u/Sierra-Powderhound

Gas' global share peaked in 2020 at 23.89%, fell to 21.75% in 2025 & declined for 5 years.

Coal peaked in 2007 at 40.84%, falling to 33% in 2025.

Renweable energy -- Solar + Wind -- rose from 18% in 2007 to 33.76% in 2025!

"The share of gas in the global power mix declined for the fifth consecutive year in 2025, despite a small rise in absolute gas generation. Strong growth in clean power, led by solar and wind, met around 68% of global electricity demand growth over the last five years (2021-2025), reducing the need for a significant rise in gas power generation." https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/gas-share-in-global-power-mix-has-declined-for-a-fifth-consecutive-year/

This chart looks at the time taken for different technologies to grow from 100 TWh to 1,000 TWh of annual electricity generation.

✅ Solar took just 8 years
✅ Wind took 12 years
✅ By comparison, gas took 28 years, coal 32 years and hydro 39 years

Nuclear also reached the milestone in 12 years, but then its growth slowed sooner than wind.

Importantly, this chart is not measuring market share. It is measuring how quickly different technologies scaled once they reached meaningful levels of deployment.

And the story today is also bigger than generation alone.

Batteries are increasingly extending solar generation into the evening peak, while electrification is creating new demand for clean electricity in transport, heating and industry.

Much of this growth is being driven by improving economics, with wind, solar and batteries becoming increasingly competitive across a growing range of applications.

That combination is beginning to reshape energy systems around the world.

Renewables now generate more than one third of global electricity, and wind and solar continue to account for the majority of new power capacity added each year.

The pace of deployment matters because energy transitions are ultimately about scale. And by that measure, wind and solar are growing faster than anything that came before them.

OP: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gavinmooney\_wind-and-solar-generation-is-scaling-faster-share-7469987485448724480-sT8m/?

Key Takeaways:

Canadian visits fell by more than 55% in major destinations including Orlando, Miami, New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.

Florida accounts for 10 of the 25 largest declines in Canadian visitors.

Canadian travel to the U.S. recorded its steepest non-pandemic drop in decades as political tensions and a weaker Canadian dollar weighed on demand.

Nuclear power is on the decline worldwide. Renewables are the future. https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

And is about to accelerate much faster as prices drop...

Something far more important than any single energy technology is happening right now: energy is being democratized. For the first time in history, the people generating power aren't just governments and utilities — they're households, farmers, businesses, and communities, installing solar panels on rooftops and wind turbines in fields, selling power back to the grid, cutting out the middleman. In 2024, global renewable capacity additions surged 25% to around 700 GW — the 22nd consecutive year renewables broke their own record — with solar alone adding 550 GW. Between 2025 and 2030, global renewable capacity is projected to grow by nearly 4,600 GW — double the deployment of the previous five years — with distributed solar (residential, commercial, industrial) accounting for 42% of that expansion. This isn't a utility megaproject story. It's millions of individual decisions by people who want cheaper, cleaner energy and no longer need permission from a power company to get it. Australia is the template: by 2025, rooftop solar alone contributed nearly 13% of the country's total energy generation, driven not by policy mandates but by households who did the math. And the math only gets better — solar and wind now have lower generation costs than both fossil and non-fossil alternatives in most countries, and that gap widens every year. Nuclear is the anti-thesis of all of this: it cannot be deployed modularly, cannot be financed privately at scale, and takes 18–36 months to build versus a decade or more for a reactor — all while locking up capital that could have built gigawatts of renewables instead. Every euro invested in new nuclear delays decarbonization compared to investments in renewable power. The transition isn't waiting for a nuclear renaissance that never comes. It's already happening, rooftop by rooftop, turbine by turbine. IEA + 5

The Hormuz crisis didn't just expose America's oil vulnerability — it lit a fire under every energy import-dependent nation on earth. When 20% of global oil supply disappears through a chokepoint and your economy bleeds for months waiting for diplomats to fix it, the calculation on solar panels and EVs stops being ideological and becomes actuarial. Europe, Japan, South Korea, India — every nation that spent the last six months paying crisis premiums for Gulf crude is now running the numbers on how fast they can reduce the exposure. That accelerated demand for clean energy hardware has one primary destination. China manufactures roughly 80% of the world's solar panels, dominates global battery cell production, and has systematically undercut Western competitors on EV pricing to the point where its market share is now structurally entrenched across the developing world. Every petrodollar that gets redirected toward the energy transition flows, in large part, directly into Chinese industrial output.

The EV piece tightens the irony further. The nations most exposed to oil price shocks — the ones that will move fastest on electrification out of sheer economic self-preservation — are precisely the markets China has spent the last decade cultivating. BYD is already outselling legacy Western automakers across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and large parts of Africa. The Hormuz disruption just handed Beijing's EV export strategy the single most persuasive sales pitch imaginable: your economy just lost months of output because you were dependent on a chokepoint America couldn't keep open. Here is a car that doesn't need it. Meanwhile the U.S. EV industry — starved of the consistent policy support and protected market scale that China's received — remains structurally fragile, dependent on tariffs rather than competitiveness, and nowhere near ready to absorb the export opportunity the crisis has created.

The bitter irony is now complete and compounding. The United States spent decades deploying its military, its diplomatic capital, and its global financial architecture to police the oil trade — underwriting the security of a system that China used as cover to quietly build the entire replacement grid. Beijing didn't need to seize the oil fields. It just needed the world to eventually realize it had to outgrow them, and to make sure it owned the factories that build what comes next. Solar, batteries, EVs, grid storage — China holds dominant or near-dominant positions across the entire clean energy supply chain, not by accident but by decade-long state-directed investment while Washington was debating whether climate change was real. The Hormuz crisis is, in the longest possible view, the moment the old energy order began its final chapter. The question is whether America will be a customer or a competitor in what replaces it.

China solar exports hit all-time record in March as Africa, Asia demand jumps https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/05/china-solar-exports-hit-all-time-record-in-march-as-africa-asia-demand-jumps/

European EV Market Surges On Energy Crisis The ongoing global oil and gas crisis caused by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in recent months has led to a notable spike in electric vehicle (EV) sales in Europe. https://www.industrialinfo.com/news/article/european-ev-market-surges-on-energy-crisis--358284

The US remains the undisputed hub of global wealth, home to over 251,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals holding tens of millions of dollars each. That is more than double the count in second-place China, which sits at 122,000. Together, the two nations account for roughly 55% of the world’s ultra-wealthy population.

The real surprise, however, is India. In just five years, it vaulted from 10th to 6th place, overtaking Japan, Switzerland, Australia, and Italy. India now counts nearly 20,000 ultra-wealthy residents, a boom fueled by a surging economy, a tech explosion, and roaring financial markets.

Growth rates show another shift. Poland led the world, doubling its ultra-wealthy population with a 109% increase since 2021. While global capital remains anchored in a few massive economies, the wealth map is clearly shifting as new players gain serious ground.

Source: Down the drain | The European Correspondent

The 80% fall in capital cost required to add 1 GW of solar led to a near ten-fold rise in annual capacity additions! https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/4fda38df-523c-46f5-ae75-49481abdc8fc/WorldEnergyInvestment2026.pdf

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from

Ember reports utility-scale #solar at just $43/MWh. Add batteries to shift half that generation into the evening & cost rises by only $33/MWh, delivering dispatchable solar for around $76/MWh.

That crushes the entire "we need 24/7 fossil baseload" argument. Cost wins. #BESS #SWB

Abu Dhabi's 5.2 GW solar + 19 GWh battery project is being built to deliver 1 GW of round-the-clock clean power, with IRENA estimating a cost of roughly $70/MWh.

Meanwhile, renewable-plus-storage systems can already supply electricity more than 95% of the time at competitive costs in major markets including China, India and Brazil.

The old grid model was simple: fossil baseload first, renewables second.

The new model flips that equation. Cheap solar, wind and batteries do the heavy lifting. Thermal plants increasingly become backup capacity rather than the foundation of the system.

The economics are changing much faster than the outdated narratives.

Edit: Why nuclear won't work with solar either.

Nuclear modulating is economically self-defeating by design. A reactor costs roughly €6-10 billion to build with fixed financing costs that run whether it generates or not—ramping down to "follow" demand means paying full capital costs for partial output, destroying the economics that make nuclear's high upfront cost theoretically justifiable. France, the world's best-case example, still can't ramp below ~40% without operational penalties, and when it does curtail during low-demand periods it's dumping power into markets at negative prices—literally paying neighbors to take electricity from infrastructure that cost billions to build. Meanwhile solar's marginal cost is zero, so it always outbids nuclear at the margin, forcing reactors to either curtail (wasting sunk capital) or flood the market with cheap power that cannibilizes their own revenue. The economic logic is brutal: the more renewables penetrate, the more hours nuclear faces zero or negative prices, the worse its capacity factor, the higher its effective cost per MWh—a death spiral that no amount of "flexible operation" escapes because flexibility requires the one thing nuclear fundamentally cannot have: low capital costs.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-enough-to-deliver-solar-when-it-is-needed/