This is exciting news but the term power here should really be replaced with electricity which is clarified early on in the article.

Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)

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tialaramex 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is true but also distorting because it's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison. Electricity is not only much more flexible it's also much more efficient when it's an option.

The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.

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jl6 2 hours ago | parent [-]

All true, but also remember that in a zero-fossil world the supply chain for solar/wind also needs to be decarbonized, which involves things like making green steel, which is not such a favorable efficiency story (the way to overcome it is simply to generate massive amounts of electricity cheap enough that you can eat the inefficiency).

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tialaramex an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I expect that a zero-fossil world does a lot more steel recycling. Today steel is insanely cheap. Not so very long ago steel was this wonder metal, too expensive to mass produce, and today the pennies most people don't want as change when buying things here have steel inside because no other metal would be cheap enough given the value of the coins. They're jacketed because people expect them to look like tarnished copper (they were once bronze coins), but copper is expensive compared to steel now so it's just a jacket around a steel core.

If steel went back to say, twice the price of bronze, I think recycling makes a lot more sense and that means far less need for new steel production.

	▲	jl6 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Steel is cheap for two reasons: unaccounted externalities of the use of coal in the process, and massive scale. Coal-free steel is possible, but we don’t currently do it at scale, so there is work to do. Recycling will make sense if steel becomes much more expensive, but a future with really expensive steel is not what we should be aiming for.

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zahlman an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

...Do we really need steel just to mount solar panels?

	▲	jl6 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We need steel for a million and one things that make modernity possible, but in the context of renewable energy, we particularly need it to build the towers that the largest and most efficient wind turbines sit on.

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Tade0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is true, but a lot of that, if replaced by electricity, would use considerably less energy overall, so it's not a 1:1 comparison.

Residential heating in particular would use anywhere between a third to half the energy, if we only transitioned to heat pumps.

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toomuchtodo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Global solar PV deployment is approaching 1TW/year. All energy will be clean energy in the next 1-2 decades. Vehicles will electrify, as will heating. Roughly half of marine traffic disappears if you're not shipping fossil fuels around.

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-export-data/

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nielsole 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Important to consider that your stat is likely comparing primary energy, not secondary energy. E.g. an electric car or a heat pump use less primary energy than the fossil equivalent.

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Wacari 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

no. if you work in the industry you'll know power/electricity are used interchangeably, and energy is treated as the superset. in the physics sense, you're right.

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ZeroGravitas 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And roughly 2/3rds of that is lost as waste heat, so really only another 25% is actually useful.

	▲	marcosdumay 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you don't look at electricity generation, yes. If you look at grid generators, that fraction can get as low as 1/3. (But then, it can get higher than 3/4 on transportation.) So it really depends on who is counting and how. I do think transportation and heating use more energy than the grid, but I was never able to get a definitive number. (My best guess is it's close to 2 times larger.) Also, electricity to transportation conversion is usually only around 80% efficient. Making electricity portable has a cost.