> the fourth‑largest annual rise of the past decade
Really doesn't sound like much of a surge then!
US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
111–120 of 346 posts
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#112Contrary 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…
I'll bite: the US dedicates about 5 billion bushels of corn a year to ethanol production [0], which is basically solar with extra steps. At a generous yield of 190 bushels/acre [1], this is 26 million acres dedicated to ethanol production (WRI puts it at 30m [2]).
Depending on who you ask, it would take somewhere between 2.5 [3] and 13.5 million acres [4] of solar to supply total US electricity demand, including storage and maintenance etc. We could double it to be safe and account for the reduction in ethanol production, and it would still all fit within the land currently used for corn ethanol. (btw this works out to a >10x increase in efficiency over ethanol.)
Of course I do agree that there's lots of less productive land (desert in the west, grazing land in the plains, and parking lots/rooftops everywhere) that should be used when available. But even in the midwest and east the land use is not a problem.
[0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1057...
[1] - https://www.ncga.com/stay-informed/media/the-corn-economy/ar...
[2] - https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
[3] - https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...
[4] (PDF) - https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy08osti/42463.pdf
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reactive power handling concerns are in addition to the issues I described. Not equivalent to them.
Gotcha, I think I understand now. The lack of rotating mass in a solar site means the rest of the spinning mass of the generators needs to compensate to maintain frequency and voltage, right? So when clouds roll in and the solar field output drops quickly, it’s a challenge for the rest of the system to compensate since any other generator that spins will slow down much more slowly, giving the grid more time to react.…
Look into GFM’s and FRT’s. You can arc it away.
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scale/quantity. That ‘negative value’ electricity could also be used to do something else. And actually requires a lot of capital to produce. It isn’t actually free, it’s a side effect of another process that has restraints/restrictions.
It has a negative price precisely because at that given moment, nobody can use it for anything else.
Yes…. And capital costs to capture that ‘moment’ productively are likely not in favor, if this situation exists long term.
For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic.
And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the most dominant costs!
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#116While I'm concerned about the environmental challenges of reversing the trend and increasing energy consumption, I'm happy that people are living in more comfortable homes, that the Amercian industrial base is being restored, that more and better services are being provided (better healthcare, inexpensive and healthy food, comfortable, efficient and inexpensive transportation). That is what we're using this electrici…
the US is not a planned economy. if it was, computers would exist only to guide missiles and operate industrial machinery, and you would be mining coal, farming wheat, or manning an assembly line for a living.
Its not a planned economy by the government, because the US is an oligarchy. The billionaires are deciding how the government should plan investments in infrastructure and social policies.
They have been able to lower the taxes that affect the richest (big beautiful bill) and cut spending on social programs (Medicaid).
So it surely looks to me like the US economy is following a plan, just not the one that's in the best interest of the population -- which is OP's original criticism.
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so frustrating discussing topics you know about on HN because you get so many software developers, which naturally know everything, that make comments like this. Solar does not 'just work' - in the US it's a crisis in the making. Power prices in several areas of the grid routinely go negative because the grid is a zero sum game - there is very little storage so what goes in must exactly match what goes out or gr…
> undispatchable resources Solar is not dispatchable like a gas power plant is as the sun needs to shine to produce electricity. But it can very much be curtailed to any percentage you want. And that is being done globally every day exactly when it would be uneconomical to generate that electricity. Interestingly this is as opposed to nuclear energy, which is basically never curtailed and always runs at 100% unless n…
Nuclear can be curtailed, it's just uneconomic to do so unless the price is literally close to zero or negative.
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The whole gimmick with that supplier was that they exposed their customers more or less directly to grid pricing. You don't need to do that to charge different prices during different parts of the day.
The post I was responding to said
> I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
That's what I was responding to, not the day/night predetermined pricing.
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#119[deleted]
Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
#120Solar 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.
It’s too bad solar degrades over time. I think it’d be more of a no-brainer if we could actually manufacture it at scale domestically without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.