Replying to
This is Germany - solar supply of 47GW at 2pm on that Tuesday, of grid load of 57GW. Solar was still supplying 18.8GW at 5pm. Can you imagine the situation 20 years ago when that solar contribution would have been negligible?
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Jenny Chase
@solar_chase@mastodon.green
mastodon 4.7.3Solar analyst with BloombergNEF, goose keeper. Author, "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon". All opinions my own. She/her.
Book (edition 2) available through all major booksellers, or directly from my publisher on https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/Q0437
3234 Followers
245 Following
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Joined November 05, 2022
Unlike that of the rest of southeast Asia, Pakistan's gas demand has been falling.
Pakistan's solar boom is partly attributable to excellent do-it-yourself videos on Tiktok and youtube, and partly to two other factors, says Zainaab Basil in an interview with BNEF.
www.bnef.com/insights/40017
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The progressive case for ground-mounted solar and grid-scale batteries: everyone benefits from the grid not fucking collapsing when it gets hot, not just those who can afford private solar and battery systems.
Wow - gas generation in California Jan-May 2026 was down 60% from its level in the same period of 2024, due to solar, batteries, imports from hydro and wind plants. This was despite a 7% increase in power demand.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67784
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To be clear I think you should get air conditioning if at all possible. There's plenty of power for it, we're going to keep building solar around the world, and otherwise you might die.
One terrifying thing about adult life is how quickly and thoroughly one forgets things. It is so, so important to write them down - or they're gone.
(My colleague just asked me about the European Minimum Import Price on Chinese modules, a policy regime I thought was seared into my brain because they were using my price index. At one point I got in trouble with the Swiss government for inviting European Union officials to the Zurich office to chat about the index formation.)
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- it is actually pretty common for things to be officially named different things by different governments. Harmless example, English-language maps show the German city that the Germans call München as Munich; nobody minds this, as far as I know.
(Yours, someone who has tried to show what I regard as apolitical maps of power plants and transmission assets in places like Taiwan and Kashmir... sometimes you do just have to be the spreadsheet jockey).
Just reading about Australia power markets: "Average power prices fell between 40% and 65% across the National Electricity Market (NEM) year on year in 2Q 2026, driven by higher renewable output and increased battery discharge during evening peak demand periods."
Paywall, https://www.bnef.com/insights/40165
Since people keep asking how much solar is benefitting from the Iran war: we just reduced our 2026 forecast to 640GW(DC) of installation, down 2% from last year.
We increased forecasts for Egypt and Malaysia, and Nigeria etc may grow. But big markets are shrinking due to saturation.
Basically solar doesn't, in most places, directly replace oil. Most Europeans, for example, would respond to the crisis much more logically by buying an electric vehicle than solar panels.
RE: https://mastodon.energy/@drsimevans/116873300919292698
In which Simon gets quite rightly mad about incorrect numbers.
Minutes of a market's peak solar output that can be stored in total battery capacity, end of 2025. Hawaii was the highest I could find, at 92 minutes, while the EU-27 aggregate is just 8 minutes.
The reason I regularly feel compelled to defend the energy / climate progress of the UK (the country of my birth) is that the UK is actually doing pretty well. And you would not know that from the UK news! It's a British trait to believe we must be doing badly, our efforts are in vain, nothing we do will ever work - but it's not true here! All the 'green crap' is genuinely reducing the UK's demand for fossil fuels, and also its CO2 emissions!
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-emissions-fall-2-4-in-2025-as-coal-hits-400-year-low/
RE: https://fediscience.org/@hausfath/116903686110008831
This (unfortunately, I say as part of one of the teams of serious energy systems modelers).
RE: @akshatrathi@mastodon.green
This is an amazing interview and Akshat is great at pushing back at Tice's nonsense.
(It's a very good thing I was not in Akshat's place because I would have [remembers this is a public forum and I am a professional] wished for Tice to step on a Lego.)
Accidentally turned the garden hose full on the baby for several seconds, and after a moment of confusion he is delighted to be sitting in a puddle.
(It seems I only breed water creatures).
Exciting times in the incubator as the single fertile egg this year hatches.
(Singleton goslings are a bad thing, but well, we'll get the adult geese involved and hopefully it won't grow up too lonely and unsocialised).
My parents and uncle are coming to visit today, and as always when I host visitors I suddenly discover that while I have plenty of beds and bedding, absolutely none of it matches or looks good.
This seems to happen regardless of how many times I go out and buy matching, nice bedding. I think the cupboards eat it and secretly change the colours.
This is a shame as I love to host and would like to be good at it. Alas, it will never be. Bought in plenty of wine though, making vegetable lasagne.
It's easy to forget that most people don't know that power will be free (or even sometimes negatively priced) when it's very sunny.
I have also been arguing with the China team about what a power market even means.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar
Seeking recommendations for podcasts about science or nature, suitable for an 8-year-old. We enjoy "Lachlabor" and "Anna und die Wilden Tiere" in German but haven't tried much in English.
(We are planning to drive the EV from Switzerland to the UK, and it's going to be a long trip.)
Does anyone actually use Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, properly?
Whenever someone sends me a time in UTC in the northern-hemisphere summer, they actually mean British summertime, so they're one hour off. Or they mean 'European summertime' in which case they are two hours off.
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It's annoying because this is a real thing, we have underforecasted (and the IEA has done so worse, and tbh I don't know the Energy Institute) and there is indeed a lot of solar, but this chart is not correct!
Information is beautiful only if it is true!
Obviously heatwaves are scary, but I'm also very relieved there will be one this week, when we are taking Child 1 and up to 17 of her friends to the currently-frigid outdoor swimming pool to celebrate her eighth birthday.
(Wondering if they will let me bring the gosling... it's possible. There's a big grassy area and we could bring him his own bath).
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The trouble with not believing that what you are doing is working, is that you cannot argue against those who want you to stop doing it!
You need to have hope, if you are to get anything done! And while 20 years ago I think the hope was a bit frail, these days we can point to progress made and also to the path forwards.
It's close enough between the US and the India that the margin of error is more than the difference, and minor revisions could reverse the order, but: India was the second largest installation market for PV in 2025, and BNEF expects this to also be true in 2026.
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Guys I love you very much but I am beginning to understand why you're a rare breed.
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@mjd@mathstodon.xyz yes, I have one coming up for clients and can probably send it round a few weeks after pub. But warning, it's not nearly so dramatic, and right now tells a different story.
(It is also only BNEF data, ie my team's data, because that is only fair. The IEA were cowards but I mostly see where they are coming from).
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Ganders are a bit like very early chess computers, which were programmed to be better more subtle players by giving them interim goals rather than "go on a king hunt". So you would sometimes get a computer in a dominating position deciding that "center control" was more important than checkmate, and proceeding to make two queens circle the center four squares.
Gander breeding success in the wild is about forming social alliances, protecting goslings, supporting nest-building behaviour.
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These ganders are extremely successful at alliances, they are chivalrous and protective of their chosen female goose, and are very keen to have some goslings to take care of! But, um, given I have tried to incubate over 20 eggs and got 2 fertile this year (one died early on), and from watching them, I think they are skipping a mission-critical step towards reproductive success.
(I also have a lot of emails from people who would like young geese this year. Sigh.)
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- Examples of real long-duration storage technologies are pumped hydro (reservoir size is decoupled from turbine capacity), or where the storage medium is big tanks of molten salt, or hot rocks. But all of these do still cost a lot of money if they are only cycling once per year.
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@Nicovel0@mastodon.social to be fair, the UK did start to embrace renewables 20 years ago and now generates over 30% of its electricity from wind. I would say that's leading!
Wind is a lot more useful in the UK climate than solar, and in any case solar panels have got so much cheaper that it made sense to wait. (I used to get excited about solar mandates but nowadays less so).
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-renewables-enjoy-record-year-in-2025-but-gas-power-still-rises/
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@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl it's largely untrue; China has not directly subsidised solar manufacturers for over a decade, the allegations of forced labour relate to a very small section of the supply chain which has a lot more to do with other industries like steel, and environmental standards in China have come a long way, as have salaries.
Basically Chinese companies have got good at making solar panels, and good solar panels are the main reason for any climate optimism.
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This one, from "Information is Beautiful", (infobeautiful@vis.social), btw.
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@pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz @amenonsen@flipping.rocks this would not help the actual problem, which is that people tell me "can you do 6pm UTC" which, yes, it's 8pm and my husband is home to put the kids to bed.
However if they mean 4pm UTC that is when I am fetching the baby from nursery and feeding both kids so, not really.
This is fun - a daily quiz where you have to guess the animal in 20 guesses, with wrong guesses giving you information about taxonomy.
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@GrahamDowns@mastodon.africa my aircon typically uses about 2kW. Obviously it's quite a small unit, but's in the stairwell so it does cool the whole 4-bedroom house.
Sounds like you might just need to talk to an electrician...? Inverters are not that expensive.
A front-of-paywall BNEF podcast in which I break a golden rule and talk about BNEF tier 1. I won't be doing it again and am not looking for feedback.
(It is a perfectly pleasant conversation, I just need to be incredibly careful what I say about these and possibly I wasn't. I am not supposed, for example, to use the phrase "the monster I created".)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-05-13/bnef-tier-1-lists-the-mark-of-credibility-podcast
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@BashStKid@mastodon.online yeah. I have never seen any of our geese deliberately break eggs, but they will squabble over nests with the same effect. Ganders absolutely need to guard against this.
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@samueljohnson@mstdn.social yeah, I should have split them into pairs earlier this year. These are only a year old, and I wanted goslings mostly from their parents (push back the inbreeding problem a few years), but my old gander Samson started a slow decline and died last week. He is much missed.
Next year I'll split them up earlier, and these youngsters will be proper adults. Too late for this year.
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@BashStKid@mastodon.online my dad is really good at it, but he did study biological taxonomy. For those of us who didn't, we are just guessing 'hmm what's a bit like that but not quite?'
I found today's answer quite surprising in terms of what is closely related to what.
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@rachelplusplus@tech.lgbt yes, it's a very famous graph, I included it in my book for example...
*New build* in 2023 was indeed about 444GW, then 2024 was about 592GW (higher! But definitely not well over 600GW). So the second chart on wikimedia is accurately citing my team's work, and is smart enough to timestamp the estimate as well - useful since estimates do fluctuate a little.
I don't recognise the Info is Beautiful 'data' at all, it is highly suspect.
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@dplattsf I think it was less than a bottle and wasn't good red wine, but we also drained it. One-pot pastas are in my experience a bit hit-and-miss generally.
I can see it could work though.
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@dplattsf did you make it? I made red wine tagliatelle with creamy mushrooms once, and it was absolutely sinfully good. So much more than the sum of its parts.
The only reason it did not become part of my repertoire was that we couldn't stop eating it, and it was basically carbs, booze and cream. Sigh. I should make small portions for a special occasion sometime.