> 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.
How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.
Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse.
I don't doubt that that resulting number is still very low, or there (being intentionally optimistic about politics and society here) wouldn't be any nuclear plants.
Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up.
> Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). But that's besides the larger point of low probability and historical risk.
Tiring with arbitrary limitations to exclude major accidents of a fleet in the hundreds.
The difference between renewables and nuclear power is who gets harmed.
When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry. And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.
The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers).
In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000!
I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
> I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.
If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade.
> The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion
The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint).
And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe.
Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.
It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal.
The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.
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.
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.
Now calculate what it costs running a nuclear plant only at night.
You’ll end up at $400 per MWh excluding transmissions costs, taxes etc.
Your state already has coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned because no one wants their expensive electricity during the daytime. Let alone a horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear plant.
> 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.
You always need something in the grid that can change the amount of power it generates regardless of what you use in combination with it, because the demand from the grid isn't fixed. All grids need something in the nature of storage/hydro or peaker plants.
The advantage of combining solar with nuclear is that their generation profiles are different. Nuclear can generate power at night and doesn't have lower output during the peak seasonal demand period for heating. Nuclear is baseload; it doesn't make sense to have more of it than the minimum load on the grid, but no one is really proposing to. The minimum load is generally around half of the maximum load.
> It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.
If you actually reprocess the fuel there is no "couple thousand of years". If you instead put it in a dry hole in the desert, you have a desert where nobody wanted to live to begin with that now has a box of hot rocks sealed in it. It's not clear how this is supposed to cost an unforeseeable amount of money.
> Vulnerable to terrorism.
Nuclear plants are kind of a hard target. The stuff inside them isn't any more of a biohazard than what's in a thousand other chemical/industrial plants that aren't surrounded in thick concrete.
> Enabler of nuclear weapons.
The US already has nuclear weapons and would continue to do so regardless of how much electricity is generated from what sources. The argument against building nuclear reactors in Iran is not an argument against building nuclear reactors in Ohio.
> It takes a long time to build and bring online.
Better get started then.
> It doesn't scale down.
Decent argument for not having one in your house; not a great argument for not having one in your state.
> Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?
The country with the largest uranium reserves is Australia. Kazakhstan is #2 and has about the same amount as Canada. Other countries with significant reserves include Russia, India, Brazil, China, Ukraine and several countries in Africa. The US has some itself and plenty of other places to source it. It can also be extracted from seawater.
The US is also in the top 4 for thorium reserves with about 70% as much as the #1 (which is India), and thorium is 3-4 times more abundant overall than uranium.
> Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.
Pumped hydro storage only holds about 8-12 hours of power. To be economically viable to build you need to cycle it daily.
It uses enormous amounts of land and capital to build, and is ongoingly dangerous in a unique way. If LiFePO4 can do 4 hours at full output already, and be placed anywhere using volume manufacturing to expand, then batteries are straight up better.
I can see this makes sense especially for medium term storage. A lot full of batteries is great for the next ten seconds, next ten minutes, even to some extent the next ten hours, but it surely doesn't make much sense to store ten days of electricity that way compared to just keeping the water behind a dam. We know that many of the world's large dams are capturing snow melt or other seasonal flows, running them only when solar or wind can't provide the power you need lets you make more effective use of the same resource.
Except that in many cases there's people living downstream doing agriculture using that water for irrigation. There's just this tiny dispute about that in the nile delta between Egypt and Ethiopia
Except for very short term peaks (less than 15 minutes-ish) it doesn't make any sense at all to use hydro to charge batteries. You've got a dam, you might as well let water through later than incur the losses of a round trip to batteries and back to the grid.
There are two types of hydro - run of river, and ones with large lake storage. You need the ones with large lake storage, rather that the ones with a lake to build a head.
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.
No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish.
Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts
That said, cooling does have an effect on ecosystems. Not the worst energy plant impact on that regard, but still not like it's all environmental friendly.
And of course, there is the what to do with the waste dilemma. And at least with current French park, there is a dependence on the rarer kind of uranium.
> 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 !!
You're forgetting corruption. Many countries can easily go 100% renewable, but there is no profit for dictators/politicians to do so. Most of africa, or the middle east, yet you still have many regions without electricity or water, so that people worry about food for tomorrow instead of better governance in the future.
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).
Oil free for electricity generation. The media in my country (Finland) also likes to brag about 90+% fossil-free electricity generation. But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.
Finland has electricified 40% of primary energy which is pretty much world leading (Sweden and Norway are 50%). European average is 19%.
Largest chunk left is transport which can mostly be electrified now. Industrial and home heat too. There are hard to electrify sections in both but overall it's fairly obvious what to do next.
And the easy parts eliminate 3 or 4 units of primary energy for every one they replace, so even 40% primary energy is way over 50% toward the finish line of electrifying all the useful stuff.
I think it's also an interesting question as to whether countries that use a lot of electricity have lower per kWh prices because they spread the fixed costs further.
Yes, ground transport (except long distance trucks) can be electrified now. In principle, most homes could be heated with electricity if we had means to store all the "excess" wind energy or waste heat from e.g. datacenters and use it in district heating. The technology for heat storage is mostly ready but the capacity is not.
But would it be easy or obvious what to do next? Absolutely not. Everything is simple if you have pockets full of money, live in temperate climates and do not rely on energy intensive (and hard to electrify) industries like the Nordic countries.
For example, about 25 per cent of the total energy consumption in Finland is used to heat buildings. Wood burning is about half of the total heating in distric heating systems which account about half of the total heating for buildings. Also heat-storing fireplaces are still a small but a crucial part of the total picture. A lot of extra energy capacity is needed just make sure you stay alive during the coldest months even if some of the systems fail.
Nordic countries have cheap electricity mostly for two reasons: very stable interconnected electric grid and lots of different renewable energy sources. Arguably, hydropower is the most important because it can stabilize the intermittent wind power which in many places we have more than enough already. Nuclear energy is also a major part of electricity production in Sweden and Finland.
And yet our electric grid or electricity production capacity is far from ready to handle even the more realistic dreams of "full electrification" we are told in the media. It will take many years just to get the grid ready.
And what happens if the stablest renewable, hydropower, fails? We might find it out this year as hydropower reserves in Norway are at the lowest level in 20 years. Hydro generates about 90% of Norway's total electricity.
> But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.
The trick of course is that if you electrify heating and transportation they'll need much less energy. Your average car with an ICE has an efficiency of 20-40%, electric cars have 60-80%. Heating your house with gas has an efficiency of around 100%, heat pumps have 300%-500%.
In theory gas boilers for heating are above 90% efficient. Not 100% because to achieve 100% what you'd have to do is keep the exhaust gases (which are hot) inside, where the people are, and unfortunately the exhaust gases are poisonous so that's a terrible idea.
There are a few countries just below as well like Norway with about 98% renewables in 2024 [1].
The gas power plant is mostly up north powering the gas compressors that fill LNG ships headed for Europe and the coal I think is for Svalbard but that mine/plant closed in 2025 [2].
With modern tech, these 100% renewable electricity countries have effectively overshot. Many other countries would be better off getting to 85% and then shifting to focusing more on EV and heat pump uptake to get the best bang per buck.
Quite a few developed countries have privatized their electrical grids. The effects - predictable - were rent seeking behavior without the necessary investments to remain future proof. This is now catching up with us in a big way, the electrification is going to lag behind considerably on account of this.
This is quite frustrating because it is blindingly obvious to me that we will need to do better but given the profit angle it remains to be seen if these private entities will now do what's right for all of us. So far the signs are not good. Instead of embracing small scale generation utilities are fighting netmetering laws where ever they can (usually under the guise of not everybody being able to have solar, which is true, but which is not the real reason behind their objections). They're dragging their heels on expansion and modernization of grid infrastructure and the government(s) seem to be powerless to force the now out-of-control entities to live up to their responsibilities.
Couple that with the AI power hungry data centers and the stage is set for a lot of misery. Personally I think privatizing the electrical grid was a massive mistake. The market effects have not really happened, all that happened is that the money that should have gone into new infra has been spent on yachts and other shiny rock goodies.
> In a world where all the cars and trucks are electric you’re going to have to roughly supply your average highway with infrastructure comparable to the energy consumption of the cars on that highway (or the cities around it)
This is not true. Worldwide, typically about 80% of the energy used to charge EVs globally comes from a private connection. And the vast majority of that energy is drawn from the grid off-peak when transmission systems etc. are underutilized. You article reflects a mindset that envisages EVs working like ICE based transport.
I think we're going to see a lot of grid defection, and not just from little consumers. Corporations won't wait for grid connections and will roll their own microgrids.
There will be serious pushback to that by lobbyists. This is already happening in the form of mandatory participation in 'the market' while at the same time (you can't make this up) having to sell to that market at some kind of arbitrary price that you don't get a say in as producer.
I'm a small step away from going off-grid again, the biggest stumbling block is that - predictably - you can't do any practical small power windmill installations. I've considered a windlass in the basement but my kids wouldn't hear of it ;)
Sure, but large corporations have a lot of influence (read: money) to stop that sort of thing, so I don't see it going very far. Those building data centers can always play their trump card: just build the data center somewhere else.
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.
>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"
Reminds me of when Bjork was protesting the construction of a new hydropower plant in Iceland, when the Director of Iceland's National power company (behind the project) was actually her uncle. I used to be romantically involved with someone in his side of the family and noticed Bjork was conspicuously absent from any family gatherings he hosted, of which there were many.
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.
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.
Recent video by someone from Puerto Rico comparing their island's renewables with Uruguay and interviewing the guy in charge of their renewables rollout:
> 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).
Makes me wonder why solar is not on the list.. I thought all gore said that was gonna solve all energy problems. (Of course not, he's a politician, but I'd have expected to at least see it with some relevant percentage in the African countries)
Or could it be that solar is distributed enough to not appear because it's set up directly by/with the consumer rather than the grid producer?
For some it's an eye-opening experience when they compare the states which are the most vocal about going solar and have a look onto the solar map of the world.
Or then they talk about how some countries have miraculous levels of an energy independence and social services and then look at their total population.
Tbf, solar has gotten so much more effective/cost efficient in the last 12-24 months that it's beating pretty much everything aside from hydro in the cost efficiency department at this point - including (most of) northern Europe and Canada.
Most data you find will be using data that's massively out of date and be off by at least 2x though...
I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear again. That would've been amazing and smart in 2015 - but now? Yeah, it's dumb af. And that's coming from a German living at the northern end of the country.
Germany spends 10x more than france on transmission and curtailment each year. Households have highest prices in EU per Eurostat despite EEG subsidies. Even if everything goes well gas expansion is still required to firm renewables. All this while it still burns coal and gas.
Going nuclear was sane in the past and sane now. If Germany wants to prove expanding nuclear is dumb it should try first to have lower annual emissions, while spending less than double the cost of entire french fleet.
France is the biggest winner in EU- it'll build both nuclear and renewables achieving deep decarbonization
Batteries are not appropriate for dealing with Dunkelflauten. There's very little energy flowing through there, so what you want to do is trade lower round trip efficiency for lower capex. The high capex of batteries is best amortized over many charge/discharge cycles, for example for daily storage.
I mean, who cares? Fire up the gas plants in the one week a year you have weather anomalies. We’d still be 90+% carbon free which would be incredible. The last gap can be solved at a later point as technology evolves
And replacing the natural gas burned in those turbines with hydrogen won't be very expensive, since they will be used so infrequently. Storing energy as hydrogen is much cheaper than storing it in batteries, as measured by cost of storage of capacity.
Ultragrav (YC S27). We plan on generating the geographic tyranny of who has rivers and mountains and who doesn't by seeking to use ultrasonic audio to disrupt gravity so you don't have to hear it. We're hiring in Kansas city, KS.
In all seriousness, thereis of course a list on Wikipedia of countries by renewable electricity production [1]. China leads here but also has 1.4B people and still has significant coal usage and oil and gas imports. But they're working really hard to wean themselves off of fossil fuels while still rapidly industrializing.
China does have mountains and has built the Three Gorges Dam, which is just massive and produces ~22GW. They're building a dam that'll produce almost three times as much power, the Medog Hydropower Station [2], which is planned for ~60GW.
The part that annoys me about a lot of developed nations is that they engage in greenwashing by simply exporting their emissions to poorer countries eg [3]. Let's at least be honest about what fossil fuels we continue to use and the emissions we indirectly create.
California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors?
Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures?
I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable.
For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc.
Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.
California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster
That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July.
The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.
The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.
It seems to disagree with Dutch statistics because the linked view is for April 2026. While the article cited is talking about all of 2024.
If you change the view to look at the year 2024 [1] it claims 53% carbon free with 2.5% of that coming from nuclear. This seems to line up with the cited statistics of 50% of consumed electricity produced by wind, hydropower, solar, and biomass in 2024.
The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass.
As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.
Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple.
Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...
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.
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).
Well yes, hydro and geothermal are the easiest (and earliest perfected) renewable sources to provide consistent base load. It would be odd if the first countries to achieve fully renewable power weren’t making use of those technologies.
Other countries will have to be more reliant on interconnects, diverse renewable mixes and batteries. Luckily this is now almost always cheaper and more secure than fossil fuels and the trend lines point towards that continuing to be more and more true over time.
Not to downplay the positive steps that are being taken but we are conveniently skipping over the denominator here at least in the case of Ethiopia and DRC who both have a grid that is only serving their full population at a fraction of the level needed to make this story one about geographical lotteries and abundance instead of one about poverty preventing them from access to the traditional carbon power generating routes to server the rest of the population.
The Earth's heat content is about 1×10^19 TJ. This heat naturally flows to the surface by conduction at a rate of 44.2 TW and is replenished by radioactive decay at a rate of 30 TW. These power rates are more than double humanity's current energy consumption from primary sources, but most of this power is too diffuse (approximately 0.1 W/m^2 on average) to be recoverable.
This leads naturally to "artificial geothermal", where solar energy is used to heat rocks or soil, and the heat is later extracted. It doesn't have to be anywhere near as deep as ordinary geothermal, which had to accumulate that heat over many thousands of years. Just ~10 meters is about enough.
That's not where natural geothermal energy is from. It's residual heat from planetary formation and some natural radioactivity.
This form of storage also unfortunately only yields heat (via heat pumps or directly), not electricity, as the temperature difference is much too low in comparison to meaningfully run any heat engine from it.
Great if you need to heat houses; not so great if you were hoping to store the solar energy for a rainy, or rather cloudy, day (or night).
No, that is how natural geothermal energy works. Perhaps you mistakenly thought I was saying the heat comes from sunlight? I didn't. The heat comes from below (or, in some cases, from internal radioactive decay). And this delivery of heat from below (or from decay) is a slow process, taking a very long time, which is why geothermal resources have to be buried deeply (otherwise, that heat just leaks out and the temperature of the geothermal resource is too low).
Yeah, "accumulate the heat over thousands of years" indeed sounds a bit misleading to me. The heat is largely already there (or is generated pretty uniformly through radioactive processes), it's just slowly transmitted outwards down a gradient.
Heat is extracted at geothermal wells much faster than it is being replenished by the average rate of heat flow from the deeper Earth. It's effectively "heat mining". Granted, there's a lot of heat to be mined.
Only as a technicality. If you find a geothermal hotspot and start to extract energy from it, the hotspot will eventually cool down faster than if you hadn't (which of course depends on the size of the hotspot and how much heat you're pulling out).
However, given that there's no downsides to cooling down a hotspot other than, well, no longer being able to extract energy from it, geothermal is a bit of an honorary "renewable".
Actual renewables ultimately all come down to recent[0] solar energy, which will never deplete their source however much they are used. All the energy in wind, hydroelectric and biofuels has recently originated in the Sun.
[0] I say "recently" because fossil fuels are all also derived from the Sun, but their rate of regeneration is a bit too slow compared to the speed at which we use them.
A lot of hydroelectric depends on snow pack and glacier runoff that is being adversely affected by global warming. Solar and wind are the only robust hedges against a warm up that might ultimately severely curtail river flow.
We have a lot of uranium and nuclear is fairly renewable at least in the span of a few centuries. The waste issue is a problem.
At a certain point there won’t be enough heat recovered from the geothermal side of the loop to generate steam on the process side of the loop and power generation will cease. I’m not smart enough to calculate how long that will take, however. I think you could still use the geothermal energy at a lower temperature for district heating and cooling, but a mechanical engineer would be more qualified to answer that.
Contrary to a popular belief, most high temperature Geothermal plants have a predicted death date.
This is due to the physics reality of the ground itself: Power of a Geothermal well will decay over time to a point where the well become unusable and need to be closed.
It is due to the fact underground water is rich in minerals and raw elements. This soup will slowly but surely cement the well itself and its associated underground.
There are techniques (similar to 'fraking') to extend the lifetime of a well but only to some extent.
If the topic interests you (and you can bear artificially translated English), a French content creator did a pretty good video on the topic:
About 20% of this is residual heat from planetary accretion; the remainder is attributed to past and current radioactive decay of naturally occurring isotopes.
Most of the radiogenic heating in the Earth results from the decay of the daughter nuclei in the decay chains of uranium-238 and thorium-232, and potassium-40.
Potassium is more or less distributed in the body (especially in soft tissues) following intake of foods. A 70-kg man contains about 126 g of potassium (0.18%), most of that is located in muscles. The daily consumption of potassium is approximately 2.5 grams. Hence the concentration of potassium-40 is nearly stable in all persons at a level of about 55 Bq/kg (3850 Bq in total), which corresponds to the annual effective dose of 0.2 mSv.
Almost none of it is from fission. Fission is a very rare natural decay mode of uranium and thorium. Most of their radioactive energy output is from ordinary non-fission radioactive decay.
No, not quite. Geothermal is powered by the accumulated heat stored in rocks from fission Uranium and other heavy atoms deep in the Earth (and other phenomena).
Geothermal hotspots do not reheat by fission or otherwise at the same speed that we extract their energy (if they did we'd be in trouble if we weren't extracting it!).
As I mentioned in another comment, build a Dyson sphere of solar panels around the Sun and it will last just as long. Build an all-Earth geothermal plant and the heat will be depleted.
How long would it take for the heat to be depleted? Humans have only managed to drill something like 12km into the earth because it gets too hot to go further.
If it were possible to access all of the Earth's stored geothermal energy, probably a very, very, very long time.
But if we're open to applying a quantitative timescale threshold to the thought experiment, at which we can argue geothermal is renewable, that raises the question for nuclear. If we could access all fissile uranium and thorium on Earth, how long would it take for us to deplete its stored energy? Does that mean nuclear energy is renewable?
Can’t speak for large scale sites with abundant volcanic activity… But for residential geothermal the bore hole has a lifetime based on how much ground water there is and how active usage it sees.
This is because using it cools the hole slowly and after a few decades (depending on how quickly ground water can dissipate heat gradient) a new hole need to be drilled a distance away.
However much solar or wind energy we use, the Sun will last exactly as long. This is not a matter of scale. Even if we were to build a photovoltaic Dyson sphere around the Sun, it would have the same lifespan.
That is not the case for geothermal. It could in theory be cooled down if exploited at a massive scale.
Saying geothermal is not renewable is not an indictment nor a criticism. Geothermal is great and we should use it more. It's just technically not renewable, but that doesn't matter.
And after a hundred generations of this there will be no fusible material left. We can extract energy from rotating black holes until they stop, and then the universe is dead.
So solar energy is renewable over a human lifetime, not renewable over a stellar lifetime, renewable over a stellar formation cycle, not renewable over the lifetime of a universe, and renewable if universes turn out to be cyclical. And all but the first are pendantry in the context of renewable energy conversations.
Also, many of these countries are tropical or subtropical, with optimal conditions for solar energy year round. Nepal and Bhutan are relatively far from equator, but have many days of unobstructed sunshine.
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.
Interesting looking at the data, that Norway generates 4x the electricity of NZ and they are roughly the same size and population I assume it exports most.
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
Blows me away that energy policy is so political, and that somehow self-styled libertarians who don’t say a peep about oil subsidies are deeply offended by renewable ones. It you consider yourself libertarian can you at least be forward-thinking enough to see that shifting to renewables is also a step towards decentralization?
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.
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.
It makes me sad - most of them are fairly poor and so don't use much energy. I want those people to have the wealth to consume as much energy as me. (My city is also 100% renewable but since I live in the us we don't show near as well on the charts overall.
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.
Yeah UK's currently going through the biggest rollout of renewable energy ever, the pace is insanely high. Theres new rules to allow plug in solar coming into effect too with kits already available for renters and such.
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...)
They're much more expensive than traditional silicon cells, they often use toxic materials (lead, cadmium, etc), and IIRC their lifespans aren't as long. Unless you have significant space constraints it's usually better just to get twice as many traditional panels.
Mixing in geothermal and hydro really distorts the story. Although technically correct, the common usage connotation of “renewable energy “ today is “wind and solar”.
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.
Geothermal is fantastic for heating. Speaking as an Icelander, we have so much hot water in Reykjavík that we even use the residue to keep our pavements clear of ice in winter. Pipes under the sidewalks carry exiting geothermally heated water from nearby houses. It's great technology and has served us well.
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
It's contrary to what most people think, but the later a country modernized, the better the infrastructure (generally). You basically get to skip the innovation stages where you have a hodgepodge of systems that eventually coalesce into one and all the upgrading required to bring it up to the newest standard. If you have a lower population and smaller geography, it is often easier to upgrade as well.
DR Kongo: 98% Hydropower, $ 760 GDP/person , 13% of country has electricity
Not sure how this is applicable (and in many cases: desirable) for countries that do not have significant hydropower potential or maybe want a GDP greater than $760 per person per year.
On the other hand, balcony solar power will be a game changer for the world, provided your neighbors won't steal the panels like they do the catalytic converters in my neighborhood.
> 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.)
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...
Sri Lanka used to rely on hydro, with oil as a backup, and has added a lot of coal.
I wonder how many other countries are increasing non-renewable output?
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.
> 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?
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.
Or just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.
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.
But they work at night
How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.
Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.
What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse.
I don't doubt that that resulting number is still very low, or there (being intentionally optimistic about politics and society here) wouldn't be any nuclear plants.
Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up.
> Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). But that's besides the larger point of low probability and historical risk.
Tiring with arbitrary limitations to exclude major accidents of a fleet in the hundreds.
The difference between renewables and nuclear power is who gets harmed.
When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry. And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.
The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers).
In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000!
I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.
The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion when they were dumb enough to sleep there.
> I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.
If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade.
> The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion
The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint).
And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe.
Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.
It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal.
The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.
”If we compare apples to oranges nuclear power is cheap”.
You can finance the competition in the same way and get similarly cheaper prices.
Hinkley Point C just got a loan at a 7% interest rate to finish the plant. That is after about all uncertainty should already have been discovered.
Now add making a profit and factor in the risk on top and you’ll end up with electricity costing $400 per MWh
> 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.
“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish”, as my old gaffer used to say.
Or just gradually taper off fossil fuel use until storage and renewables carry everything.
Exactly what "storage" means there is the key, especially at high latitude. Do not assume just batteries.
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.
This is just wrong. Nuclear is perfectly fine for nighttime because nighttime is highly predictable and doesn't fluctuate very much.
My state (NSW, Australia) for example uses no less then 6 GW at all times of day. Variable load is on top of that during the day.
If we had 6GW of nuclear plants, our grid would be almost completely green and they'd run at 100% utilization.
Now calculate what it costs running a nuclear plant only at night.
You’ll end up at $400 per MWh excluding transmissions costs, taxes etc.
Your state already has coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned because no one wants their expensive electricity during the daytime. Let alone a horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear plant.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Nuclear seems to be the worst option:
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?
> 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.
You always need something in the grid that can change the amount of power it generates regardless of what you use in combination with it, because the demand from the grid isn't fixed. All grids need something in the nature of storage/hydro or peaker plants.
The advantage of combining solar with nuclear is that their generation profiles are different. Nuclear can generate power at night and doesn't have lower output during the peak seasonal demand period for heating. Nuclear is baseload; it doesn't make sense to have more of it than the minimum load on the grid, but no one is really proposing to. The minimum load is generally around half of the maximum load.
> It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.
If you actually reprocess the fuel there is no "couple thousand of years". If you instead put it in a dry hole in the desert, you have a desert where nobody wanted to live to begin with that now has a box of hot rocks sealed in it. It's not clear how this is supposed to cost an unforeseeable amount of money.
> Vulnerable to terrorism.
Nuclear plants are kind of a hard target. The stuff inside them isn't any more of a biohazard than what's in a thousand other chemical/industrial plants that aren't surrounded in thick concrete.
> Enabler of nuclear weapons.
The US already has nuclear weapons and would continue to do so regardless of how much electricity is generated from what sources. The argument against building nuclear reactors in Iran is not an argument against building nuclear reactors in Ohio.
> It takes a long time to build and bring online.
Better get started then.
> It doesn't scale down.
Decent argument for not having one in your house; not a great argument for not having one in your state.
> Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?
The country with the largest uranium reserves is Australia. Kazakhstan is #2 and has about the same amount as Canada. Other countries with significant reserves include Russia, India, Brazil, China, Ukraine and several countries in Africa. The US has some itself and plenty of other places to source it. It can also be extracted from seawater.
The US is also in the top 4 for thorium reserves with about 70% as much as the #1 (which is India), and thorium is 3-4 times more abundant overall than uranium.
> It's dangerous. For millenia.
See https://www.jlab.org/news/releases/jefferson-lab-tapped-lead...
> Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.
The word CAN is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Let's not pretend like the track record of energy production is free of externalities.
We CAN also produce almost all of our plastics from recycled ones. We don't, because those are more expensive than new.
But who cares? Plastic in stabilized landfill is behaving better then the oil in the ground it was manufactured from. It doesn't matter.
You don't need battery storage if you've got hydro.
You need solar. Make hydro the backup, fill reservoirs as your reserve and sell extra energy when they're nearly full.
Pumped hydro storage only holds about 8-12 hours of power. To be economically viable to build you need to cycle it daily.
It uses enormous amounts of land and capital to build, and is ongoingly dangerous in a unique way. If LiFePO4 can do 4 hours at full output already, and be placed anywhere using volume manufacturing to expand, then batteries are straight up better.
Pumped hydro is an expensive dead end.
I can see this makes sense especially for medium term storage. A lot full of batteries is great for the next ten seconds, next ten minutes, even to some extent the next ten hours, but it surely doesn't make much sense to store ten days of electricity that way compared to just keeping the water behind a dam. We know that many of the world's large dams are capturing snow melt or other seasonal flows, running them only when solar or wind can't provide the power you need lets you make more effective use of the same resource.
Except that in many cases there's people living downstream doing agriculture using that water for irrigation. There's just this tiny dispute about that in the nile delta between Egypt and Ethiopia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
Except for very short term peaks (less than 15 minutes-ish) it doesn't make any sense at all to use hydro to charge batteries. You've got a dam, you might as well let water through later than incur the losses of a round trip to batteries and back to the grid.
There are two types of hydro - run of river, and ones with large lake storage. You need the ones with large lake storage, rather that the ones with a lake to build a head.
Get a drought and you have to shut them down, ask France.
"Base load" is just some nonsense from nuclear fans to get the cost per GWh down.
Which absolutely should be done, but having energy sovereignty is never a bad thing.
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.
No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish.
Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts
Happens regularly. Last year’s heatwave caused a bunch of reactor shutdown across Switzerland and France - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
That said, cooling does have an effect on ecosystems. Not the worst energy plant impact on that regard, but still not like it's all environmental friendly.
And of course, there is the what to do with the waste dilemma. And at least with current French park, there is a dependence on the rarer kind of uranium.
No, I'm not - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
A lot of NPPs in France are cooled with river water and they need to be kept at low output if the rivers are too warm.
Cooling for French nuclear reactors, yes. More than once since 2020. But nukes?
Funny, TAP runs straight-thru Albania. They could just build a gas power station. Of course rented rigs line the pockets much better.
Why would they want to do that?
Building something is cheaper than renting it forever?
> 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 !!
You're forgetting corruption. Many countries can easily go 100% renewable, but there is no profit for dictators/politicians to do so. Most of africa, or the middle east, yet you still have many regions without electricity or water, so that people worry about food for tomorrow instead of better governance in the future.
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).
And it means that it has been oil free since the 70's.
Brazil, a continental country, has more than 80% of its energy from renewables
Oil free for electricity generation. The media in my country (Finland) also likes to brag about 90+% fossil-free electricity generation. But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.
Finland has electricified 40% of primary energy which is pretty much world leading (Sweden and Norway are 50%). European average is 19%.
Largest chunk left is transport which can mostly be electrified now. Industrial and home heat too. There are hard to electrify sections in both but overall it's fairly obvious what to do next.
And the easy parts eliminate 3 or 4 units of primary energy for every one they replace, so even 40% primary energy is way over 50% toward the finish line of electrifying all the useful stuff.
I think it's also an interesting question as to whether countries that use a lot of electricity have lower per kWh prices because they spread the fixed costs further.
Yes, ground transport (except long distance trucks) can be electrified now. In principle, most homes could be heated with electricity if we had means to store all the "excess" wind energy or waste heat from e.g. datacenters and use it in district heating. The technology for heat storage is mostly ready but the capacity is not.
But would it be easy or obvious what to do next? Absolutely not. Everything is simple if you have pockets full of money, live in temperate climates and do not rely on energy intensive (and hard to electrify) industries like the Nordic countries.
For example, about 25 per cent of the total energy consumption in Finland is used to heat buildings. Wood burning is about half of the total heating in distric heating systems which account about half of the total heating for buildings. Also heat-storing fireplaces are still a small but a crucial part of the total picture. A lot of extra energy capacity is needed just make sure you stay alive during the coldest months even if some of the systems fail.
Nordic countries have cheap electricity mostly for two reasons: very stable interconnected electric grid and lots of different renewable energy sources. Arguably, hydropower is the most important because it can stabilize the intermittent wind power which in many places we have more than enough already. Nuclear energy is also a major part of electricity production in Sweden and Finland.
And yet our electric grid or electricity production capacity is far from ready to handle even the more realistic dreams of "full electrification" we are told in the media. It will take many years just to get the grid ready.
And what happens if the stablest renewable, hydropower, fails? We might find it out this year as hydropower reserves in Norway are at the lowest level in 20 years. Hydro generates about 90% of Norway's total electricity.
> except long distance trucks) can be electrified now.
What do you call long distance? And why do you think it can't be electrified now. Both Volvo and Scania have electric tractor units.
Scania has trucks with over 500 km range at 42 t GTW. In Europe you can't drive more than 360 km in one go. See https://www.scania.com/group/en/home/products-and-services/t...
> In principle, most homes could be heated with electricity if we had means to store all the "excess" wind energy or waste heat from e.g. datacenters
Most homes are hundreds or thousands of miles from a datacenter.
> But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.
The trick of course is that if you electrify heating and transportation they'll need much less energy. Your average car with an ICE has an efficiency of 20-40%, electric cars have 60-80%. Heating your house with gas has an efficiency of around 100%, heat pumps have 300%-500%.
In theory gas boilers for heating are above 90% efficient. Not 100% because to achieve 100% what you'd have to do is keep the exhaust gases (which are hot) inside, where the people are, and unfortunately the exhaust gases are poisonous so that's a terrible idea.
To hit 90% the boiler needs to be designed to condense water vapour out of the exhaust gases, this way we'll get back the energy needed to turn water into a vapour which is a large portion of the energy embodied by the exhaust gas. And to do that the vapour needs to pass a low temperature fluid, so we use the input fluid we were about to heat with the boiler anyway, we want this fluid to be cooler than about 55°C but that means if we're using the boiler to heat a home with radiators, rather than to make fresh hot water for cleaning etc. we need our return temperature from the radiators to be less than 55°C which means we need our flow temperature to be lower (than the typical 70-80°C programmed by builders, not lower than 55°©) or else the radiators can't possibly radiate enough heat to hit that number, which means we're actually doing much of the same heating efficiency work we'd have to do to use heat pumps anyway...
And have either a small population or a very low per-person energy budget.
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.
There are a few countries just below as well like Norway with about 98% renewables in 2024 [1]. The gas power plant is mostly up north powering the gas compressors that fill LNG ships headed for Europe and the coal I think is for Svalbard but that mine/plant closed in 2025 [2].
[1] https://www.nve.no/energi/energisystem/energibruk/stroemdekl...
[2] https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/norges-siste-kullgruve-pa...
With modern tech, these 100% renewable electricity countries have effectively overshot. Many other countries would be better off getting to 85% and then shifting to focusing more on EV and heat pump uptake to get the best bang per buck.
Quite a few developed countries have privatized their electrical grids. The effects - predictable - were rent seeking behavior without the necessary investments to remain future proof. This is now catching up with us in a big way, the electrification is going to lag behind considerably on account of this.
I wrote about that in 2016, https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-problem-with-evs/ , and even though the situation has improved it has not improved as much as it should have.
This is quite frustrating because it is blindingly obvious to me that we will need to do better but given the profit angle it remains to be seen if these private entities will now do what's right for all of us. So far the signs are not good. Instead of embracing small scale generation utilities are fighting netmetering laws where ever they can (usually under the guise of not everybody being able to have solar, which is true, but which is not the real reason behind their objections). They're dragging their heels on expansion and modernization of grid infrastructure and the government(s) seem to be powerless to force the now out-of-control entities to live up to their responsibilities.
Couple that with the AI power hungry data centers and the stage is set for a lot of misery. Personally I think privatizing the electrical grid was a massive mistake. The market effects have not really happened, all that happened is that the money that should have gone into new infra has been spent on yachts and other shiny rock goodies.
> In a world where all the cars and trucks are electric you’re going to have to roughly supply your average highway with infrastructure comparable to the energy consumption of the cars on that highway (or the cities around it)
This is not true. Worldwide, typically about 80% of the energy used to charge EVs globally comes from a private connection. And the vast majority of that energy is drawn from the grid off-peak when transmission systems etc. are underutilized. You article reflects a mindset that envisages EVs working like ICE based transport.
I think we're going to see a lot of grid defection, and not just from little consumers. Corporations won't wait for grid connections and will roll their own microgrids.
There will be serious pushback to that by lobbyists. This is already happening in the form of mandatory participation in 'the market' while at the same time (you can't make this up) having to sell to that market at some kind of arbitrary price that you don't get a say in as producer.
I'm a small step away from going off-grid again, the biggest stumbling block is that - predictably - you can't do any practical small power windmill installations. I've considered a windlass in the basement but my kids wouldn't hear of it ;)
Sure, but large corporations have a lot of influence (read: money) to stop that sort of thing, so I don't see it going very far. Those building data centers can always play their trump card: just build the data center somewhere else.
Don't you need even more than 100% (of your prior consumption) to remain renewable if you also switch to EVs and heat pumps? Why would 85% be enough?
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.
>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"
They certainly can be disastrous in ecological terms, and will disrupt all biotopes along the concerned water flows.
But it's extremely renewable none the less.
Reminds me of when Bjork was protesting the construction of a new hydropower plant in Iceland, when the Director of Iceland's National power company (behind the project) was actually her uncle. I used to be romantically involved with someone in his side of the family and noticed Bjork was conspicuously absent from any family gatherings he hosted, of which there were many.
Or, more charitably: use the Strangler Fig method to modernize your systems, and start with low-hanging fruit.
wasnt New Zealand also already far up beyond 90% renewable electricity a couple of years ago?
They are blessed with all three of hydro, geothermal, and wind.
Do we have many countries around where wind is not a thing?
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.
Hydro electricity is also one of the most dangerous forms of energy production:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
(This is the worst disaster, but could put Chernobyl to shame?)
Full list here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
Sure, if you consider only local dangers and don't care at all about regional or global externalities.
Well most dangerous apart from coal, oil, gas, biomass?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
And that's before you bring into the deaths due to climate change
I should have pre-fixed it with "out of renewable energy".
I'm wondering how this picture holds up if we include cooking and water heating.
And cars. Lots of diesel in Albania.
They worked within the constraints of their own topography - good and bad - to make it work. That is too hard for everyone else?
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.
Recent video by someone from Puerto Rico comparing their island's renewables with Uruguay and interviewing the guy in charge of their renewables rollout:
https://youtu.be/TsmlyqZJOug
> 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).
Makes me wonder why solar is not on the list.. I thought all gore said that was gonna solve all energy problems. (Of course not, he's a politician, but I'd have expected to at least see it with some relevant percentage in the African countries) Or could it be that solar is distributed enough to not appear because it's set up directly by/with the consumer rather than the grid producer?
For some it's an eye-opening experience when they compare the states which are the most vocal about going solar and have a look onto the solar map of the world.
Or then they talk about how some countries have miraculous levels of an energy independence and social services and then look at their total population.
Tbf, solar has gotten so much more effective/cost efficient in the last 12-24 months that it's beating pretty much everything aside from hydro in the cost efficiency department at this point - including (most of) northern Europe and Canada.
Most data you find will be using data that's massively out of date and be off by at least 2x though...
I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear again. That would've been amazing and smart in 2015 - but now? Yeah, it's dumb af. And that's coming from a German living at the northern end of the country.
Germany spends 10x more than france on transmission and curtailment each year. Households have highest prices in EU per Eurostat despite EEG subsidies. Even if everything goes well gas expansion is still required to firm renewables. All this while it still burns coal and gas.
Going nuclear was sane in the past and sane now. If Germany wants to prove expanding nuclear is dumb it should try first to have lower annual emissions, while spending less than double the cost of entire french fleet.
France is the biggest winner in EU- it'll build both nuclear and renewables achieving deep decarbonization
Can batteries store enough energy for dunkelflaute in winter? I don't think it's possible with the current technology.
Batteries are not appropriate for dealing with Dunkelflauten. There's very little energy flowing through there, so what you want to do is trade lower round trip efficiency for lower capex. The high capex of batteries is best amortized over many charge/discharge cycles, for example for daily storage.
It's not. Germany would need an insane amount, about 3twh based on recent data and much more looking at 30y weather data
Batteries can store as much energy as you are willing to buy.
I mean, who cares? Fire up the gas plants in the one week a year you have weather anomalies. We’d still be 90+% carbon free which would be incredible. The last gap can be solved at a later point as technology evolves
And replacing the natural gas burned in those turbines with hydrogen won't be very expensive, since they will be used so infrequently. Storing energy as hydrogen is much cheaper than storing it in batteries, as measured by cost of storage of capacity.
Ultragrav (YC S27). We plan on generating the geographic tyranny of who has rivers and mountains and who doesn't by seeking to use ultrasonic audio to disrupt gravity so you don't have to hear it. We're hiring in Kansas city, KS.
In all seriousness, thereis of course a list on Wikipedia of countries by renewable electricity production [1]. China leads here but also has 1.4B people and still has significant coal usage and oil and gas imports. But they're working really hard to wean themselves off of fossil fuels while still rapidly industrializing.
China does have mountains and has built the Three Gorges Dam, which is just massive and produces ~22GW. They're building a dam that'll produce almost three times as much power, the Medog Hydropower Station [2], which is planned for ~60GW.
The part that annoys me about a lot of developed nations is that they engage in greenwashing by simply exporting their emissions to poorer countries eg [3]. Let's at least be honest about what fossil fuels we continue to use and the emissions we indirectly create.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station
[3]: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/18/1533104...
Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins:
- 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.
California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors?
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704
> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar
California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading.
It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels.
Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at the best time of the year and not the full year?
Or am I looking at sources that are >1 year out of date and in one year they've jumped from ~70% renewable to ~83%?
AIUI, there has been excess solar at peak, but batteries have growing very fast. That might have caused a big change even in a year.
Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.
Solar will no longer be renewable in 5 billion years as well.
But it is today
Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures?
I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable.
For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc.
Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.
California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster
2022 - 48% gas power on grid
2025 - 25% gas power on grid
What insane progress.
Most expensive electricity in the contiguous United States. By quite a margin.
By contrast, Georgia, which has to pay for the "disastrous" Vogtle 3/4 nuclear construction project, pays less than half that.
Remember: disastrous nuclear projects are significantly better than renewable successes.
That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July.
The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind
The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/12mo/monthly
That’s just a random website. Dutch bureau of statistics:
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2025/hernieuwb...
It seems to disagree with Dutch statistics because the linked view is for April 2026. While the article cited is talking about all of 2024.
If you change the view to look at the year 2024 [1] it claims 53% carbon free with 2.5% of that coming from nuclear. This seems to line up with the cited statistics of 50% of consumed electricity produced by wind, hydropower, solar, and biomass in 2024.
[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/5y/yearly?signal...
It's not just 'a random website' and it aligns with CBS numbers.
This is just goalpost moving. Only a couple of decades ago we were at a solid 0% everywhere.
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind
The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass.
As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.
Nah about 5% of electricity is from biomass, not 33%. The 33% figure is regarding gross energy production, not electricity. Otherwise agreed.
Where can I look up this numbers? (Just curious)
For California, CAISO publishes a ton of data. Here is daily fuel mix - https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso
You can also see Texas (ERCOT), New York and a few other operators.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
This is a goldmine of data, how did you find out about it? Thank you so much for sharing
good hilights! but - and i mean this kindly - you are starting to talk like an AI: "overshadowing real wins" "There's real momentum happening".
Isn't that the list of high energy prices and blackouts?
Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple.
Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...
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.”
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.
Whew, very glad that a leading scientific voice like DiCaprio is speaking of this to world leaders. Solid foundations.
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).
Well yes, hydro and geothermal are the easiest (and earliest perfected) renewable sources to provide consistent base load. It would be odd if the first countries to achieve fully renewable power weren’t making use of those technologies.
Other countries will have to be more reliant on interconnects, diverse renewable mixes and batteries. Luckily this is now almost always cheaper and more secure than fossil fuels and the trend lines point towards that continuing to be more and more true over time.
>at such as scale
Not to downplay the positive steps that are being taken but we are conveniently skipping over the denominator here at least in the case of Ethiopia and DRC who both have a grid that is only serving their full population at a fraction of the level needed to make this story one about geographical lotteries and abundance instead of one about poverty preventing them from access to the traditional carbon power generating routes to server the rest of the population.
Why geothermal is not renewable? Earth is not going to cool its magma soon enough
The Earth's heat content is about 1×10^19 TJ. This heat naturally flows to the surface by conduction at a rate of 44.2 TW and is replenished by radioactive decay at a rate of 30 TW. These power rates are more than double humanity's current energy consumption from primary sources, but most of this power is too diffuse (approximately 0.1 W/m^2 on average) to be recoverable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power#Resources
In comparison, averaged over the year and the day, the Earth's atmosphere receives 340 W/m^2 from the Sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#On_Earth's_su...
This leads naturally to "artificial geothermal", where solar energy is used to heat rocks or soil, and the heat is later extracted. It doesn't have to be anywhere near as deep as ordinary geothermal, which had to accumulate that heat over many thousands of years. Just ~10 meters is about enough.
That's not where natural geothermal energy is from. It's residual heat from planetary formation and some natural radioactivity.
This form of storage also unfortunately only yields heat (via heat pumps or directly), not electricity, as the temperature difference is much too low in comparison to meaningfully run any heat engine from it.
Great if you need to heat houses; not so great if you were hoping to store the solar energy for a rainy, or rather cloudy, day (or night).
No, that is how natural geothermal energy works. Perhaps you mistakenly thought I was saying the heat comes from sunlight? I didn't. The heat comes from below (or, in some cases, from internal radioactive decay). And this delivery of heat from below (or from decay) is a slow process, taking a very long time, which is why geothermal resources have to be buried deeply (otherwise, that heat just leaks out and the temperature of the geothermal resource is too low).
Yeah, "accumulate the heat over thousands of years" indeed sounds a bit misleading to me. The heat is largely already there (or is generated pretty uniformly through radioactive processes), it's just slowly transmitted outwards down a gradient.
Thanks for that context.
Heat is extracted at geothermal wells much faster than it is being replenished by the average rate of heat flow from the deeper Earth. It's effectively "heat mining". Granted, there's a lot of heat to be mined.
Only as a technicality. If you find a geothermal hotspot and start to extract energy from it, the hotspot will eventually cool down faster than if you hadn't (which of course depends on the size of the hotspot and how much heat you're pulling out).
However, given that there's no downsides to cooling down a hotspot other than, well, no longer being able to extract energy from it, geothermal is a bit of an honorary "renewable".
Actual renewables ultimately all come down to recent[0] solar energy, which will never deplete their source however much they are used. All the energy in wind, hydroelectric and biofuels has recently originated in the Sun.
[0] I say "recently" because fossil fuels are all also derived from the Sun, but their rate of regeneration is a bit too slow compared to the speed at which we use them.
A lot of hydroelectric depends on snow pack and glacier runoff that is being adversely affected by global warming. Solar and wind are the only robust hedges against a warm up that might ultimately severely curtail river flow.
We have a lot of uranium and nuclear is fairly renewable at least in the span of a few centuries. The waste issue is a problem.
If it goes down, what happens to all the buildings using geo/earth heat with these probe heads to collect the energy?
Does this effect occur in lets say 10-20 years or is this longterm like 50y+?
At a certain point there won’t be enough heat recovered from the geothermal side of the loop to generate steam on the process side of the loop and power generation will cease. I’m not smart enough to calculate how long that will take, however. I think you could still use the geothermal energy at a lower temperature for district heating and cooling, but a mechanical engineer would be more qualified to answer that.
Contrary to a popular belief, most high temperature Geothermal plants have a predicted death date.
This is due to the physics reality of the ground itself: Power of a Geothermal well will decay over time to a point where the well become unusable and need to be closed.
It is due to the fact underground water is rich in minerals and raw elements. This soup will slowly but surely cement the well itself and its associated underground.
There are techniques (similar to 'fraking') to extend the lifetime of a well but only to some extent.
If the topic interests you (and you can bear artificially translated English), a French content creator did a pretty good video on the topic:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q4xZArgOIWc
Additionally, Geothermal plants can emit CO2 (even a lot of CO2) in some geological configuration.
All of that makes Geothermal (for electricity) a bit controversial as "Renewable".
I precise that there is absolutely nothing wrong about low temperature Geothermal energy for residential heating and we should do more.
Geothermal is powered by fission Uranium and other heavy atoms deep in the Earth.
Solar is powered by fusion of Hydrogen in the Sun.
I'd use the same classification for both.
About 20% of this is residual heat from planetary accretion; the remainder is attributed to past and current radioactive decay of naturally occurring isotopes.
Most of the radiogenic heating in the Earth results from the decay of the daughter nuclei in the decay chains of uranium-238 and thorium-232, and potassium-40.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiogenic_heating
Potassium is more or less distributed in the body (especially in soft tissues) following intake of foods. A 70-kg man contains about 126 g of potassium (0.18%), most of that is located in muscles. The daily consumption of potassium is approximately 2.5 grams. Hence the concentration of potassium-40 is nearly stable in all persons at a level of about 55 Bq/kg (3850 Bq in total), which corresponds to the annual effective dose of 0.2 mSv.
https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-engineering/radiation-...
Almost none of it is from fission. Fission is a very rare natural decay mode of uranium and thorium. Most of their radioactive energy output is from ordinary non-fission radioactive decay.
No, not quite. Geothermal is powered by the accumulated heat stored in rocks from fission Uranium and other heavy atoms deep in the Earth (and other phenomena).
Geothermal hotspots do not reheat by fission or otherwise at the same speed that we extract their energy (if they did we'd be in trouble if we weren't extracting it!).
As I mentioned in another comment, build a Dyson sphere of solar panels around the Sun and it will last just as long. Build an all-Earth geothermal plant and the heat will be depleted.
By that definition, hydroelectric dams are not a renewable energy source for most of the year.
How long would it take for the heat to be depleted? Humans have only managed to drill something like 12km into the earth because it gets too hot to go further.
If it were possible to access all of the Earth's stored geothermal energy, probably a very, very, very long time.
But if we're open to applying a quantitative timescale threshold to the thought experiment, at which we can argue geothermal is renewable, that raises the question for nuclear. If we could access all fissile uranium and thorium on Earth, how long would it take for us to deplete its stored energy? Does that mean nuclear energy is renewable?
Can’t speak for large scale sites with abundant volcanic activity… But for residential geothermal the bore hole has a lifetime based on how much ground water there is and how active usage it sees.
This is because using it cools the hole slowly and after a few decades (depending on how quickly ground water can dissipate heat gradient) a new hole need to be drilled a distance away.
Can we cycle the holes? Use one while the other one is warming back up.
“Technically”
Then solar and wind aren't technically renewable either, because the sun is going to eventually consume the earth and explode.
Geothermal is renewable.
However much solar or wind energy we use, the Sun will last exactly as long. This is not a matter of scale. Even if we were to build a photovoltaic Dyson sphere around the Sun, it would have the same lifespan.
That is not the case for geothermal. It could in theory be cooled down if exploited at a massive scale.
Saying geothermal is not renewable is not an indictment nor a criticism. Geothermal is great and we should use it more. It's just technically not renewable, but that doesn't matter.
And a new star will eventually form from the debris, so "renewable" is a function of time scale.
And after a hundred generations of this there will be no fusible material left. We can extract energy from rotating black holes until they stop, and then the universe is dead.
So solar energy is renewable over a human lifetime, not renewable over a stellar lifetime, renewable over a stellar formation cycle, not renewable over the lifetime of a universe, and renewable if universes turn out to be cyclical. And all but the first are pendantry in the context of renewable energy conversations.
Then no power source is "technically" renewable.
Also, many of these countries are tropical or subtropical, with optimal conditions for solar energy year round. Nepal and Bhutan are relatively far from equator, but have many days of unobstructed sunshine.
The vast majority of humans live in regions with plentiful sun for solar.
Well, when geothermal stops being renewable there will be no humans around to need energy generation.
You are still technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
But if we follow that rationale, in a long enough timeline, solar and wind is also not renewable.
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 see that Norway is big on renewables - great that all that Oil & Gas revenue can be used to build hydro & wind to salve their conscience.
Interesting looking at the data, that Norway generates 4x the electricity of NZ and they are roughly the same size and population I assume it exports most.
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
Or just trains
Meanwhile the US is spending billions to cancel renewable energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas...
King Canute Trump trying to order back the tide.
Blows me away that energy policy is so political, and that somehow self-styled libertarians who don’t say a peep about oil subsidies are deeply offended by renewable ones. It you consider yourself libertarian can you at least be forward-thinking enough to see that shifting to renewables is also a step towards decentralization?
Link to the source data:
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/Countri...
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.
This map says hydro share is like 8%. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/JP/live/fifteen_min...
Article from 2024: still super impressive in 2024 yet I'd like more recent numbers to see the progress.
Worse, the summary article makes claims using 2022 data which is so out of date to be useless
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.
[1]: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/Countri...
Seeing so many sub-Saharan countries generating >= 50% of their electricity from renewables makes me smile: https://static.the-independent.com/2024/04/16/11/renewable%2...
It makes me sad - most of them are fairly poor and so don't use much energy. I want those people to have the wealth to consume as much energy as me. (My city is also 100% renewable but since I live in the us we don't show near as well on the charts overall.
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.
Yeah UK's currently going through the biggest rollout of renewable energy ever, the pace is insanely high. Theres new rules to allow plug in solar coming into effect too with kits already available for renters and such.
They announced they're thinking about amending regulations to allow plug in solar at some point. Hopefully something eventually actually gets done.
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...)
Perovskite Tandem are the best , according to the graph.
Why is it that those are reserved for ultra-big utility companies and I cannot buy those for my home or even my balcony?
They're much more expensive than traditional silicon cells, they often use toxic materials (lead, cadmium, etc), and IIRC their lifespans aren't as long. Unless you have significant space constraints it's usually better just to get twice as many traditional panels.
At present, those tandem cells are still experimental. Nobody is manufacturing them on gigawatt scale like for other solar cell technologies.
Well... if you go to the web site , they seem to welcome very large orders. Just not mine or yours.
Might be experimental and unavailable, but just for small orders? Come on ...
Time for a group buy
Mixing in geothermal and hydro really distorts the story. Although technically correct, the common usage connotation of “renewable energy “ today is “wind and solar”.
> the common usage connotation of “renewable energy “ today is “wind and solar”
Hydro, wind and solar. Hydro is often even more important because it runs more steadily than the other two.
Geothermal and nuclear are neither fossil nor renewable, they are their own category.
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.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/5y/yearly
Honestly surprised Iceland doesn't rely more on geothermal, the entire country is a volcano! I had expected a 70-30 split in the other direction
Geothermal is fantastic for heating. Speaking as an Icelander, we have so much hot water in Reykjavík that we even use the residue to keep our pavements clear of ice in winter. Pipes under the sidewalks carry exiting geothermally heated water from nearby houses. It's great technology and has served us well.
most people from abroad do, but most of that geothermal goes to home heating and not power generation too.
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
It's contrary to what most people think, but the later a country modernized, the better the infrastructure (generally). You basically get to skip the innovation stages where you have a hodgepodge of systems that eventually coalesce into one and all the upgrading required to bring it up to the newest standard. If you have a lower population and smaller geography, it is often easier to upgrade as well.
Albania: 90% Hydropower, $12150 GDP/person
Bhutan: 99% Hydropower, $ 4700 GDP/person
Nepal: 23% Imported $ 1381 GDP/person
Paraguay: 100% Hydropower, $ 7990 GDP/personIceland: 99% Hydry/Geo, $90000 GDP/person
Ethiopia: 88% Hydropower, $ 1350 GDP/person
DR Kongo: 98% Hydropower, $ 760 GDP/person , 13% of country has electricity
Not sure how this is applicable (and in many cases: desirable) for countries that do not have significant hydropower potential or maybe want a GDP greater than $760 per person per year.
Those "countries in the sticks", one report says that the DRC only has at most 20% of the households on electricity. This report says only 10% https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/democratic-r...
On the other hand, balcony solar power will be a game changer for the world, provided your neighbors won't steal the panels like they do the catalytic converters in my neighborhood.
All these industrial powerhouses like Iceland and Albania!