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

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

#81

Post by fpoling »

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…

There are a lot of places where solar panels can increase yield for specific plants by providing a shade. They also can generate electricity to run electrical pumps for targeted irrigation saving a lot of water.

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

#82

Post by quickthrowman »

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…

Large solar sites are required to be able to provide reactive power as well as maintain a power factor of 0.95 to avoid all of the issues you mentioned.

Reddit post by an EE explaining it better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/qhear9/commen...

> There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness.

I don’t understand what you are talking about here. I don’t work in the utility world, I sell and run commercial electrical work, but handling available fault current in my world is as simple as calculating it and providing overcurrent protection with a high enough AIC rating or current limiting fuses. I don’t see why the utility side would be any different.

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

#83

Post by reactordev »

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.

Very good point!!!

The frequency (50hz or 60hz) comes from those rotational forces from the generators and until we can eliminate them, we have to play nice with them.

Luckily, we have GFMI’s. Grid-forming inverters that can emulate 60hz push pull but you’re right that it’s more than just voltage since we are dealing with high voltage alternating current.

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

#84

Post by mort96 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #71
mort96 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, as I said it's a solvable problem. It just needs solutions to be implemented

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

#85

Post by HWR_14 »

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…

And then a storm hits texas and without realizing it you run up a $30,000 electricity bill in a single night of not freezing.

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

#86

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

glimshe wrote: post #41

I've thought about installing solar panels on my roof for years. But when I factor in installation costs, it never makes sense because the local energy rates are pretty reasonable... Also, I live in Southeast, a place with plenty of sun but nowhere near the Southwest. Solar panel prices fell hugely in the past years. Is there anything that could significantly reduce installation costs?

Where I live in the west, the time to break even was projected at 7.5y for panels rated that run at 85% for 25y and expected lifetime of 30y.

I think the main consideration where I live is whether you can make the investment and if you plan on staying in your house long enough to realize the benefit. Also nearly all of the power I offset is from coal.

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

#87

Post by bob1029 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #82
bob1029 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Large solar sites are required to be able to provide reactive power as well as maintain a power factor of 0.95 to avoid all of the issues you mentioned. Reddit post by an EE explaining it better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/qhear9/commen... > There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated…

Reactive power handling concerns are in addition to the issues I described. Not equivalent to them.

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

#88

Post by thijson »

raddan wrote: post #58
elzbardico wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost. Useful life. I thought about an off grid system. Batteries are expensive. Also, unless you live in a dry place in the equator, You'll need to account for things like winter, long rainy spells, so either you add more batteries to account for multiple days (weeks? months?) of low generation, or you'll need a diesel/gas generator, or have a hybrid system instead, which basically means you're using the utilities ga…

Generating your own power does not necessarily mean cutting ties with the grid. I think for most people in most places being off-grid would be a real challenge. I’m not sure how Australia does it but in my neck of the woods (northeast US) staying grid-tied is the norm. I have a relatively big battery (12kWh) which is enough to see me through the evening during the summer months. We do not get quite enough sunshine wh…

The battery in the winter could be used to charge during low cost time periods, assuming your have time of use energy prices. I see people in the UK doing that all the time because the peak prices are very high. I think California is the same.

Batteries have come down a lot in cost, at least the raw ones:

https://youtu.be/3mAx_KE8gz0

Without the tariffs it would be even cheaper I guess.

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

#89

Post by polyterative »

Saline9515 wrote: post #80
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.

You don't need solar to be 100% perfect to be useful
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