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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

To put it in perspective, in 2023 the world produced 5.5% of it's electricity from solar - if in the U.S., there was 25.3% growth year over year to 7% today, and given that overall worldwide electricity consumption grows annually by a couple percent, there is nothing in particular to be proud about here: U.S. is in the middle of a pack, producing as much solar as a share of total electricity consumption as everyone else does. Why should it be harder than anywhere else to install same Chinese solar panels? And it isn't. If this is seen as an achievement, things are bad indeed.

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25% growth in anything at scale is interesting.

It's true that some other places are ahead. For example solar in Australia has been growing at at average of 29% per year for 10 years[1], and wind at 15% per year for 10 years.

But every energy market is unique. The US has a huge supply of new, cheap oil and gas from fracking, and that means it has taken longer for solar to be cheap enough to undercut the politics of the fossil fuel lobby.

[1] https://www.energy.gov.au/energy-data/australian-energy-stat...

I think the important part is that the price has reached a level that incentivizes large scale installations.

Usage is going up and maybe that's attributable to more people shifting to electric cars.

We can certainly do better but claiming there is nothing to be proud of seems unnecessarily gloomy.

This is good news sure, but everyone else in the world, on average, is at more or less the same spot with about same growth rates, too. So there is no longer even an expectation that America is supposed to be the leader, and just not falling behind others is seen as a major achievement?

I completely understand you.

We accomplish this growth despite a lot of people not believing in global warming, despite having large corporations lobbying against renewables.

I am not sure why you are expecting the US to be a leader here. We are trailing other countries in many areas (healthcare, child mortality...) due to our political environment that makes positive change so difficult.

I don't have a comment on pride, but I do think the growth is remarkable: the US and similar countries already have mature power grids, meaning that solar adoption is fighting against the "sunk cost" of hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of investment. Understood in that context, solar's growth in the US is remarkable to me.

From another perspective, just because others are having success, does not mean one should not recognize one's own. It is not a zero sum game here, it's win-win.

Also, the article indicates it is more likely over 40% growth for 2024, it is 25% year over year for the first 5 months of the year, not for an entire year.

> Why should it be harder than anywhere else to install same Chinese solar panels?

Democracy. Permitting. Federalism. Regulatory decentralization. Lots of things that make construction relatively difficult in the USA.

All of these are in place in the EU too and we don't have a problem at all. We produced 10.2% of all electricity from solar in the same period. Having a lot less land and a lot less sun.

Half of the US voting population is still cheering cries of, "Drill baby drill". There are significant entrenched interests who are fighting renewable development wherever possible. It is only because the economics of solar panels have gotten too good to ignore that things are proceeding.

Solar panels are great at a consumer level due to utility metering agreements. At a grid level they are another story. Decentralized, fault tolerant, power grid with fall back generation just in case, is a tough challenge. This is why Europe pays the highest electricity prices in the world.

You also pay to send your kids to university, have the worlds best particle accelerator, and pay to take care of sick people.

Huh? Higher education is free for citizens in most EU countries and super cheap in the rest of them ($500-$5000 a year).

Pay to take care of sick people? Healthcare is socialised almost everywhere and is either free to use, or very cheap (and even commercial is cheap because it competes against free or very cheap state-provided one, even if it's patchy in quality and has long waiting times).

Thinking of "what's really wrong in EU" i can come up with only one thing really: our airlines are a pathetic piece of shit especially pertaining to the "premium" service, and no one really understands why.

I think they mean "pay to send your kids to university" and "pay to take care of sick people" as in the state absorbs the cost.

But the wording is ambiguous.

That is what I meant. The plural or collective you.

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