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For small values of "pushing aside" https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy
Upvote. It always bugs me when headlines focus on electricity rather than total energy use. And flip between the terms as if the author and their editors maybe don't know the difference.
Then again i don't know what I should expect from an article that thinks "warp speed" is a reasonable description of anything.
Even within the limited frame of electricity generation, coal and gas (output electrical energy) have gone up maybe +1.2PWh since 2019. Roughly double that for the input fuel energy but best stick with output to compare to Solar.
Solar elec gen might be up +1.5 to 2.5PWh from 2019 if we believe the cited 2025 estimates. But overall I'd call that 'growing a bit faster' than coal and gas generation not really pushing it aside. We've not seen coal and gas elec gen figures for 2025 though, if all this ai datacentres talk is to be believed, then it's very possible that gas and coal has ramped up too - as they're by far the easiest to turn up in the short term. They just have to ignore any environmental restrictions and run coal for more hours.
I'd be reckoning Solar elec gen at <2% of total energy demand in 2025 factoring in their claimed growth for 2025, not 10%.
I love solar, but this article is misleading. It says ~2000 people died as a result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. While technically true, only 1 person has died from radiation related to the event. The other deaths were as people were evacuating the exclusion zone (eg. Old people who couldn't get medical treatment during the evacuation).
…forcing the evacuation of more than 150,000 people. More than 2,000 die in the process.
it looks precise to me
The article is correct. You are misinterpreting the writer: "...forcing the evacuation of more than 150,000 people. More than 2,000 die in the process." An event (Nuclear plant disaster) forced evacuation of people. That evacuation (from the area due to the nuclear plant disaster) resulted in 2000 deaths.
There were over 2000 deaths directly related to the evacuation order. No known deaths from radiation related events. Here are some links and quotes from a few places to show consensus on this.
"Official figures show that there have been 2313 disaster-related deaths among evacuees from Fukushima prefecture. Disaster-related deaths are in addition to the about 19,500 that were killed by the earthquake or tsunami." - World Nuclear Association, a think tank and pro nuclear policy group.
No deaths nor discernible increase in cancer rates - UNSCEAR Report, 2013, a UN agency
And if you want to deep dive:
https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en-1-2-1.html
I mean... that still makes the disaster responsible for their deaths
Mass panic and irrational actions by authorities.
I’m not sure I’ll chalk that one up to the accident itself.
I paid ~$800 for 1.2kW of solar panels on my van in 2023. The 600Ah of LFP was an additional $1,700. I've not paid a power bill in 2.5 years. How anyone could choose to not go solar baffles me. I was paying $3/kWh through the city-owned utility. Nominally, it was somewhere around 15 cents, but after all the fees that Austin charges, despite using only 20kWh/month, my bill was $60 at minimum.
The city has now raised rates five times since I went off-grid, so a straight $60 times 30 months undersells the ROI. It would now be $75-80, and $80 times 30 months means I'll have broken even by May.
Less than three years, and when the power goes out in town, I'm unaware of it unless I run into a complaint on Reddit.
despite using only 20kWh/month
Uh, that's really a lot.
According to the US EIA as of 2022, the average annual amount of electricity sold to a U.S. residential electric-utility customer was 10,791 kilowatt-hours (kWh), or an average of about 899 kWh per month.
You think using 2.2% of that is excessive?
No, watt, not kilowatt. And US is an outlier by far, with 12 kw/month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society
... My power bill for February was $1900 ...
holy shit, mine was $15 here in Australia so that's about 50c in US dollars (some sarcasm) AND that includes charging my ecar. i have 8.4kW of solar on the roof and I get paid a grid feed in tariff for the extra kW I don't use. We are conscious about doing electric intensive things when the suns shining though eg oven for baking, charging the ecar and ebikes, hot water on from 11-5 only etc
Holy crap. Do you live in a bitcoin server farm? Thats insane.
I don't disagree that it was insane!
But no, the reason is that I live in a decently sized old house in a cold area. We've dual zone climate control and I'm not sure either heat pump stopped running the whole month. I do run some servers but that's true year round and most months my power bill is in various parts of triple digits.
that is an absurdly high price for energy. I pay on average between 20 and 30 euro cent per kwh
Bought my first few panels today. Better late than never!
Too bad the US is owned by fossil fuel companies and weapons manufacturers who make money on wars fought over said fossil fuels. If we could at least eliminate the subsidies from taxes, then people might actually see how much more it costs. But as long as taxes pay for fossil fuel production, it will always appear cheaper to those not paying attention.
I disagree. Here in Texas, for example, even while politicians push new fossil fuel investments, property owners and private solar companies are deploying small and medium sized photovoltaic projects all over the state. Solar is a higher percentage of our total generation mix every year, 10% of the total last year (<1% 5 years ago), and its growth is dramatically outpacing that of fossil fuels. You won't see headlines about this, but the market forces are real
Yeah, but most of the data centers recently brought online to feed the LLM/"AI" bubble have triggered a bunch of retired coal plants to be restarted as well as old "dirty" nuclear plant that generate fissile-material for the new nuclear weapons Trump ordered built and other nuclear waste that we already dont have anywhere to store longterm. Part of the excuse being that the demand of these centers is too volatile for green energy. Plus Musk and Trump killing off the programs to build a network of car charging stations mean electric car production for the US market has been drastically cut despite gains in other countries. And cutting the incentives for heat pumps and replacing natural gas furnaces and water heaters has reduced the boom that heat pumps were having as well as are having elsewhere.
And the general public believes that natural gas in homes and gasoline in cars is cheaper than electric although that is not true, it's only that
Anyway, more "dirty" energy sources are in use than a few years ago, do any gains in clean energy have been outpaced significantly by increases in use of dirty energy in the US, though that isn't the case in many other countries like China and many EU countries without such large tax subsidies for the general public to consume fossil fuels more cheaply out of pocket.
Howdy, fellow Texan. Yeah, even we have realized fossil fuels are kinda a stupid way to power things. It doesn't help that ERCOT is a shitshow.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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