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

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.

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 felt hugely in the past years. Is there anything that could significantly reduce installation costs?

Jevons paradox in action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Curiously, TFA doesn't raise the question of why demand surged, it spends its 8 microparagraphs only praising solar.

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.

Thank god it's not those pesky windmills...

Confusing headline (on purpose I'm sure). No, solar didn't handle 61% of total energy demand. It handled 61% of the so-called "surge" - 3% growth over the prior year.

Lying title

Remove this

Where are all the "without nuclear power we're dooooooomed" people at the moment?

It's just like the eco nerds said all the time... solar not just works out on the technical side, it also works out on the build speed and financing side.