America Adds 11.7 GW of New Solar Capacity in Q3 - Third Largest Quarter on Record (electrek.co)
- Reference: 0180373471
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/13/0110246/america-adds-117-gw-of-new-solar-capacity-in-q3---third-largest-quarter-on-record
- Source link: https://electrek.co/2025/12/08/us-solar-tops-11-7-gw-in-a-huge-q3-despite-political-roadblocks/
> According to the new " [2]US Solar Market Insight Q4 2025" report from Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, 85% of all new power added to the grid during the first nine months of the Trump administration came from solar and storage. And here's the twist: Most of that growth — 73% — happened in red [Republican-leaning] states. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations fall into that category, including Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas...
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> Two new solar module factories opened this year in Louisiana and South Carolina, adding a combined 4.7 GW of capacity. That brings the total new U.S. module manufacturing capacity added in 2025 to 17.7 GW. With a new wafer facility coming online in Michigan in Q3, the U.S. can now produce every major component of the solar module supply chain...
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> SEIA also noted that, following an analysis of EIA data, it found that more than 73 GW of solar projects across the U.S. are stuck in permitting limbo and [3]at risk of politically motivated delays or cancellations .
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/12/08/us-solar-tops-11-7-gw-in-a-huge-q3-despite-political-roadblocks/
[2] https://seia.org/news/third-largest-quarter-on-record/
[3] https://underthreat.seia.org/
political attacks (Score:4, Informative)
... and we know which political party is doing the attacking.
"Political attacks on America’s solar and storage industry are threatening over 500 projects totaling 117 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. These projects represent half of all new planned power capacity in the United States.
Solar power and storage are the quickest and most affordable way to add new power to the grid, representing 72% of new capacity in the pipeline.
Without this power, Americans’ electricity bills will spike, manufacturing will move overseas, and the United States will cede AI dominance to China."
Re: (Score:1)
Don't worry, as soon as Trump wakes up from his nap he will shut down all this communist solar crap.
> Without this power, Americans electricity bills will spike, manufacturing will move overseas, and the United States will cede AI dominance to China."
And when that happens Trump will blame it all on The Woke Democrats and his idiot followers will cheer as he continues to fuck them.
Tax credits ending (Score:3)
There's a huge crush of residential installations happening right now as people rush to install before the tax credits end at the end of the month. Just like there was a rush to buy EV's.
Funny business decisions (Score:1)
Are they actually going for the economically best solutions? May these be (gasp!) capitalists making capitalist decisions that make sense financially?
Naaa, that cannot be! The demented felon claims solar is the road to hell!
Good! (Score:2)
Keep going. Update your grid and work on improving storage. You'll finish way faster than any molten salt fission pipe-dream, that's for sure.
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Molten salt may well be a viable answer to many problems. But, yeah, it needs development...and it's not clear that it would be cheaper for grid based power.
US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and is [1]on a trajectory to absorb way more than those 11.7GW for "AI" very quickly [pewresearch.org]. And that is before translating the very theoretical peak power of the new "solar capacity" into actual Terawatt-hours harvested.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/24/what-we-know-about-energy-use-at-us-data-centers-amid-the-ai-boom/
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:5, Informative)
> Data centers need power. Do you propose to stop construction or shut them down? China certainly won't - they're moving full-speed ahead.
The sensible solution is to require that those data center construction projects add capacity to the grid, preferably from renewable sources.
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seems entirely reasonable, probably wont get done. smh.
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No, the sensible solution is that every polluter pays for the cost of its pollution. Why make a special case for data centers while the coal plant next door continue to run with 0 intensive to reduce emissions?
Let say there are two possible sources of electricity, coal and solar. If coal is 1% cheaper but pollutes 100x, that's what "the market" will always choose. The pollution cost has to be internalized. Then, data centers and every other consumer will be able to make a rational decision on whether its wo
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm just saying that when you boast about how fast you can fill water into a bucket, you should probably also mention when there's a big hole in that bucket.
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That will stop in a few years and the workloads will mostly evaporate. Because either they can do it much, much cheaper and on much lower power or they will never find that sorely needed and still unknown business model that will generate enough revenue to keep LLMs going.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Data centers aren't going away. Unlike more traditional industries which require specific machines and specialized labor, a data center can run anything it has the hardware to handle. All it takes is for one use of LLMs to be successful and every data center will start doing that or something related to it.
Enough people have already thrown so much money into it that they'll keep throwing even more. They just need any one person to find a winning move and they can ride the wave. If you think it's really g
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The new AI datacenters will mostly go away. There is no realistic way to keep them running. None at all. yes, they can continue to burn heaps of money for a few more years, but there is a limit to that and then things collapse.
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"All it takes is for one use of LLMs to be successful and every data center will start doing that or something related to it. "
I think you are correct. Also, if I could find a pink unicorn, I'd be rich.
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...and yet LLM inferencing is being measured (ny pathological liars) in gigawatts, as though reducing power consumption is inherently impossible.
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The data centers will be supplied by nuclear or geothermal which is best suited to supplying a steady amount of power. Solar is better than burning coal, but it's not well suited to all problems and trying to force it into areas where it's not well suited is foolish and only breeds resentment. We should be more focused on getting solar into residential installations where it works great.
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I wonder why in 2024, 92% (yes, ninety-two) of all power added to the grid worldwide was Wind and Solar, if it has so many disadvantages. And no, this was not mandated by some government. It was people in countries like Kenya or Pakistan buying some solar panels, loading them on their motorcycles and riding to their villages to mount them on roofs to get power independent from the big utilities. That's something you can't do with nuclear or geothermal.
If you want fast and cheap energy added to the grid, g
Re: (Score:2)
" Solar is better than burning coal, but it's not well suited to all problems and trying to force it into areas where it's not well suited is foolish and only breeds resentment."
What "problems" is solar not "well suited" and who is trying to "force" solar onto those problems? I suspect that "resentment" you refer to isn't what you say.
The beauty of electric is that any source of electric and any consumer of electric are well "suited". There aren't different "kinds" better or worse for certain uses. Sure
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Informative)
> The data centers will be supplied by nuclear or geothermal which is best suited to supplying a steady amount of power. Solar is better than burning coal, but it's not well suited to all problems and trying to force it into areas where it's not well suited is foolish and only breeds resentment. We should be more focused on getting solar into residential installations where it works great.
Nuclear and solar are actually similar sources of electricity. They're classed as non-dispatchable. which means they cannot change with demand. They're just on opposite ends of the same.
Nuclear takes hours to ramp up and down - you have to plan for increases and decreases in consumption hours ahead of time. Solar and wind just suddenly start and stop generating. So you under-run a nuclear plant (it only supplies most of the current demand), while your curtail renewable production (i.e., solar/wind always produce too much for current demand). The grid gets destabilized if you cannot turn down nuclear production, or you cannot ramp up production should solar/wind falter.
Coal, geothermal, hydro, natural gas plants are dispatchable in that their output takes minutes to change - you can ramp them up and down even from cold within 15 minutes or so, which is sufficient. Batteries are even faster since they can respond in under a second.
Datacenters while most of their demand is static, do have variable amounts of demand as well - it's why your laptop can go from a day's worth of battery life to 3 hours if you play a game or something. Likewise, an idle server may consume maybe 100W, while one fully loaded jumps up to 1.5kW.
The key with AI loads is nuclear can work, but you have to schedule it. If you know you have a major processing load to do, you can tell your nuclear plant to prepare for it in advance and have it ready hours later to run your task. And as it completes, it can ramp down as well.
But datacenters powering things like cloud computing are much less predictable - you can tell the plant that Black Friday to expect higher loads as instances are spun up to deal with the influx of demand, but it's a lot more variable and if demand spikes you might not be able to handle it. Or if demand fails to materialize it can be devastating (and expensive). .
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah but that was happening regardless of whether the USA was building solar or not.
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, so you want to bring AI into it. Let's see if AI can add some Funny to a discussion that is so far lacking Funny... Oh oh. Already stalled out. I don't know if any of the generative AIs are any good at humor.
Anyone have a recommendation on which AI's electricity I should waste in an attempt to tell a joke? Probably DeepSeek if the wind is blowing now? (That could apply in Germany, too, except that I'm guessing a German genAI will not be so good for jokes.)
Re: (Score:2)
> actual Terawatt-hours harvested.
It will be here. The sunlight is just on back order.
Let's work with ballpark figures (Score:2)
Yeah, a good ball-park figure is that you'll have about an eights of peak power on average. This can, of course, vary widely, but it's an order of magnitude.
So we could have those 21 GW of average power in roughly 14 quarters or three and a half years (give or take some years). Which is likely after the burst of the bubble. So those power plants will then displace a lot of fossil fuel plants because of their somewhat lower costs. Sure it'll take time, but only some years, not some decades. It's less than th