Renewable energy met all new demand for electricity in 2025, according to a new review of global power generation, halting the growth of fossil fuel-powered generation and highlighting the promise of clean sources like wind and solar.

The authoritative Global Electricity Review released annually by Ember, an international energy research organization, says clean sources — especially solar — are growing fast enough and are cheap enough that they are stopping new fossil fuel-powered electricity generation. Electricity from solar and wind increased while there was no change to the amount of electricity produced from burning fossil fuels.

“We're really talking about a large-scale change in how the energy system works. And solar is among the most scalable technologies that can deliver fast change,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember.

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[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Probably because it's so uncommon. The only commercially viable tidal generator ever built in Canada (and one of the few in the world) was the one on the Bay of Fundy, and it didn't produce all that much electricity in grid terms (20MW, thank you Wikipedia). You need a lot of tidal water level change to get decent power out of tidal generation, so there are likely fewer sites than you think. Plus, one reason the Bay of Fundy station was shut down was that it was rather hard on the local sea life, although I expect some of the same mitigation strategies used on inland hydro dams could help with that if they wanted to replace it with a new station.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 days ago

Getting turbines reliable while in salt water proved to be difficult.

[–] Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There's also wave generation, which has its own pros and cons

[–] SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Everything Has a Cost

[–] MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago

Huh, TIL, thanks!