Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.

This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.

The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.

US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China. China's massive footprint of Coal should be added to US emissions.

Yes, but it was most recently at the same level between 1939 and 1940, according to that graph.

And total US GHG emissions are currently at about the same level as they were in 1988.

There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no.

Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets.

That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’s PowerAssist.

(Which limits the rate at which power draw can change. Very useful when you use a house-sized generator; it amounts to synthetic inertia. I have a 7kW generator, but a 7kW step load would stall it.)

i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.

that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge

it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.

any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.

we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US

Regulation aside, a significant issue is physical area. Most people won’t have access to enough area in the right direction to make it a primary source.

Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.

Quickly being in the next decade or two.

You mean the "US-Israel war of aggression against Iran"?

Let's not avoid assigning responsibility when it is so clear.

Funny, I initially read the OP title as

> Solar generates more energy in US than coal for the last time

Then the actual title is what confused me for a second.

USA became top 1 oil exporter, so we'll see how that goes

That shift is going to happen a lot quicker than people expect, here's the expected 2026 US grid additions:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205

- Solar: +87 TWh/year (assuming 23% capacity factor, lower end of US range)

- Gas: +9TWh/year (6.3GW new, 4.6GW retirements, higher end of US capacity factor of 60%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67206

This is in the face of massive growth for grid demand for the first time in decades, so the trend will accelerate.

New gas turbine manufacturing capacity is tapped out, causing new gas CapEx to get more expensive:

https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/gas-turbine-prices-so...

Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.

So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.

Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.

And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.

The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.

On the other hand.

Here we are reading about solar overtaking coal. Coal was producing more grid electricity than gas relatively recently, in 2015.

The rate of growth of solar-produced electricity is accelerating. Given another decade, there's every chance it can supplant gas as well.

Coal-powered AI has fewer hallucinations.