From what I can tell, solar doesn't contribute a significant amount of electricity. About 0.25%. Coal is about 40%. I think we're comparing the wrong thing.
jeffbee's unsourced numbers are probably not for UK.
Worldwide coal provides a lot more power than wind [1], although of course it still produces more waste and pollution and everything per TWh than renewables.
We see that in 2018 coal produced 1,146,393 thousand Megawatts, which is a decrease of ~60,000 from 2017 (corrected!). Solar produced 66,604 thousand MW in 2018, an increase of ~13,000 from 2017.
In terms of percent of coal, the sources are:
* solar 6%
* hydro 25%
* nuclear 70%
* natural gas 100%
* other renewables (mostly waste/biomass) 31%
Coal use as a percentage of total generation is down and Wind has taken off so your intuition is wrong here. In 2022, 7.5% of the worlds electricity supply came from Wind vs 35.7% from coal so 30x easily makes up the difference.
> Together, wind and solar provided 16.1% of US electrical generation in the first two months of 2023; by comparison, electrical generation by coal dropped by 32.7% and provided 16.0% of total US electrical generation.
I'm not sure which part of it you believe is unreal, but I'll try to clarify;
- the 1% electricity consumption of total world consumption is real - based on research done by IEA (https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-...)
- The calculation on the effect of generating 200TWh of electricity from burning coal is 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 emission is real - the link in the article points to the estimation
- the fact that most of world's energy comes from fossile sources is real. While it's not 100% from coal, 67% is from fossile fuels; https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-2019
To further put this in perspective (2007-2021 data from the source above).
Gas absorbed about 60 percent, while renewables absorbed about 40. The numbers are in billion kilowatthours. Coal usage was reduced by 1117, in the same time period gas went up with 678 and renewables went up with 473.
"Overall, the addition of 121 gigawatts of solar and wind globally (also a record) means that roughly half of new electricity generating capacity installed last year was in these two technologies."
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
I'd assume coal uses much more land in absolute terms, since it's what 50% of global electricity vs 3-5% for solar at the moment.
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