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Comment by josselex | Hacker News Reader

So renwable Energy increased from 7 percent to 10 percent in 12 years with a perfect linear slope. So we just need only about 300 years till 100%. Good luck with that.

Is anybody reading these plots? This is really the worst news I read this year.

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Or, look at it differently: we've increased our renewable energy capacity percentage by 42% over 12 years, even as world energy demand rose. (0.1/0.07 = 1.42)

This is great news! In about 75 years, we'll use >90% renewable energy. (1.42^(x/12) = 0.9/0.1)

Which of these is the better model? I don't know, I can't eyeball statistical regression on this chart. But my gut says percentage of energy use growth isn't what we should pay attention to if we want to predict the long run future. When/if renewables become far cheaper than coal, that percentage is going to skyrocket fast.

Both wind and solar are cheaper as of 2018 than continuing to run existing coal plants.

Not only, but apparently includes bio-fuels. Sorry, but agriculture is hugely environmentally impactful. We should not be growing fuel. I think a lot of it is subsidized by governments. Extracting petroleum from the ground is going to continue to be cheap for a very long time.

Aren't biofuels carbon neutral? You have to capture the carbon from the atmosphere to make the fuel.

Perhaps that is the argument, but corn or sugar cane or whatever don't magically become diesel. There's energy and other external costs put into the system, pollution by fertilizers, etc. Then again, growing trees on the same agricultural land would sequester how much carbon? And trees would be processed to building materials (among other uses) not released back into the atmosphere so quickly.

You missed an important point, the 2017 increase. "According to the International Energy Agency, the world got nearly 25% of its electricity from renewables in 2017, and that number should jump to 30% within the next few years."

Hopefully better and more nuclear in the future with a progress on fusion and storage . Or any other novel ways to produce energy.

From what I have read, the experts agree the adoption rate is going to radically increase in the coming years and decades.

Don't know why I'm down voted. Did I miss anything? I thought I'd read about some good news but then it just showed how bad it really is... Let's hope we can speed up considerably.

> anybody reading these plots? This is really the worst news

A significant amount of work and investment goes into making some of these plots trend that way:

https://datareport.goalkeepers.org/

You might be down-voted because you take that improvement for granted.

You mistook a sigmoid curve for a linear one.

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