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US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

electrek.co

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Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#71

Post by sandworm101 »

mort96 wrote: post #67
reactordev wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use…

Well there are real challenges here. Generators which rely on massive spinning things naturally provide the grid with inertia; they resist changes to grid frequency. Power sources which rely on inverters or otherwise dynamically adapt to grid frequency don't naturally provide the same inertia. This is a solvable problem, but it requires a solution nonetheless.

That too can be replicated. There are a few centrifuges out there. Not batteries, but spinning masses meant to keep the frequency stable. Some are looking at using air conditioning motors, of which we have millions, as such a spinning mass.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#72

Post by g8oz »

sandworm101 wrote: post #69

Contrary opinion: too much farmland is being turned over to solar. Our regulatory systems are not working. Land that once produced food now produces electricity. Turning a food farm into solar is too easy (ie cheap). The land is flat and there are nearby roads and electricity networks. And who is going to tell a farmer how to best use thier land? But the world needs more than datacenters. The world needs food. Solar…

Agrivoltaics are a thing.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#73

Post by reactordev »

bob1029 wrote: post #61
reactordev wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use…

> Any energy source can provide power. Not all prime movers are the same with regard to grid dynamics and their impact. Solar, wind, etc., almost universally rely on some form of inverter. This implies the need for solid state synthetic inertia to provide frequency response service to the grid. Nuclear, coal, gas, hydropower, geothermal, etc., rely on synchronous machines to talk to the grid. The frequency response c…

Yeah, DC vs AC power. 12v vs 120v or 240v. This isn’t a limitation. All energy sources must be converted to useable energy to the grid somehow. So every power source requires an inverter or a down stepper or a really advanced rectifier or all of the above.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#74

Post by Aboutplants »

sandworm101 wrote: post #69

Contrary opinion: too much farmland is being turned over to solar. Our regulatory systems are not working. Land that once produced food now produces electricity. Turning a food farm into solar is too easy (ie cheap). The land is flat and there are nearby roads and electricity networks. And who is going to tell a farmer how to best use thier land? But the world needs more than datacenters. The world needs food. Solar…

But there are also millions of acres of corn being grown solely for the purpose of ethanol. A lot of that acreage could be better off utilized as solar farms

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#75

Post by fpoling »

infecto wrote: post #20
mschuster91 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> idk like turning the heat way up during the day That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter. > or using high power appliances more during the day Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get hom…

At least in the US there is a push to make electric appliances smarter already. So for example, the electric hot water heater responding to the strain on the grid. The same could happen for AC, heat, EVs and other higher load appliances. At scale that can help out the grid immensely either in times of peak load or dip in demand.

I do not see a point of smart appliances besides electrical car. 10 KWt-hour battery will cover all the needs to smooth the demand from all home appliances and costs below 1K usd. It will allow also to significantly reduce maximum power that has to be supplied to a house while allow to increase peak consumption while heavy cooking/AC/heating.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#76

Post by chiefalchemist »

So I'm reading it correctly, 39& of "the surge" was covered by traditional energy sources. Which still means use of traditional sources increased. Correct?

I guess the good news is, solar is available when demand is highest. Nonetheless, is it helping to solve a problem or is it serving more as an enabler of the status quo?

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#78

Post by reactordev »

londons_explore wrote: post #70
raddan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, power companies did not necessarily kill energy export incentives. Here in Massachusetts my meter “runs backward” when I export to the grid. This does not earn me money but it does earn me kWh credits, which means that if I am net negative for energy import in the summer and net positive for import in the winter, I can be net zero (or close to it) for the year. In MA and a few other states, polluters are also r…

In a future with solar and batteries, daytime and nighttime electricity pricing cannot be equal - else nobody would bother to have a battery (grid scale or at home). Rules and regulations could solve that problem (meter not allowed to go backwards, solar companies are forced to pay some kind of battery credit, etc), but the free market will always outcompete. Therefore, I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity…

We already do this. Charging different rates for different times of day.

It’s called TOU pricing.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#79

Post by chiefalchemist »

Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy. It starts to produce electricity basically the same day. I can't imagine anything being able to compete with that for speed and scale - or costs, for that matter. Once deployed it's basically free.

Yes, great feature. Unfortunately, to the status quo, it's a bug.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#80

Post by Saline9515 »

Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy. It starts to produce electricity basically the same day. I can't imagine anything being able to compete with that for speed and scale - or costs, for that matter. Once deployed it's basically free.

Solar can't produce electricity at night, it's hardly a a credible sole competitor if the power surge requires a constant power supply. Renewables are most of the time coupled with gas power plants to handle this.
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