I think the misunderstanding here is that you're talking about now: "solar is 1.3% of our electric production", "coal is still the biggest source", etc. This, I believe, is missing the point of the article.

The importance of noting that solar is the biggest source of new power is that is signifies the economics of power generation have changed. So sure, there's still lots of coal and there's still lots of natural gas. But if you're adding new capacity we're at the point where it makes more sense to build large solar arrays.

So in a sense, this article is noting the beginning of the end for coal and natural gas. The present percent contribution of solar or coal is not so important.

But this article doesn’t say anything about power generation. It only discusses nameplate capacity. Because the sun moves in the sky, and we have clouds, and night, and dust that sticks to panels, etc., the actual generated power is far less than the nameplate capacity.

For example, one set solar panels on my roof yielded 5.2MWh in 2017. Their nameplate capacity is 5kW, so the nameplate yearly generation is 5 * 24 * 365 = 44MWh, so my yield is about 12%. The other, smaller set (better panels, better site) yielded 4MWh or 15%. Actual generation is roughly an order of magnitude smaller than nameplate suggests.

And I live in California, where we don’t get a lot of rain - these numbers could be worse.

If you look at the power that will be actually generated by this new solar capacity referenced in the article, it’s far less than the power that will be generated by the other technologies, just because solar has such a bad yield.

So it’s not even true that incremental power generation is dominated by solar.

I love solar power, but I don’t think articles like this advance the cause, because they aren’t thinking critically enough. Lazy reporting does us no favors.

Don't let engineering numbers mislead you. The only number that really matters is cost per kwh at scale. Utilities are investing in this technology because that number has become favorable. We're starting to cross over from early, experimental deployments to bigger production. Utilities, which are very risk-averse, are becoming comfortable with solar.

12-15% capacity factor is comparable to a natural gas peaker plant.

Right, but the average capacity factor for natural gas plants in the US is about 56%.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25652

The capacity factor for utility scale solar PV in the US was 27% in 2017:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

The capacity factor gap with utility scale gas plants isn't as large as you might guess from looking at residential rooftop solar.

True. I guess the overall point I was trying to make is that the low capacity factor of solar strengthens the case for this beginning the real transition to renewables, since utilities are used to low capacity-factor assets (and are still choosing solar in spite of that drawback)

At some point within the next 3-5 years, storage + solar will exceed the capacity factor of natural gas without the fuel price volatility.

"New" is relative, hence the Bill Gates picking up the penny example. Sure, it's a true statement the second he picks up the penny, but it's not a meaningful one. In the case of the article, we are talking about a single quarter.

"New" is certainly meaningful. It gives an indication of where the market is going, investors want this information. It definitely meaningful to GE's natural gas turbine division, which has had big losses since demand has been less than they have forecasted

"Renewables boom is a bust for gas equipment suppliers like GE" https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-boom-is-a-bust-f...

Sure, it has a meaning, but it does not have the meaning implied by the title, hence clickbait, which was paidleaf's point.

The title says "new" and the article discusses new generation. Paidleaf said the title makes an implication about overall generation, how does it do that?

It is meaningful here, though. If Gates started showing indications that he was primarily going to pick up pennies from now on, that'd have important implications and questions raised.

The article could have made a stronger case about the broader trends: although this is referring only to a single quarter's worth of new capacity in the US, this trend has been happening on a longer term in many other countries.

> The importance of noting that solar is the biggest source of new power is that is signifies the economics of power generation have changed

Not necessarily. Solar becoming the biggest source of new power doesn't mean that there aren't any new projects for gas plants etc., and if people are still building new non-solar plants then solar's economics aren't always better than non-solar sources, particularly since the economics of power generation are very much geographically dependent.

Solar becoming the biggest source of new power is an important milestone, but it's also a relatively meaningless statistic. More important would be measuring the rate of change of solar adoption in new power generation projects, if it's positive then either new solar projects are bigger than previous solar projects (for a constant rate of new projects year over year, meaning that solar is scaling well), or the number of solar projects is increasing (meaning that solar has become relevant in more and more areas), or both. Either way, if you're concerned about solar adoption, that's the real statistic to track.

I don't get why you think "new" is inaccurate or misleading. This shows where investments are being made now, which is highly relevant. For example, GE's natural gas turbine division has been taking a beating lately due to renewables, ie:

"Renewables boom is a bust for gas equipment suppliers like GE" https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-boom-is-a-bust-f...

You make points about the overall contributions of fossil fuels to national generation capacity but that's not what the article is about.

Don't get me wrong, there are other reasons the headline and article are misleading. Comparing nameplate system capacity of electricity sources w/o taking into account the capacity factor is highly misleading. Also, discussion of whether solar projects were pushed up in an effort to beat the tariffs would have been appropriate.

"My deliberately incorrect reading of the headline is wrong!"

Speaking of misleading, your Bill Gates analogy is quite misleading too. These figures about new electric power are sums over a quarter-year, so small statistical fluctuations like finding a penny (or opening a single power plant) are smoothed out. To complete the analogy, if Bill Gates' biggest source of new wealth this quarter and last quarter were finding pennies, that would be quite a big deal, because over that period he would have to find hundreds of thousands of tons of them - more than doubling US zinc production in the process.

Or Microsoft's stock price took a dive? Analogies are fun!

>Solar energy is going to be a minor part of the world's energy strategy unless a revolutionary breakthrough happens

It doesn't really need a revolutionary breakthrough, just for solar and battery costs to drop 50% or so such that they become the cheapest option. A 50% drop will probably happen just from the existing trends continuing.

Indeed. I'd say we are in the midst of a "revolutionary breakthrough" right now. The cost-per-kwh of solar/wind electric power is now lower than fossil, and still dropping. Consumer options are growing on the low end, and experience with industrial-scale installations is growing on the high end.

There's another breakthrough I'm looking forward to, however - really good instantaneous pricing and metering. When prices are set on demand and fully automated, then energy caching hooked to the grid becomes viable. This creates a good arbitrage financial model. Store energy from solar/wind when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and sell that stored energy when demand is up and supply is down.

Once that's working, the whole grid gets remodeled. Then we can make a real dent in the coal-fired baseload plants and aging nuclear plants that desperately need retired. Economies of scale and experience will reduce production cost for whole suites of energy storage technologies (batteries, compression, thermal, flywheel, gravity, etc), even if they don't become more efficient.

That's an exciting future.

We don't even need the price drops you quoted. Installing new solar is already the cheaper than installing coal or gas in many locations. At this point we just need to continue to deploy. The panels themselves are already very cheap! Having out local governments and utilities simplify the permitting process would bring down some of the soft costs and make things even better though.

What this ignores is that the price for the end consumer is not directly related to the price of solar panel.

The combined cost of solar, batteries and grid changes, more advanced handling and software actually don't result in cheaper energy prices.

Compare California to places where they use gas.

Yeah that's kind of why we need another 50% or so to really be cheaper after you allow for the problems with peaker plants, upgrading the grid and so on.

I don't think it's misleading at all. More new solar power is being built than any other source. That's a good thing and if the trend continues, solar will eventually overtake other sources.

If, over the course of the past year, Bill Gates made more money from picking up pennies than any other source, that would be news too. It would indicate that his other sources of income have dried up.

You're right, the article doesn't say coal is dead.

It says coal is dying.

Social media is rife with what you call "lies and misrepresentations about solar" because a lot of people are very excited to see real progress being made in converting the electric grid from dirty, limited coal to clean, unlimited solar/wind. When I see numbers like this, I'm not thinking about "1.3%". I'm thinking about what this trend means for how it's going to look in 20-30 years.

Other countries have solved this today, even others 40 years ago (France).

But we today are exited about 'maybe in 20-30 years'.

Big projects take time. Decades. The financial models of power utilities are based on multi-decade deprecation of plants that cost hundreds of millions (or billions) to build.

Adding solar/wind to add new capacity or replace retiring capacity is a different and much better financial model than replacing equipment that is not yet fully deprecated. But it's a much slower one. Be patient.

I understand why it is not happening.

But my point is that there seem to be more interest in solar and wind as ends in themselves rather then actual discussion of how to de-carbonize the economy.

That just seems like an unnecessarily negative perspective to me. The point is, we are starting to de-carbonize the economy. And it's being done because market forces are a tailwind, not a headwind.

All the moral imperatives in the world won't be as effective as a profit motive. I'm not one of those silly people who finds a moral valence in market forces, but I'm always happy when I see them working in my favor, because they're as relentless as erosion.

The problem is that the energy market is far to regulated to make it clear what are 'market forces' and what are not.

Wind and Solar farms get production tax credits while producing useless energy (or even energy that they have to pay to dispatch). That gives them a significant advantage to something like a nuclear plant.

I am happy that these things are cheaper but I would also say that if we are seriously talking about this from a environmental perspective and how they will solve the problems we have.

If this is true then this endless talk about solar/wind is harmful to the larger debate. The ends and the means seem to be backwards knowdays.

Is it, though? Solar/wind is the path to getting us off fossil fuel. (I'm ignoring nuclear, as it has not managed to take off outside France, and the pro-nuclear contingent is so full of wishful thinking and conspiracy theory that it's like nails on chalkboard to listen to them.)

Early production credits are just priming the pump for solar/wind, helping the lead time to get the market going. They're neither necessary nor viable in the long run. Nor are they reliable for long-term utility commitments - all it takes is a political wave of fossil industry shills and anti-environmentalist fanatics (like, say, Washington today), and all those long-fought subsidies and credits can disappear. Worse, such subsidy/credit models are notoriously difficult to target effectively - the Obama administration, for all their good intentions, completely botched it.

But regulation and subsidy are, themselves, just market forces, more conditions to set supply and demand and therefore price. I don't believe in bullshit fantasies about frictionless free markets, and to the extent that they do exist, they just drive profit margins to near-zero (see the margins for supermarkets or gas stations). Show a real capitalist a regulation, and she'll see a market opportunity to be exploited. That's how capitalism actually works outside the whiteboard.

The killer for nuclear isn't regulation or subsidy - it's latency. Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build (not because of regulation, but because of complexity and scale). This introduces much greater long-term financial risk, and the industry is full of failed boondoggles, not just in the US but everywhere.

Solar and wind, on the other hand, can be experimented with at a small scale, for very low cost, and lead times an order of magnitude less than nuclear. What we're seeing now is a scaling up of the initial experimentation, based on initial learnings.

In software terms, solar/wind allow for Lean product development. Nuclear is waterfall in its purest form. Which one gets us to viable products faster and more reliably?

Yet nuclear reactors used to be built much faster and still are in some places. There is clearly something going on.

If you call all these things 'market forces' then its meaningless to talk about market analysis. The winners are picked by the political process.

While solar and wind are easy to play around with its that does not get you to de-carbonised energy production.

We don't need to 'play around' we need to mass produce cheap carbon free electricity.

> why is HN and much of social media rife with lies and misrepresentations

Clickbait (economic or personal gain), or people perpetuating things that sound good, or things they want to believe. Emotion influences the perception of information, and information can influence emotion.

> Solar energy is going to be a minor part of the world's energy strategy unless a revolutionary breakthrough happens ( a significant breakthrough on par with cold fusion ). That's a basic fact of current state of physics

What physics based on what equipment? An array of photovoltaic cells may or may not be as efficient as the Ivanpah solar facility. Ivanpah produced 719,398 GWh/yr across a six square mile area. Theoretically we would only need to cover half of the Mojave with such sites to provide for the US's annual electricity need.

I don’t understand what you think is misleading here. It clearly says new power. That means it’s growing faster, not that it’s the biggest.

Your Bill Gates analogy doesn’t work. He’s still making fantastic amounts of money from his investments. If picking money up off the sidewalk was actually his biggest source of new wealth (which is an odd way of saying “income”) then that would be huge news.

> https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427

According to your source, 1.3% of utility production comes from solar. It provides an estimate for smaller residential rooftop installations which brings total current generation closer to 2%.

1.3% of generation today with a growth rate of roughly 30-40% per year. We are installing a ton of solar and are no longer building a significant number of new coal plants or nuclear plants. The article is pointing out an emerging trend. Before we know it, solar generation will account for 5% of electricity generation.

It's understandable coming from Bloomberg, their MO is to drive up clicks/views. Is it technically untrue? Well, in this advanced economy with projected flat electricity demand, there isn't much growth in demand for utilities, except for replacing retiring stock like coal, nuclear, etc. It's simply a massively large industrial base that fossil fuels are leveraging day-in day-out, powering the vast majority of vehicles, airplanes, cement, steel, aluminum, plastics, and on and on. Electricity is one component of our emissions base, yes, but it's something like 25-30% of our emissions. Solar/wind/other non-fossil-fuels will take 100 years to fill all of the use-cases seen with current fossil fuels, and even then they still may be used in some niche applications.

Sadly, readers don't want to face the uncomfortable facts: we are still a fossil fuel civilization and will be for decades.