> Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7 per cent of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power.
- On 2026-04-12 16:45 GMT+2, 22,67% of electricity consumed by Albania is imported from Greece, which generates 22% of its electricity from gas. Interestingly, Albania exports about as much to Montenegro as it imports from Greece.
Bhutan:
- 100% hydro, makes perfect sense
Nepal:
- 98% hydro, a bit of solar for good measure
Iceland:
- 70% hydro, 30% geo
Paraguay:
- 99,9% hydro
Ethiopia:
- 96,4% hydro
DRC
- 99.6% hydro
So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!
(I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)
I guess somewhat of a fun fact: Albania has rented(!) two floating(!) oil-powered power plants near the city of Vlöre that are there in case of emergency. The last time they were really needed was in 2022 (if I remember correctly), but these days they're not turned on any more than they need to be to make sure they're operating properly. That very expensive backup system is basically the only non-renewable source in the whole country, and most of the time it's just sitting there doing nothing.
Being powered almost entirely by hydro means that the system is highly susceptible to droughts, so then they either have to spin up those oil plants from time to time or import electricity from abroad. I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s. The country used to have its own oil power plant that it heavily relied on before that decision, which slowly produced less and less until it was shut down for good in 2007. Some images of it from 2019: https://www.oneman-onemap.com/en/2019/06/26/the-abandoned-po...
Not increasing but cancelling plans on phasing out. Here in The Netherlands, an absolutely minuscule country of ~18 million people, two coal plants will remain online that previously would've been phased out.
And this is an expected problem with renewables that can be engineered around. It's unlikely the whole world has a drought at once during a calm night, so developing ways to transmit power long distances will be important.
The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them.
> By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally.
HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.
> Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and
still come out ahead of nuclear.
Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and January. Worse, if you electrify heating then it's not just that solar supplies less in the winter, you also have more demand in the winter.
By this point you're not just overbuilding by a bit, you'd need five times as much or more in January as in July. "Five times as much" is already over what it costs to use nuclear. Then it gets worse, because you now have a price of zero during the summer and even the spring and fall because of the massive oversupply and lower demand, so you now have to recover the entire cost of the overbuild during the three months when you're generating the least amount of power.
Then it gets worse yet, because heating demand is higher at night and we haven't yet added the cost of storage.
Okay, let’s say that we use solar + battery to cover everything but Nov, Dec, Jan, when the days are too short. Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery.
So we end up using nuclear 1/4 of the time. But unfortunately, nuclear’s cost is in the capital expense, not the operating expense. We pay about the same amount for it regardless of whether we’re using it or not. So if we’re only using 1/4 the energy, the cost per watt of nuclear energy is effectively 4x larger.
This incentivizes further build-out of solar, catching those sweet winter profits (now 4x larger!), further squeezing nuclear’s usage, driving up its prices, and incentivizing even more solar.
Eventually nuclear gets squeezed out and solar’s profit margins go from “astronomical” (naturally, it’s power from the sun, nyuck nyuck) to “low margin.” But they’re still making money. Whoever built the nuclear plant is left with a very expensive stranded asset.
At least, that’s my understanding. I’m not a power company accountant. What I observe, though, is that power companies who do employ accountants aren’t building nuclear. They’re building shit-tons of solar. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because they’re hippies who hate nuclear.
> Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery.
The way energy markets work is that prices change based on supply and demand. So you build a lot of solar and then the price goes down at times when solar generation is high. (There isn't really enough solar in the grid for this to have happened yet in most places.)
Because nuclear has high capital costs but low unit costs, it continues generating all the time even if prices are lower some of the time. It needs to hit a particular average price but will take essentially any instantaneous price. It can't operate with an average price of $0.02/kWh but it can sell for that at noon in July as long as it's getting enough to offset it at midnight in December.
So, you add a bunch of solar to the grid and as a result the price of electricity during daylight hours in the summer falls below the average breakeven cost for solar. Nuclear is still getting more than that at night, when the price won't fall below the daytime price plus the cost of storage, and in the winter, when solar output is lower and heating demand is higher.
Because it's still recovering a lot of its costs on summer nights and even a little bit on summer days, the winter price nuclear needs never gets to be 4x as high, but it goes up some.
Now the solar companies are looking at that price and trying to decide whether it's worth getting. If they add more solar it's going to generate e.g. 4kW in summer, 2kW in spring, 2kW in fall and 1kW in winter. So for every 9kWh they generate, only 1kWh comes in winter, and that's during the day.
Suppose solar needs to average $0.04/kWh to be sustainable but we're already at $0.02/kWh in the spring, summer and fall. Then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be at least $0.20/kWh before wanting to add more. On top of that, if they do add more, then the price during other seasons drops. If those hit $0.01/kWh during the day then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be $0.28/kWh. And, of course, then the price in the other seasons would drop again, until solar would need to have $0.36/kWh in the winter because by then they would only be getting paid in the winter. Whereas nuclear still makes some in the summer at night.
On top of this the demand is higher in the winter at night, but it's not higher in the summer at night. So to use solar with storage, you would also have to amortize the cost of the additional storage during only the winter months. And the winter nights have more hours than the days, don't forget. So for solar to supply all power in the winter it needs the daytime price to be $0.36/kWh and the nighttime price to be more than twice that.
Then solar is intermittent. People still need heat when it's cloudy. Overbuilding solar sufficiently to handle the heating load on a cold cloudy day in winter? Nope. Hopeless. You'd have to use long-term storage in addition to short-term storage and that's a whole new category of expensive when we were already looking at prices nobody was going to like.
So what happens instead? Well, probably the daytime price in the non-winter months gets to something like $0.02/kWh and the daytime price in the winter gets to something like $0.20/kWh and you fall below the breakeven point for building more solar. Then nuclear takes the same $0.02 and $0.20 during the day and something more than that at night and continues to cover its costs.
Really the problem here is not that solar is going to push out nuclear in the winter, it's that natural gas could unless you have a price on CO2. Or more likely, without a carbon price people might not switch to electric heat instead of continuing to heat with natural gas and fuel oil.
So we kind of need a carbon price to do heating. Or to solve it from the other side (which would be even better), we need to get nuclear to be more cost efficient so it can out-compete natural gas since solar won't.
During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home.
Those are the worst month vs the best month. Overall the winter is not that bad, but it is still pretty bad for solar. Talking with people who has had solar installed here, the general story is very similar. During periods where it do produce the market price is already exceptional low, so it isn't returning a major saving. When the market price is high, the output is low, forcing them to be connected to the grid and pay whatever the electrical company demand during the highest market peaks, as well as taxes and grid fees which themselves has increased to match the cost of high variability.
All this looks very different in countries with much warmer climates and where the major energy consumption from households are air conditioning.
The nice thing is Sweden has lots of hydro, which works as natural long-term energy storage. Every bit of solar you generate means water is kept in the dam for use later in the year.
You also can't ignore wind power which should be part of any plan to "overbuild".
Scotland at a similar latitude to the populated parts of Sweden has hit 100% renewables generation in the past and will do so again.
Renewables are not just solar and hydro storage is also suitable.
You are also ignoring that improving housing stock with good insulation is a much better answer to excessive energy use in winter than attempting to find more supply in winter.
I selected random date in July 2025. During that time Finland produced about 10GWh of solar. I selected random one from February 2025. During that Finland produced about 0.5GWh. February also actually doesn't have shortest daylight hours, mid-December situation is even worse. Christmas Eve 2024 produced about 0.05GWh.
You sure overprovision factor of 200x is still cheaper? This is when looking at the peak generation. From what I understand solar has about 30-40% capacity factor in summer. Just to panels (I'm not sure about total cost of grid-scale solar) seem to be about $300k per rated 1MW or $750k per 1MW during peak. $150M per 1MW during December. OL3 cost about 11B € for 1.44GW (assuming 90% capacity factor) or 7M € per MW.
Unless there has been some huge overnight exchange rate change 7M € seems much cheaper than $150M. Latter of course would actually be much higher when you factor in rest of the equipment, labor etc. Some numbers I found say that it's probably 5x higher.
1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night.
2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
The issue with them in addition to time is a huge capital expense that needs to be amortized. Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete.
For commercialization, solar makes more sense as there is a much better return on capital.
If I were king, I’d do socialized power and have the government capitalize and own the nuclear plants, and bid out the operations to private entities. Government has better debt economics and doesn’t care about return in monetary means.
Even then, relatively small tweaks to tax law and some grid investment would create a solar boom at lower cost. Every Walmart parking lot and some road infrastructure should be covered with solar. Interstates could be utility and generating corridors - they aren’t because federal law makes any multimodal use very difficult.
I think HVDC is a more important component in smoothing out demand/supply than you give it credit for, especially if you add wind into the mix.
In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets.
In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumption ( rather than a few massive power stations ) - so with a proper grid you could argue you would have fewer single points of failure, and increased resilence.
How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.
Like you wrote you can use nuclear as a base load. It's not really useful as a short-term backup for when other plants don't work. If you need batteries and excess power for backup, you might as well create the excess power without nuclear if you can.
Nuclear doesn't really solve this particular problem - solar is already cheaper than nuclear, so no one is going to replace their entire solar capacity with nuclear. And nuclear doesn't spin up/down rapidly like natural gas, so its a lousy solution for nighttime.
Having a continent-wide draught (or cold winter or other weather effect) is rather common though. Just a few years back Europe had a massive issue where draught caused both drop of hydro production and cooling for French nukes, causing energy prices to spike.
fun fact for Paraguay: the Itaipu Dam is one of the largest in the world located between Brazil and Paraguay, where each country gets 50% of the production. But 50% of that production for Paraguay, a country of 7 millions inhabitants, means that it cannot consume that much, so it's essentially reselling that energy to Brazil, a country with 30x more inhabitants. Paraguay only uses about 1/3 of its share (and thus resells 2/3 to Brazil).
(I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup
about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)
Well, there was that plan to use scores of nuclear bombs to alter the geography of Egypt in such a way that the Mediterranean could be drained into the Qattara Basin [1]. I think the story is somewhat well-known now, but it proves, at least, that pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startups are not a phenomenon unique to the 21st century. And given that nuclear bombs essentially were the blockchain of the 1950s, that is altogether unsurprising.
>So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!
It is a relief that Environmentalists have decided that hydro counts as "renewable" energy! When I was in school, hydro was considered really bad for the environment, and projects like the Hoover dam and Yangzie River dam were "not helping"
Well hydropower is the "easy" level of the decarbonization game. So it's not really surprising first countries to leave fossil fuels behind are also countries with mountains and rivers.
I guess if you're not allowed to use solar in the form of chemical potentials frozen long ago into carbon-y molecules buried underground, the second best thing is to use solar in the form of gravitational potential stored in water molecules that's constantly getting replenished because the planet just happens to work like that.
> So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!
Came to say that, every time you'll see a country running on 100% renewables for an extended period, it's going to be hydro, because it's the only controllable supply among renewables (with geothermal as well, but it's been so niche so far I put it aside, but I hope it will change).
Unfortunately most of the hype and investments go to solar and wind power, which fundamentally don't offer the same capabilities. (Solar is fine as long as you're in q sunny place that is not in Europe though because it can be predictable enough to be relied on, but Solar in above 40° North and wind are borderline scams at this point).
I think they missed Uruguay which is a similar case. They have also traditionally benefitted from a hydro able to cover 80-90% most of their needs but they made a concerted effort to fill the entire remaining gap with wind and solar.
Specifically Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Not to downplay the positive steps that are being taken towards using renewable energy worldwide, but one must point out that all those countries except one are almost exclusively using hydroelectric power, whose availability at such scale is a geographical lottery. As for Iceland, which also relies mostly on hydroelectric power but not in such great a proportion, it makes up for it thanks to easy and abundantly available geothermal power (which, though environmentally friendly, is arguably not technically renewable).
The article cites research publication by Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson, very famous 100% wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) advocate.
His past research was already cited by Leonardo DiCaprio on Sept. 23 2014, during opening of the UN Climate Summit.
“The good news is that renewable energy is not only achievable but good economic policy,” DiCaprio told the more than 120 world leaders assembled. “New research shows that by 2050 clean, renewable energy could supply 100 percent of the world’s energy needs using existing technologies, and it would create millions of jobs.”
The 100% renewable papers by Mark Z. Jacobson were subject to strong criticism. Jacobson filed a lawsuit in 2017 against the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Christopher Clack as the principal author of the paper for defamation. In February 2024, Jacobson lost the appeal and was required to pay defendants more than $500,000 in legal fees.
Jacobson is also very strong critic of nuclear energy. In calculating CO2 emissions from using nuclear energy, he includes carbon emissions associated with the burning of cities resulting from a nuclear war aided by the expansion of nuclear energy and weapons to countries previously without them.
Jacobson assumes that some form of nuclear induced burning that will occur once every 30 years.
Probably at least slightly misleading, just reading the names of some of the countries in the list (I am from South Africa).
Just because a country generates 100% of its energy from renewables, it doesn't mean that its enough to power the entire or even majority of the country. Case in point: DRC. I believe only half of the population has access to electricity. It's been a while since I've looked into continental stats, but a quick Google search suggests the situation hasn't changed that much in the last few years.
I live in one of those countries, and while renewable electricity helped to cushion the concern for house electricity, most of the logistics (that being the supply chain for basic commodities) are transported by oil (specifically diesel). Which further increases inflation for import dependent countries. Meaning even for those states (except those that don't import oil to move cars in the country) it will regardless cause an economic crisis.
One state is considered to be fully 'renewable' if the means of transport (excluding Airplanes since I can't find a suitable alternative ) for land is done via electric cars
This is a bit of a weird list. This looks at the percentage of electricity generation that is renewable. But some of these countries are net importers. I think the final row in the table from the report [1] is more interesting. It compares the generation of renewable energy as a percentage of demand. There are quite a few countries that don't quite have 100% renewable generation, but generate way more than 100% of their demand as renewable energy.
This article omits important context : these 7 countries have massive hydro power (+geothermal for Iceland) for very little demand.
The only countries with <100 g CO2/kWh and >10TWh/y are using nuclear. Large scale batteries are exciting for the future but need more development. The 2 biggest battery investments in the world are being made in Australia and California, yet still produce 4x the g CO2/kWh of France.
Japan used to have many dams for the electricity but then scaled them down (or not scale it up) due to environmental concern. I'm not sure it was a right call given the limited availability of options there. They are also strong anti-nuclear sentiment which I have some sympathy. However you need something you have to make a call.
What a great beacon of hope to consider that we are closer than we thought in the clean energy rollout !
I read somewhere, not sure though how it is assessed/how valid it is, that last year 50% world-wide came already from clean power, with countries like the UK around 50% in the middle and others like Spain far ahead.
I am not sure, but i guess the Paraguayan Energy is mostly generated in Brazil, which as i can see here https://www.iea.org/countries/brazil generates
88.826% of its own energy from Renewables.
Cases are very interesting but most rely a lot on hydro and specific geography : the real shift is not exactly 100% renewables in small systems but maybe more whether large industrial economies can replicate this with maintaining grid stability and lower costs
i love that in a lot of countries people think these other countries are in the sticks and that they are modern... (ofc depending who u talk to but im sure we all know such a person...) :) a lot of perceptions based on old world views. Love to see these countries do so well on it. There might be many problems to solve still but it provides a degree of self reliance for energy that is really important today for a country i'd think
About 80% of global primary energy consumption comes from fossil fuels [1]. With renewables growing at 10x the rate of demand growth, we’re moving in the right direction. But it’s dishonest to frame it as a “tipping point.”
Mixing in geothermal and hydro really distorts the story. Although technically correct, the common usage connotation of “renewable energy “ today is “wind and solar”.
Sadly these are edge cases due to either a lot of hydro, which is terrible for the environment in most cases or having neighbors that buy the renewable and help stabilize the grid with conventional energy.
The best way to go green is still going green yourself. Get some panels, batery, inverter and go where no government wants you to go, off-grid. (And a gas generator, too, just in case...)
492 comments
> Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7 per cent of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power.
Let's head to electricitymaps.com !
Albania (https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AL/live/fifteen_min...)
- On 2026-04-12 16:45 GMT+2, 22,67% of electricity consumed by Albania is imported from Greece, which generates 22% of its electricity from gas. Interestingly, Albania exports about as much to Montenegro as it imports from Greece.
Bhutan:
- 100% hydro, makes perfect sense
Nepal:
- 98% hydro, a bit of solar for good measure
Iceland:
- 70% hydro, 30% geo
Paraguay:
- 99,9% hydro
Ethiopia:
- 96,4% hydro
DRC
- 99.6% hydro
So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!
(I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)
Being powered almost entirely by hydro means that the system is highly susceptible to droughts, so then they either have to spin up those oil plants from time to time or import electricity from abroad. I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s. The country used to have its own oil power plant that it heavily relied on before that decision, which slowly produced less and less until it was shut down for good in 2007. Some images of it from 2019: https://www.oneman-onemap.com/en/2019/06/26/the-abandoned-po...
I wonder how many other countries are increasing non-renewable output?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Sri_...
> They take too long to build and cost too much.
The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them.
> By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally.
HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.
> It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January.
That’s not necessary. Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.
> Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and
still come out ahead of nuclear.Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and January. Worse, if you electrify heating then it's not just that solar supplies less in the winter, you also have more demand in the winter.
By this point you're not just overbuilding by a bit, you'd need five times as much or more in January as in July. "Five times as much" is already over what it costs to use nuclear. Then it gets worse, because you now have a price of zero during the summer and even the spring and fall because of the massive oversupply and lower demand, so you now have to recover the entire cost of the overbuild during the three months when you're generating the least amount of power.
Then it gets worse yet, because heating demand is higher at night and we haven't yet added the cost of storage.
So we end up using nuclear 1/4 of the time. But unfortunately, nuclear’s cost is in the capital expense, not the operating expense. We pay about the same amount for it regardless of whether we’re using it or not. So if we’re only using 1/4 the energy, the cost per watt of nuclear energy is effectively 4x larger.
This incentivizes further build-out of solar, catching those sweet winter profits (now 4x larger!), further squeezing nuclear’s usage, driving up its prices, and incentivizing even more solar.
Eventually nuclear gets squeezed out and solar’s profit margins go from “astronomical” (naturally, it’s power from the sun, nyuck nyuck) to “low margin.” But they’re still making money. Whoever built the nuclear plant is left with a very expensive stranded asset.
At least, that’s my understanding. I’m not a power company accountant. What I observe, though, is that power companies who do employ accountants aren’t building nuclear. They’re building shit-tons of solar. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because they’re hippies who hate nuclear.
> Solar is cheaper than nuclear the rest of the time, so (due to the way energy markets work) we pay solar producers the cost of nuclear generation, creating strong incentive to build out more solar + battery.
The way energy markets work is that prices change based on supply and demand. So you build a lot of solar and then the price goes down at times when solar generation is high. (There isn't really enough solar in the grid for this to have happened yet in most places.)
Because nuclear has high capital costs but low unit costs, it continues generating all the time even if prices are lower some of the time. It needs to hit a particular average price but will take essentially any instantaneous price. It can't operate with an average price of $0.02/kWh but it can sell for that at noon in July as long as it's getting enough to offset it at midnight in December.
So, you add a bunch of solar to the grid and as a result the price of electricity during daylight hours in the summer falls below the average breakeven cost for solar. Nuclear is still getting more than that at night, when the price won't fall below the daytime price plus the cost of storage, and in the winter, when solar output is lower and heating demand is higher.
Because it's still recovering a lot of its costs on summer nights and even a little bit on summer days, the winter price nuclear needs never gets to be 4x as high, but it goes up some.
Now the solar companies are looking at that price and trying to decide whether it's worth getting. If they add more solar it's going to generate e.g. 4kW in summer, 2kW in spring, 2kW in fall and 1kW in winter. So for every 9kWh they generate, only 1kWh comes in winter, and that's during the day.
Suppose solar needs to average $0.04/kWh to be sustainable but we're already at $0.02/kWh in the spring, summer and fall. Then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be at least $0.20/kWh before wanting to add more. On top of that, if they do add more, then the price during other seasons drops. If those hit $0.01/kWh during the day then solar needs the price during the day in winter to be $0.28/kWh. And, of course, then the price in the other seasons would drop again, until solar would need to have $0.36/kWh in the winter because by then they would only be getting paid in the winter. Whereas nuclear still makes some in the summer at night.
On top of this the demand is higher in the winter at night, but it's not higher in the summer at night. So to use solar with storage, you would also have to amortize the cost of the additional storage during only the winter months. And the winter nights have more hours than the days, don't forget. So for solar to supply all power in the winter it needs the daytime price to be $0.36/kWh and the nighttime price to be more than twice that.
Then solar is intermittent. People still need heat when it's cloudy. Overbuilding solar sufficiently to handle the heating load on a cold cloudy day in winter? Nope. Hopeless. You'd have to use long-term storage in addition to short-term storage and that's a whole new category of expensive when we were already looking at prices nobody was going to like.
So what happens instead? Well, probably the daytime price in the non-winter months gets to something like $0.02/kWh and the daytime price in the winter gets to something like $0.20/kWh and you fall below the breakeven point for building more solar. Then nuclear takes the same $0.02 and $0.20 during the day and something more than that at night and continues to cover its costs.
Really the problem here is not that solar is going to push out nuclear in the winter, it's that natural gas could unless you have a price on CO2. Or more likely, without a carbon price people might not switch to electric heat instead of continuing to heat with natural gas and fuel oil.
So we kind of need a carbon price to do heating. Or to solve it from the other side (which would be even better), we need to get nuclear to be more cost efficient so it can out-compete natural gas since solar won't.
During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home.
Those are the worst month vs the best month. Overall the winter is not that bad, but it is still pretty bad for solar. Talking with people who has had solar installed here, the general story is very similar. During periods where it do produce the market price is already exceptional low, so it isn't returning a major saving. When the market price is high, the output is low, forcing them to be connected to the grid and pay whatever the electrical company demand during the highest market peaks, as well as taxes and grid fees which themselves has increased to match the cost of high variability.
All this looks very different in countries with much warmer climates and where the major energy consumption from households are air conditioning.
You also can't ignore wind power which should be part of any plan to "overbuild".
Renewables are not just solar and hydro storage is also suitable.
You are also ignoring that improving housing stock with good insulation is a much better answer to excessive energy use in winter than attempting to find more supply in winter.
1. Sweden is just about the worst case, there's very few countries/people that far north.
2. There's this genius invention called "wires". HVDC has transmission losses on the order of 3.5% per 1,000km. You don't have to colocate the solar.
You sure overprovision factor of 200x is still cheaper? This is when looking at the peak generation. From what I understand solar has about 30-40% capacity factor in summer. Just to panels (I'm not sure about total cost of grid-scale solar) seem to be about $300k per rated 1MW or $750k per 1MW during peak. $150M per 1MW during December. OL3 cost about 11B € for 1.44GW (assuming 90% capacity factor) or 7M € per MW.
Unless there has been some huge overnight exchange rate change 7M € seems much cheaper than $150M. Latter of course would actually be much higher when you factor in rest of the equipment, labor etc. Some numbers I found say that it's probably 5x higher.
2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
For commercialization, solar makes more sense as there is a much better return on capital.
If I were king, I’d do socialized power and have the government capitalize and own the nuclear plants, and bid out the operations to private entities. Government has better debt economics and doesn’t care about return in monetary means.
Even then, relatively small tweaks to tax law and some grid investment would create a solar boom at lower cost. Every Walmart parking lot and some road infrastructure should be covered with solar. Interstates could be utility and generating corridors - they aren’t because federal law makes any multimodal use very difficult.
In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets.
In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumption ( rather than a few massive power stations ) - so with a proper grid you could argue you would have fewer single points of failure, and increased resilence.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-starts-construc...
> They take too long to build and cost too much
Not in China apparently
You need solar. Make hydro the backup, fill reservoirs as your reserve and sell extra energy when they're nearly full.
Exactly what "storage" means there is the key, especially at high latitude. Do not assume just batteries.
"Base load" is just some nonsense from nuclear fans to get the cost per GWh down.
You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar.
It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.
It's dangerous. For millenia. Vulnerable to terrorism. Enabler of nuclear weapons.
It takes a long time to build and bring online.
It doesn't scale down.
Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?
> nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s.
Climate change was known well in the 90s, so what is your assumption, that it can't be to help lessen climate change?
> I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s.
Why do you think it is worth pointing this out?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project#Fri...
>So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!
It is a relief that Environmentalists have decided that hydro counts as "renewable" energy! When I was in school, hydro was considered really bad for the environment, and projects like the Hoover dam and Yangzie River dam were "not helping"
But: 7 isn't the number that matters, what matters is that next year it will be 8 or 9. That would be worth documenting.
> So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!
Came to say that, every time you'll see a country running on 100% renewables for an extended period, it's going to be hydro, because it's the only controllable supply among renewables (with geothermal as well, but it's been so niche so far I put it aside, but I hope it will change).
Unfortunately most of the hype and investments go to solar and wind power, which fundamentally don't offer the same capabilities. (Solar is fine as long as you're in q sunny place that is not in Europe though because it can be predictable enough to be relied on, but Solar in above 40° North and wind are borderline scams at this point).
- California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar
- Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind
- Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar
- The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind
- Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar
There's real momentum happening.
Not to downplay the positive steps that are being taken towards using renewable energy worldwide, but one must point out that all those countries except one are almost exclusively using hydroelectric power, whose availability at such scale is a geographical lottery. As for Iceland, which also relies mostly on hydroelectric power but not in such great a proportion, it makes up for it thanks to easy and abundantly available geothermal power (which, though environmentally friendly, is arguably not technically renewable).
His past research was already cited by Leonardo DiCaprio on Sept. 23 2014, during opening of the UN Climate Summit.
“The good news is that renewable energy is not only achievable but good economic policy,” DiCaprio told the more than 120 world leaders assembled. “New research shows that by 2050 clean, renewable energy could supply 100 percent of the world’s energy needs using existing technologies, and it would create millions of jobs.”
https://cee.stanford.edu/news/what-do-mark-z-jacobson-leonar...
The 100% renewable papers by Mark Z. Jacobson were subject to strong criticism. Jacobson filed a lawsuit in 2017 against the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Christopher Clack as the principal author of the paper for defamation. In February 2024, Jacobson lost the appeal and was required to pay defendants more than $500,000 in legal fees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson
Jacobson is also very strong critic of nuclear energy. In calculating CO2 emissions from using nuclear energy, he includes carbon emissions associated with the burning of cities resulting from a nuclear war aided by the expansion of nuclear energy and weapons to countries previously without them.
Jacobson assumes that some form of nuclear induced burning that will occur once every 30 years.
Just because a country generates 100% of its energy from renewables, it doesn't mean that its enough to power the entire or even majority of the country. Case in point: DRC. I believe only half of the population has access to electricity. It's been a while since I've looked into continental stats, but a quick Google search suggests the situation hasn't changed that much in the last few years.
One state is considered to be fully 'renewable' if the means of transport (excluding Airplanes since I can't find a suitable alternative ) for land is done via electric cars
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas...
[1]: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/Countri...
The only countries with <100 g CO2/kWh and >10TWh/y are using nuclear. Large scale batteries are exciting for the future but need more development. The 2 biggest battery investments in the world are being made in Australia and California, yet still produce 4x the g CO2/kWh of France.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/5y/yearly
This map says hydro share is like 8%. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/JP/live/fifteen_min...
Why is it that those are reserved for ultra-big utility companies and I cannot buy those for my home or even my balcony?
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/Countri...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
Unless the point here is "if we accept rolling blackouts we too can go full solar"
The best way to go green is still going green yourself. Get some panels, batery, inverter and go where no government wants you to go, off-grid. (And a gas generator, too, just in case...)