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California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors?

1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704

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> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar

California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading.

It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels.

Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at the best time of the year and not the full year?

Or am I looking at sources that are >1 year out of date and in one year they've jumped from ~70% renewable to ~83%?

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AIUI, there has been excess solar at peak, but batteries have growing very fast. That might have caused a big change even in a year.
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Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.
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Solar will no longer be renewable in 5 billion years as well.
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But it is today
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Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures?

I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable.

For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc.

Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.

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California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster

2022 - 48% gas power on grid

2025 - 25% gas power on grid

What insane progress.

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Most expensive electricity in the contiguous United States. By quite a margin.

By contrast, Georgia, which has to pay for the "disastrous" Vogtle 3/4 nuclear construction project, pays less than half that.

Remember: disastrous nuclear projects are significantly better than renewable successes.

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That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July.

The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.

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> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind

The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.

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That’s just a random website. Dutch bureau of statistics:

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2025/hernieuwb...

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It seems to disagree with Dutch statistics because the linked view is for April 2026. While the article cited is talking about all of 2024.

If you change the view to look at the year 2024 [1] it claims 53% carbon free with 2.5% of that coming from nuclear. This seems to line up with the cited statistics of 50% of consumed electricity produced by wind, hydropower, solar, and biomass in 2024.

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/5y/yearly?signal...

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It's not just 'a random website' and it aligns with CBS numbers.
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This is just goalpost moving. Only a couple of decades ago we were at a solid 0% everywhere.
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> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind

The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass.

As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.

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Nah about 5% of electricity is from biomass, not 33%. The 33% figure is regarding gross energy production, not electricity. Otherwise agreed.
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Where can I look up this numbers? (Just curious)
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For California, CAISO publishes a ton of data. Here is daily fuel mix - https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso

You can also see Texas (ERCOT), New York and a few other operators.

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This is a goldmine of data, how did you find out about it? Thank you so much for sharing
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good hilights! but - and i mean this kindly - you are starting to talk like an AI: "overshadowing real wins" "There's real momentum happening".
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Isn't that the list of high energy prices and blackouts?
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Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple.

Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...

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