.7%.

For the first time in 2025, renewables collectively generated more electricity than coal. And fossil generation as a whole has stalled. Fossil output slipped slightly by 0.1% (-17 TWh) through the end of Q3. Ember expects no fossil-fuel growth for the full year, driven by clean power growth outpacing demand.

China and India are partly driving that shift. In China, fossil generation fell 52 TWh (-1.1%) as clean energy met all new demand, resulting from a structural change in its power system. India saw fossil generation drop 34 TWh (-3.3%), thanks to record solar and wind growth and milder weather.

Solar is doing the heavy lifting. It’s now the single biggest driver of change in the global power sector, with growth more than three times larger than any other electricity source in the first three quarters of the year.

“Record solar power growth and stagnating fossil fuels in 2025 show how clean power has become the driving force in the power sector,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember. “Historically a growth segment, fossil power now appears to be entering a period of stagnation and managed decline. China, the largest source of fossil growth, has turned a corner, signaling that reliance on fossil fuels to meet growing power demand is no longer required.”

Electricity demand rose 2.7% in the first three quarters of 2025, far slower than the 4.9% jump seen last year when extreme heatwaves pushed up cooling demand in China, India, and the US. This year’s milder weather helped take some pressure off the grid, making it easier for clean energy to close the gap.

For the first time outside of major crises such as the pandemic or the global financial crash, clean energy growth has not only kept up with demand but surpassed it. The next big question: can solar, wind, and the rest of the clean power sector keep up this pace consistently? If they can, 2025 may be remembered as the year global fossil generation plateaued. [peaked]

I talked about EMBER's report for the first 6 months of 2025, here.  The conclusions are pretty much the same.  Renewables are beating fossil fuels, partly because of slower demand growth because of cooler summers, as well as because of massive growth in wind and solar.   So it is possible that in 2026, hot summers and higher economic growth will increase demand again, by more than the rise in electricity generated by renewables.  But it is unlikely, and if it does happen, renewables will overtake demand again in 2027.  Emissions have probably peaked.  Even if their decline will be slow, at first.

Musk's politics lost Tesla 1 million car sales

 

From Electrek

We’ve been talking about the impact of Elon Musk’s venture into politics on the Tesla brand for years, but now a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is putting some staggering numbers to it.

According to a new working paper, Musk’s “polarizing and partisan actions” have directly cost Tesla over a million vehicle sales in the US alone.

The study, titled “The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales,” argues that without this effect, Tesla’s sales would have been 67% to 83% higher between October 2022 and April 2025. That’s an absolutely massive number, and it suggests Tesla’s recent sales slump isn’t just about “increased competition” or “pent-up demand” being satisfied.

It’s about the brand.

The researchers from Yale and NBER didn’t just run a poll. They dug into county-level, monthly new vehicle registration data for all EVs and hybrids from March 2020 to April 2025.

They used a “difference-in-differences” analysis. In simple terms, they tracked how sales trends changed in heavily Democratic-leaning counties versus heavily Republican-leaning counties. The “treatment” event that broke the trend? Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022.

Here’s what the data shows:

Before Oct. 2022: Counties with more Democrats showed an increasing preference for Teslas compared to Republican counties. This makes sense, as we know EV adoption has historically been higher among liberal-leaning buyers.

After Oct. 2022: The trend dramatically reverses. As Musk’s political activities—including “relaxed content moderating of far-right and extremist voices” and massive campaign contributions—ramped up, Democratic-leaning counties began “shifting away from Tesla purchases”.

The study is blunt, noting Musk’s actions “antagonized his most loyal customer base”.

The paper runs two different models to quantify the damage, and the results are “remarkably similar”.

Aggregated from October 2022 through April 2025, the “Musk partisan effect” cost Tesla between 1.0 and 1.26 million vehicle sales.

Again, that’s in the US alone. Tesla’s sales in Europe have also been crashing over the last 2 years. Some of that has been attributed to Musk’s political activism, but Tesla is also facing tougher competition in Europe, where more EV models are available due to fewer protectionist rules.

Solar power doesn't sleep any more

 From Electrek

A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.

The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. [At 1 GW per hour, the battery has 17 hours of storage.  This seems a lot!] The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.

Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.[Manchester is famouly cloudy and wet--latitude 53 degrees north. Berlin is also 53 degrees north.  New York is only 40 degrees N.  If you also have wind in your grid, you should be able to go to 100% renewables up to latitude 53.]

“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”

This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.

It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections [provided they are co-located with the solar farm].

In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.

Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places [and even in their less sunny places].