I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons. The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder). In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off. My up time is better than the grid. The simple fact is that solar plus batteries is a complete solution for 90% + of the worlds population. One of my side projects was to remove the alternator from the "truckasaurus" and mount solar pv as the only electrical power for starting, lights, etc. It was marginal, but I ran it that way as my only vehicle ,year round, for years. Relevant?, yes! as my experience has shown me where the margin realy is, and there has been a great deal of technological improvements and cost reductions since I built my system.

I think the key is to combine it with a strong, digitalized grid and a lot of BESS—a technology which is now getting progressively cheaper, just like PV.

https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...

I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.

From the article:

  Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.

Connect enough grids and the sun is always shining.

> Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants

No, Germany has 97 coal BLOCKS in its power plants (down from 150 in 5 years), but those are NOT all active.

Also Germany's coal consumption is at an all time low, down a third in only 5 years.

That’s a lot of text, none of which even attempts to refute the factual claim that solar’s generation share has increased from 1% in 2015 to 10% in 2025.

Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.

They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.

The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment. I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied. Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector.

The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources. You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.

hydro is mostly tapped, solar on the other hand can grow a lot. And we are talking about electricity, not energy in general. Tackling energy is more about electrification.

Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.

Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.

The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices

It is working perfectly fine: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-

The energy transition in Germany sucks because they are replacing nuclear with solar when they should have been replacing coal with solar.

That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.

If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.

it's winning regardless - every kwh of solar is a kwh less of fossils. You can achieve even deeper decarbonization with nuclear but the perfect shouldnt be the enemy of good. There are countries where nuclear is politically hard and changing ppl's opinions is hard too. So it's either ren+ some fossil firming or just fossils

That's what batteries and wind and hydro are for.

> Every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs.

Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.

And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.

Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane. At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle. That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.

Recent Bloomberg opinion pice about factories there and in nearby countries shifting to renewables:

Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/asia-s...

> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915

It is absolutely sane and perfectly reasonable. The climate highly support it, you are already used to a grid that in some cases are not available 24/7, and the major energy consumptions are AC and fans which correlate with production.

There was a production car planned called the Lightyear One [0], originating from a Dutch student team, but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_0