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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

#21

Post by kalleboo »

taminka wrote: post #11
danmaz74 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for things to continue working well. And that requires both technical skill and political will.

i wonder if ppl's electricity consumption habits will change in response to this, idk like turning the heat way up during the day or using high power appliances more during the day

We have a solar electric plan - the price per kWh is much higher during the duck curve in return for cheap rates during sunshine hours. The rates are something like 1x during night, 0.5x during sunshine, 4x during the morning and afternoon peaks.

We have our heat pump water heater running during the cheap hours, and also change our use of air conditioning/heating to accommodate.

It would probably not work in our favor if we didn't work from home and were out of the home all day.

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

#23

Post by GrowingSideways »

danmaz74 wrote: post #4
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.

The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for things to continue working well. And that requires both technical skill and political will.

Well as we all know the political will in this country seems to generally be "let's all commit suicide together", but perhaps mass installations of solar will provide material reason to improve conditions somewhat.

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

#24

Post by torginus »

There should be a minimum level of expertise or commitment to the truth so that publication who certainly think of themselves as major league or factual don't publish blatantly false statements like this.

Yes, demand rose, and solar panels were installed whose capacity was about 60% of the new demand, but to say solar handled 60% of new capacity is blatantly false.

As someone who owns solar panels, I'm painfully aware that there can be days, weeks of bad weather when there's barely any generation. But even at the best of times, solar has a hard time covering for the demand of something like data centers which suck down insane amount of juice round the clock.

There's also no information about whether these data centers are located to be close to solar farms, and we know that in many cases, they're not.

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

#25

Post by evolve2k »

danmaz74 wrote: post #4
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.

The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for things to continue working well. And that requires both technical skill and political will.

Solar is highly distributed. At the most basic level with a solar & battery system the production and consumption and CONTROL are all yours. You own it and it's literally on your property.

Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you.

There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned by you, you retain soverignty and full rights on what happens.

I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control.

Get your solar, back increasingly distributed approaches, let those pushing centralised agendas be the ones to pay for their grid. Eventually they are forced to change.

As we're finding in Australia, our high solar uptake by citizens.. is pressuring governments to respond, lest their centralised options become redundant. What we found is that as more people moved to solar, the power companies lumped the costs for grid maintenance onto those who hadnt moved yet, actually contributing to even further accelerated solar adoption and pressure to rework the system. Big corporates can lobby for themselves you dont owe them your custom.

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

#27

Post by hackable_sand »

anovikov wrote: post #16
mcny wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it has some thing to do with those data centers and LLM stuff.

So the increase was 3.1% and it was "fourth largest in the last decade", which means, "barely above average growth rate". Considering that economy growth rate was the fastest in a decade except 2021 which was a covid recovery year, it doesn't really show anything abnormal at all.

All that work and we still have a broken economy, go figure.

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

#28

Post by idiotsecant »

infecto wrote: post #19
danmaz74 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that works perfectly well when solar is a small % of the grid, but when that number grows, then you need grid scale solutions and coordination for things to continue working well. And that requires both technical skill and political will.

The bigger issue, at least in the US, is that there is a huge lack of supply in the equipment to connect to the grid at the moment. Backlogs are still 1-3 years after order, not terrible but still an issue deploying.

That is definitely not the bigger issue. If we had faster grid tie completions the problem would be even worse. If you don't believe me look at the very nearly daily negative power pricing inany areas of California.

We simply don't have the transmission and storage for significantly more grid tied solar. It's pointless to build more for purposes of grid supply, we need to build transmission and storage first.

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

#30

Post by zahlman »

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 be deployed... with almost no bureaucracy.

It can be.

Unless existing bureaucracy doesn't want that.

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