* https://theonion.com/solar-power-investment-skyrockets-upon-...
** There's also a big El Niño event, the Wikipedia page on the heatwave currently expressly denies that this contributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_European_heatwaves
But isn't that accurate? The ENSO is a specific phenomenon in the Pacific and it's not clear to me how that would impact the EU in such a direct manner.
Well technically speaking crude oil is a form of solar energy. (Sun -> plants -> animals -> crude oil)
> In addition to being cheaper...
It might even be cheaper, we're looking for the tipping point. But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed. The reason the world runs on something like 80% fossil fuel is because solar has, so far, manifestly not been a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels.
If you ignore the fact that people would have to go without energy then sure, it'd be great. But the practical reality is the downsides of oil are much smaller than the downsides of not having cheap, accessible energy. Which is why the world persists in using coal and oil.
Events in China do not retroactively change your solar panels or wind farm. You might choose to buy from a different supplier but there’s no equivalent of all of the people who are now struggling with food and housing insecurity because of two other countries fighting thousands of miles away.
> But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed.
This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the United States where laws are being broken at the federal level to prevent cheaper renewable projects from going online, but it’s common to other corrupt petro-states as well.
This tracks with it being cheaper which it basically has been for that decade.
The market has spoken but some people who claim to like markets aren't listening.
"The data available on fatal falls from height would indicate that rooftop solar power is several times more dangerous than wind power or nuclear power (0.44 deaths per terawatt hour each year compared with 0.15 and 0.04 deaths respectively)"
https://osha.europa.eu/sites/default/files/E-fact68.pdf
"Government (South Korea) data reported 28 worker deaths during solar installation projects from 2020 through the first half of 2025 (about 5–6 deaths per year on average)."
It's wonderful technology, the sun is god and so on, but we can't run everything on bursty renewables.
Also, we have battery technology. Bursty doesn’t mean real engineers can’t build reliable systems, and the economic factors can spur a lot of efficiency improvements.
Like... A hurricane?
Sun spill?
Like... A coronal mass ejection?
That includes renewables.
I think "acceptable" is a better adjective here, though people like to disassociate by using "collateral", like with the school of girls blown up the first day...
But given the remoteness of the Pacific and all the other sources of variation in European weather, it's a fairly weak signal with lots of uncertainty (and there's no clear signal at all for summer weather).
It can, capital depreciated continuously and there'd be an annual budget for replacing panels. If the new panels are much more expensive, we'd expect the cost to start rising.
Obviously everyone would rather be using solar rather than oil if there is going to be a war because the feedback loop is slower, but it is still affected by foreign events.
> This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that.
Maybe, but the environmentalists have been flailing and failing to stop the fossil fuel industry for decades, because people want cheap energy. If renewables actually work the fossil fuel industry will have about as much success stopping them, ie, none whatever. There wasn't ever strong enough political support for renewables to escape economics, but there is even less for fossil fuels. Nobody is in favour of them on an ideological basis.
We can do fusion, but given the only large sources of that are fusion bombs and nobody wants a bomb-based power plant… :P
[citation needed]. Project Pacer might be controversial and uneconomical, but still interesting.
Nukes for the win!
2024: https://www.indexbox.io/blog/australias-battery-storage-flee...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-11/californias-battery-s...
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10022025/solar-battery-st...
Note how massive home battery deployment drove all of Australia’s wholesale power price down by half: