Jenny Chase

@solarchase.bsky.social

18305 Followers 1423 Following

Solar analyst at BloombergNEF, goose keeper. Author of a book, "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon". Opinions all my own.

A BloombergNEF chart showing solar build, 2000 to 2036 (expected as of mid 2026). After a boom from 2009 to 2012, the market slowed down to just a few GW/year before picking up to 15GW/year in 2023 and slightly more in 2024 and 2025.
A chart showing German wind onshore and offshore new build by year from 2000 to 2036 (forecast as of mid 2026). These were around 2GW/year from 2000 to 2012, had a small boom of 4-6GW/year 2015-2017, a few years of doldrums and is expected to pick up again to nearly 12GW in 2026.
Chart showing BloombergNEF data for minutes of battery storage, calculated as cumulative battery capacity in megawatt-hours at the end of 2025, divided by cumulative solar capacity in megawatts at the end of 2025. It is highest in Hawaii at 92 minutes, is 66 minutes in California, 44 minutes in Saudi Arabia, 34 minutes in the UK and around 30 in Texas, total US, Chile and Italy. Germany and mainland China are both on 15. Spain has 2 and India, 0.
Jenny Chase, on a bike, with her 10-month-old baby on the back seat. A field of maize and the Alps are in the background.
A screenshot of a BloombergNEF chart also sourced to the Australian Energy Market Operator, showing the intraday hourly average revenue earned in the National Electricity Market for the first quarter of each year from 2022 to 2026, for gas-powered generation (grey) and batteries (pink). The majority of revenue is in the evening hours, when the sun goes down. The revenue from gas is clearly lower in 2026 than in previous years, and battery discharge revenue is clearly eating into it. From the associated story, "During the first quarter of 2026, discharge from utility-scale batteries in the NEM averaged A$0.40 million ($0.28 million) in wholesale energy market revenue at 7 p.m., up 211% from A$0.13 million the year prior. The increasing volume of batteries discharging during evening power price peaks in the NEM is reducing demand for the gas plants, whose average evening revenue earned fell 23% to A$0.58 million in 1Q 2026, down from A$0.76 million in 1Q 2025. As more batteries come online, competition to maximize returns from arbitraging intraday swings in the power price will intensify. Increasing volumes of charge and discharge from competing battery projects is starting to soften volatility in the NEM, tempering the very dynamic that made the market so lucrative to batteries in the first place. Across the NEM, average intraday arbitrage was A$203.33 per megawatt-hour in 1Q 2026, a 12% year-on-year decline, driven partly by the increasing penetration of battery storage in the NEM. This ‘self-cannibalization’ of arbitrage value available to batteries could intensify further in the near future with an estimated 9 gigawatts (27 gigawatt-hours) of capacity currently under construction across the country. Battery projects will need to diversify their revenue streams with non-market sources of value such as offtake agreements and system security contracts to bolster their business models against lower arbitrage returns."
Daily power supply for Germany on June 22 and 23 2026, during a heatwave, from BNEF. On Tuesday, June 23, solar was supplying 47GW out of 58GW load at 2pm - and generally the big yellow chunk is a majority of daytime power demand.
Chart of power demand, supply and load for France on June 22 and 23 2026, during an extreme heatwave. Source is BloombergNEF. The power mostly came from nuclear, but there's a substantial chunk of power coming from solar during the daytime.
A screenshot of the Sonnen app for Jenny Chase's house electricity profile on 28 June 2026, a day when temperatures were 36 degrees C. There's a spike in the morning of car charging, then a flat plateau of air conditioning until solar output dips. The 22kWh battery was full all afternoon, and the 13.2kW solar system exporting power for negligible value.
A large baby sitting on a mat outside, in a small puddle of water.
Some text and a char . The text, which more or less recapitalates what the chart says, reads: "2.1. BNEF’s New Energy Outlook Energy Transition Scenario –the terawatts add up BNEF has just published its New Energy Outlook 2026 (web | terminal), which presents BloombergNEF’s long-term energy and climate scenarios for the transition to a low-carbon economy. The Economic Transition Scenario (ETS) – which models a transition led by market forces, and is our base case – is lower than our forecasts (Figure 2). Solar worldwide in the ETS reaches 8.9TW by 2035, generating 23% of world electricity, while our mid scenario is 10.7TW. Even the Net Zero Scenario (NZS), a considerably more ambitious one for renewables, only builds 11.4TW of solar by 2035, generating 27% of the world’s electricity, and then reaches 30.8TW for 40% of world electricity by 2050."
Chart showing new build PV, historicals and forecast, by country. The world total was 655GW(DC) in 2025 and 640GW(DC) in 2026, after which the global market resumes slow growth driven mainly by the buffer capacity (ie, unknown / unallocated markets such as African countries, which we cover individually but have no confidence in our ability to identify booms).
A photo from the author's office window in the basement. There are several layers of heavy bars, but can be seen that there is a gosling outside on grass in a predator-protection pen, chatting to the adult geese who are loose in the garden.
Day-old gosling snuggling in the crook of the poster's arm.
Photo of a new-hatched gosling meeting his very interested father.
A photo of a goose egg hatching in an incubator.
A fat fairhaired baby sitting under a tree.
Photo of the undistinguished Swiss city of Olten from a nearby hill.
A screenshot of a BloombergNEF article, including a chart of a load duration curve showing that supplying a rising proportion of hours of the year with solar and storage goes up slowly to about 95%, then more sharply, and goes asymptotic to 100%. This is specifically in Saudi Arabia where the sunshine is pretty constant. Text says, "Solar is the cheapest source of electricity in many countries, including Saudi Arabia, where BloombergNEF estimates a levelized cost of plain vanilla photovoltaics (PV) at $15 per megawatt-hour. This is not necessarily useful to run the ranks of data centers the country aims to host, though, as their high capex means they need to run nearly constantly to amortize that cost. Adding a battery can change that — especially in the Saudi climate, where solar generates a similar high amount of electricity nearly every day of the year. Batteries seldom sit either empty or full for multiple days. BNEF estimates that PV and batteries could supply 99.5% availability for a baseload demand source like a data center, for a cost of just $70 per megawatt-hour (MWh) — more expensive than gas at $40-49/MWh, but not massively so."
Early oak leaves against a blue, partly clouded April sky.
A grey and white goose named Stiorra on a nest. She has a missing beak tip as a result of a fox attack, but she does not let this interfere with any of her plans.
A pair of charts from BloombergNEF using data from Vortexa, showing the share of global seaborne volumes of fossil fuels going through the Strait of Hormuz (about 22% for jet fuel, over 30% for crude oil) and the share of European Union supplies (nearly 50% for jet fuel).
Text from the New York Times story, "Saving Hermit Crabs by Breeding them in the Suburbs". "She began to see them in new ways. They are social animals that thrive in family groups. They require large spaces with hamster wheels for exercise, display distinct personalities and communicate with unique chirps. Like parrots and ball pythons, they can live 50 years. “They’re voiceless, misunderstood, elegant, incredible creatures that nobody cares about,” Akers said in her makeshift lab, where bright aquariums line the walls. In one, Fernandina, a stately, purple, baseball-sized crab around 40 years old, unfurled herself from a coconut hut. “They live so long, they must have some knowledge or sentience.” It pains Akers and her crab-loving friends that so many hermit crabs are denied the chance of a long life. Some store owners toss them out at the end of the beach season if they aren’t sold. “It’s ingrained in that boardwalk mentality that the crab is for the summer,” said Stacy Griffith Wodicker, of Fairfield, Ill. Her organization, the Land Hermit Crab Owners Society (motto: “Good Friends in a Pinch”) helps rehome unwanted pet crabs."
A sandy-haired fat baby on the floor, next to a mat suitable for laying a baby on. He has clearly rolled himself off.
A screenshot of the author's battery control app, Sonnen. It shows a battery 100% full, 3.4kW coming from the solar panels, the house consuming 0.3kW and 3.1kW going to the grid (with very little compensation).
Five geese eating spring cabbage from a hand.
A BloombergNEF chart by Jenny Chase's team, showing solar build forecasts over time for selected quarters since 2011. In 2011, we only had two-year forecasts and they were flattish at 30-40GW/year; over the years, these forecasts drift upwards and generally are lower than what actually happened. In 2021 we started doing forecasts to 2030, and they were also flattish, though also hilariously drift upwards. In 2024 we expected solar build to rise from just under 600GW, to about 850GW in 2030; as of 1Q 2026, we cut this slightly in the long run.
A screenshot of BNEF's 2026 Long-Duration Storage report. It reads, "Long-duration energy storage definition and technology coverage While there is no universally accepted definition of LDES, BNEF defines it as energy storage technologies in which the cost and scale of energy capacity (GWh) are largely decoupled from those of power capacity (GW). This report focuses on novel LDES technologies, excluding solutions such as conventional pumped hydro. We also exclude chemical-based solutions here as BNEF covers this sector separately. Lithium-ion batteries are excluded from this analysis, as they are generally classified as short-duration storage technologies. For thermal storage, we restrict our scope to power‑based projects, excluding those designed solely for thermal output. For more on LDES definitions across key markets, see A.1"
A dashboard showing the current status of the author's solar and storage system (a new 22kWh battery with an old 13.2kW solar system). The battery is at 97%, and still charging from the sun.
A snapshot of a screenshot from BloombergNEF's Solar Exports Tool, showing exports from China to Cuba by month, 2023-2025. This data comes originally from China Customs via the firm SinoImex. The chart shows a major increase from late 2024 and into 2025, from negligible levels in 2023.
A screenshot of an article from Solar Power World Online, about a factory by ELITE Solar (formerly ET Solar) opening in Egypt. The text reads, "At ELITE Solar’s Egyptian grand opening, both ELITE Chairman Derek Liu and OCI Chairman Woo Hyun Lee wore cowboy hats that they said represented the “cowboy spirit” of what they’re doing together. Lee fashioned Liu as a “modern Genghis Khan” for ELITE’s early entry into the Egyptian market, leading the way for solar domination across the region."
A photo of a snow-covered farm landscape with the Jura hills behind. Mist is rising from the ground.
A chart from BloombergNEF showing US annual PV production capacity as of October 2025. Polysilicon capacity is about 20GW/year (from Wacker and Hemlock), wafer capacity 2GW/ year (Corning), cell capacity 3GW/year, and module capacity 63GW/year (the largest is First Solar, followed by Hanwha Q CELLS, with a large number of other firms).
Text from the New York Times article, "Vaccines Are Helping Older People More Than We Knew": Nearly all studies of off-target benefits are observational, since scientists cannot ethically refuse a safe, effective vaccine to a control group who could then become infected with the disease. That means such studies are subject to “healthy volunteer bias,” because vaccinated patients may also practice other healthy habits, differentiating them from those not vaccinated. Although researchers try to control for a variety of potentially confounding differences, from age and sex to health and education, “we can only say there’s a strong association, not a cause and effect,” Dr. Maggi said. But Stanford researchers seized on a natural experiment in Wales in 2013, when the first shingles vaccine, Zostavax, became available to older people who had not yet turned 80. Anyone who had was ineligible. Over seven years, dementia rates in participants who had been eligible for vaccination declined by 20 percent — even though only half had actually received the vaccine — compared with those who narrowly missed the cutoff.
A desk with a computer set up right next to a window, where the ground outside is above the level inside. A goose is looking in the window; behind her, others are hanging out in the snow-covered garden.
Four solar panels attached to a wall at ground level, facing the street. Three of them have been broken from multiple impacts; cracks run all over the panels.
An advertising picture by publisher World Scientific Publishing, for the book Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon by Jenny Chase. It notes that the Amazon Kindle version is available for US$20 or £20 until the end of February 2026.
Two solar panels leaning on a wooden house. They are held in place with orange tape that also attaches what appears to be an electricity wire, which covers part of the active area of each panel. Brambles are growing very close to them, almost impinging on the active area.
A photo of a gander (male goose) watching over a group of goslings. They weren't always his goslings - they came out of the incubator in the human house - but they're his goslings now. Ganders do a lot of goose childcare and are much more willing to adopt than female geese do.
A bike with a small package attached to the backrack with a bungee cord. Behind the bike are rolling fields, woods, and right in the distance, the Swiss Alps.
A hand writing with a pen on a piece of paper. It is the start of a formal letter in German.
A very charming little shop with striped blue awnings, with a bike outside and beautiful old cobblestones.
Chart of BloombergNEF's historical and short-term forecast numbers, as of the third quarter of 2025, for new build of photovoltaics from 2016 to 2035. These rise from 75GW new build in 2016, to 599GW in 2024, to 694GW in 2025, but growth then slows and reaches only 931GW in 2035. The largest market is China, but the 'Buffer / unknown' category becomes even larger by 2035.
A screenshot of an app from inverter maker SolarEdge, which monitors the author's monthly household solar electricity production and energy consumption, for the year beginning 1 September 2024. Total production was 10.79kW, consumption 13.62kW. However, in December total consumption was 1.74MWh, while production was only 0.2MWh; in June, total production was 1.72MWh, consumption 0.8MWh.
An edit of a meme, from a cartoon by Tom Gauld, to apply to trade wars. Two very similar-looking countries are on opposite sides of a river. One is labelled “Our Blessed Homeland”, the other “Their Barbarous Wastes”. Jenny Chase has edited the text below so that “Our Blessed Homeland” has “Our Support for Strategic Industries” while Their Barbarous Wastes has “Their Filthy Production Subsidies”. Likewise ”Our Investment in the Energy Transition”, “Their Profit-chasing Bandwagon-Jumping”. “Our Free Market Competition Benefitting Consumers ,”Their Terrible Dumping at Cost”. “Our Innovative Collaborative Companies”, “Their Nasty Cartels”.
A screenshot of a chart from a BloombergNEF Tableau tool showing power generation in continental Europe - including Switzerland, Ukraine, Turkey, and Scandinavia - by source, from 2005 to 2024. Solar and wind are a yellow and blue slice along the bottom, growing visibly. Total generation stays fairly steady around 5 million GWh, but coal generation decreases from 1.2 million GWh in 2005 to 0.65 GWh in 2024, and gas (and nuclear) also decrease slightly, with the difference being made up with solar and wind. The link to the tool, if you have a BNEF account, is https://www.bnef.com/generation?region=ala%7Calb%7Cand%7Caut%7Cbel%7Cbgr%7Cbih%7Cblr%7Cche%7Ccyp%7Ccze%7Cdeu%7Cdnk%7Cesp%7Cest%7Cfin%7Cfra%7Cfro%7Cgbr%7Cggy%7Cgib%7Cgrc%7Chrv%7Chun%7Cimn%7Cirl%7Cisl%7Cita%7Cjey%7Clie%7Cltu%7Clux%7Clva%7Cmco%7Cmda%7Cmkd%7Cmlt%7Cmne%7Cnld%7Cnor%7Cpol%7Cprt%7Crou%7Crus%7Csjm%7Csmr%7Csrb%7Csvk%7Csvn%7Cswe%7Ctur%7Cukr%7Cvat%7Cxkx&_=
Jenny Chase holding Child 2, a fat eight-week-old baby.
A very beautiful 50 metre outdoors swimming pool, completely empty of people in the September sun, with trees in the background.
Washable nappies, sized for a newborn baby, drying on a washing line among trees and under a blue blue sky.
A seven-year-old child carrying a small goose for purposes of medication. Her face is not visible. Behind her, her father is keeping the other geese in the house until they can be medicated and released.
Jenny Chase with newborn Child 2, giant sunflowers, and a flock of geese.
A small grey and white pied goose, about ten weeks old, called Vel. She is standing under a tree in the garden. She is behaving like she is very sick, but this is not really clear from the photo.
A chart from https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy25osti/95135.pdf , sourced to the IEA as of April 2025, showing solar power as % of generation in different countries. This varies between over 25% for the Netherlands, through about 24% for Spain, about 14% EU average, about 8% for the US to almost nothing in Norway. Text says that the IEA reckons global is about 10%.
A chart from https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy25osti/95135.pdf showing the cost of residential solar systems by US installers Sunrun and SunPower from 2018 to 2024. While total per-W cost has risen from just over $4/W to just over £6/W, this is partly due to increasing battery attachment rates. But sales costs have also risen and are more than a dollar per Watt in 2024.
Screenshot from US NREL's Spring 2025 Solar Industry Update report, https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy25osti/95135.pdf It reads "The median system price of large-scale, utility-owned PV systems in 2024 was $1.51/Wac—increasing about $0.1/W since 2018. • EnergySage reported that the median gross cost of stand-alone PV was $2.65/Wdc in the second half of 2024. "
An empty stony beach on a sunny morning.
A bluesky post from danielwilliams965.bsky.social, reading "Your shit is not interesting. We all know Jews are responsible for the collapse of civilization, like back The post author hid the reply while asking if the account had been hacked, and will now block. You deserve to pay them for your crimes against humanity"
Photo of a gooseberry bush in fruit, with a blackcurrant bush behind.
A picture of a redcurrant bush in fruit. If has very verdant green leaves and the strings of redcurrants hang down like jewels.
A screenshot of the Solaredge app showing solar power production and household energy consumption for the poster's house. Total electricity production over the day was 59.11 kWh, total consumption 21.38 kWh. By 15-minute intervals this doesn't perfectly match, but there is a long plateau of 1.5kW consumption between about 11am and 18:00 representing air conditioning load. The airconditioning is turned off before the solar production drops.
Two charts from BNEF's 2024 New Energy Outlook report, Net Zero Scenario. https://www.bnef.com/insights/33873 The first (Figure 5.21 in the report) shows 'Battery utilization: average daily cycles in select markets, 2020-2050'. The markets are India, US, Germany, France, UK, China and Iberia. The chart shows that the average daily cycles falls from about 1 in most markets in 2025, to as low as 0.25 in Iberia in 2050. The NZS has Iberia particularly dependent on solar and wind by 2050. (The other chart is "Battery utilization: average discharge duration in select markets, 2020-2050, NZS" and shows the values generally rising. It's basically negatively related to the first, and imo less valuable).