While 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 electricity for, right?
> That is what we're using this electricity for, right?
Yes, amongst others.
> 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).
Over the last 25 years, we've the seen the following change across the dimensions you picked:
Energy consumption: +15%
Population: +21%
Hospitals (hospital sector size as a function using employment as proxy): +45-50%
Homes: +27-30%
Food production: +23-25%
Transportation (vehicle miles travelled): +14-16%
------
Some take-aways:
Population grew faster than energy and transportation, implying major efficiency gains.
Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households.
Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity.
Food production grew roughly in line with population, but without proportional land expansion productivity gains.
Transportation growth lagged housing growth, suggesting more remote work, urbanization, and efficiency.
> Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households.
Or rich people owning more vacation homes.
> Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity.
What? It could easily be the population getting older and/or sicker. Even if it was a structural shift, it could be in the negative direction ie less efficiency.
> Food production grew roughly in line with population, but without proportional land expansion productivity gains.
What land expansion? You didn't include that in your stats. And no source to verify.
There's some historical stuff happening in that graph that it's easy for young people to not have context for, like the fact that the peak home ownership around 2005 was caused by a subprime mortgage fiasco.
There is a push to switch from fossil fuel to electricity across the board, and that’s a good thing.
Cars are the big one. However even heating is going electric (heat pumps, not resistive). Induction stovetops outperform residential gas cooktops. Some cities are even experimenting with phasing out natural gas hookups for new construction.
It all adds up, and it a good thing. It doesn’t explain 100% of the growth but it’s a lot of it.
> 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).
Trying to put concepts like “better healthcare” on to the growth of electricity demand is unrealistic but generally speaking we’re putting electricity to good use. It’s not being wasted.
What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.
Perform better as in more efficient electrically, not necessarily more pleasant or efficient in the cooking process.
For example, when cooking an omelette, a recommended technique is to angle the pan so the liquid part flows towards the hot part of the pan touching the flame as you slowly scrape the curds up to rest at the cooler part of the pan. AFAIK an induction cooktop is unable to simulate this technique. Now maybe there are similar ways of getting this, but there’s centuries of experience informing cooking on top of a fire in some form or another. The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.
> not necessarily more pleasant or efficient in the cooking process.
For amateurs, I find that the gain of control from using induction far outweighs everything else--especially at low heats. If I put a newbie on an induction with a temperature sensor, they generally do great. Over time they start to correlate the behavior of the food with the temperature, but, even if they don't, they still can maintain control over the food via the temperature sensor.
> The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.
And, sometimes, those old techniques are just a pain in the ass and only exist because of the lack of control. Caramelizing onions requires a lot less attention when I can set the pan to a specific temperature and don't have to worry about thermal runaway as the water cooks off. There are all manner of directions for thickening custards that aren't required if you can set the pan at exactly 180F and know that it isn't going above that. Tempering chocolate is stupidly easier when you can set the pan for 115F-81F-88F rather than having to swish it on a marble slab or put it on a double boiler and risk seizing the chocolate because of water. On an electric or gas stove, I plan for two batches of caramel because I almost always screw up my first batch if I haven't done it in a while; on induction I almost never miss. etc.
I used to be a gas snob for ages but after moving, first to a place with an induction stove, then to one with a regular electric one, I have to say the supposed advantages are overblown. You can cook perfectly well on either. Induction/gas are slightly nicer if you want to use very high heat but even my current electric stove puts out a lot of power on the highest setting.
And then there's the downsides of gas:
They're a complete mess to clean. Tons of nooks and crannies where stuff might get into.
They suck for low heat simmering. There's iron plates you can put below the pot to distribute the heat but that's cumbersome. Low heat flames also go out more easily if there's a draft.
Not even talking about air quality and fire risks.
So I'm never going back to gas if I can help it. If I have a choice I'll probably get an induction stove next time around.
I've been cooking eggs on induction cooktops for something like a decade now; while it's true that you can't tilt the pan (the induction won't work, and the cooktop is likely to just say "nope, not operating without a pan on me"), I've had no trouble with getting either scrambled eggs or omelettes to be softly and evenly cooked.
Perhaps it helps that I had never had that particular advice for cooking on gas/electric!
I have an old but still perfectly functional high-end gas cooktop. I have no plans to replace it. Sturdy cast-iron trivets are bulletproof. You get visual feedback about heat intensity. I use enough heavy Dutch ovens and stainless and cast-iron pans that a glass cooktop under them seems like an added risk.
You can find induction wok stove tops on alibaba (China obviously has more vested in electric transition than we do), but ya, standard western stove tops are flat.
I own an induction stove, and overall really enjoy it. But there are certain types of cooking it's not nearly as well suited to (still possible, but not as good). One of those is cooking on a wok.
But really it comes down to heating. Heat pumps are not universally better. We are currently sitting at -25C or so which is pretty common in the winter (it can even get a fair bit colder at times). Hardly any of the contractors around here work with heat pumps, and even the ones that do aren't aware of the latest tech. That said even if you could get a cutting edge system through sheer money/will I am not sure how it would perform without at least a gas backup. At least from an efficiency standpoint.
Not to mention we have had electricity go out in the winter which can be life threatening or at least cause substantial damage to property. I can't remember ever having the gas go out. (we have generator backup but that couldn't run an electric furnace for very long).
Lastly we have a gas water heater (tankless) and damn that thing is efficient. A few therms a month...
I also own an induction range and love it, but I keep a portable butane stove around for random things gas is better for like woks or cooking that involves a lot of lifting the frying pan. Just make sure things are well ventilated (which should be the case with gas stoves, too).
If you're really hampered by not having a wok behavior for your induction stove, good news! There are plugin induction woks! From what I hear they work great. Technology Connections on YouTube did a great video about them
Heat pumps do not do well when it's -40 outside. You can say "fine, but how often does it get that cold?" but consumers are not going to be happy with a heat pump if their pipes freeze during an extended cold snap.
I live in Southern Ontario and I have a heat pump with an auxiliary natural gas furnace for emergency heating. The heat pump shoulders most of the heating load but the thermostat does kick on the furnace when the heat pump starts falling behind.
It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree, so the thermostat usually calls for the furnace to start up before things get that bad.
Canada's climate is really different when it comes to the extreme cold.
Heat pumps are getting better at lower temperatures, but in an environment like Canada you still want auxiliary heat to be safe.
> It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree
That would be an undersized heat pump in any regard. The installer would be at fault for screwing up that badly.
You're right that efficiency falls off at lower temperatures, 8 hours to move 1 degree would be from the installer sizing the unit wrong.
It's not just the efficiency of the heat pump that is at issue, it's the insulation of the house. As the outside temperature plunges, the house begins cooling off much more rapidly. This means the reduced efficiency of the heat pump (operating in cold outdoor temperatures) needs to produce more heating than it would at higher temperatures, and it's just not capable of that. My house was built in the 1980s and its insulation has always been more than adequate for the original natural gas furnace to be able to heat.
The heat pump I have is only a few years old and cost $12,000 installed (before tax credits). To be able to rapidly heat the house when it's -40 outside would require a system costing several times that! Much cheaper just to use a furnace for those few days per year.
air source heat pumps, though they're improving won't do well in extreme cold; even if they can operate they'll still be running at much lower efficiency.
For temperatures significantly into negative territory a ground source heat pump would perform far better, where it can draw on a source of heat that will always be at least above freezing.
A hybrid system doesn't seem like a bad trade-off though..
I think NG outperforms in high efficiency heaters when the outside temperature is around 1-4 degrees Celsius with humidity as it causes ice buildup on the external unit which then has to be cleared using resistive heating. Also if only little hot water is required sporadically, heating it just in time with gas is more efficient than keeping a buffer heated for long times.
Also, heat pumps do best when the temperature differential is lower. So in older housing without floor heating or duct heating, it is typically not as efficient to use a heat pump when the water to heat has to be above 55 degrees Celsius.
For any new residential construction I think there is very little value in natural gas.
Heat pumps do fine down to -20C or so. The modern ones have all sorts of tricks to avoid icing. (mostly they run the cycle in reverse which is extremely efficient since you are heating the ice on the compressor with the warmer inside air)
That is awesome to hear. I noticed that mine does fine sub 0, but when it is moist and around 1-4 degrees Celsius a lot of ice forms and it needs the resistive heating.
I didn’t see it reverse cycle yet. But I have air-air with one outside unit connected to three inside units. It’s a Mitsubishi Heavy from 2023.
Methane has lots of value in colder climates, especially much of Canada. Methane is cheap and does not lose heating capacity as temperature falls. Across most of Canada, the median construction year for a typical house is in the 1980. Half were built before that, meaning insulation standards were lower.
The #1 problem with heat pumps in Canada is low temperature performance. The heat output drops but the rate of heat loss from the house also increases. This is the precise situation where even backup resistive heat cannot keep up. Methane is excellent at filling this gap, especially now when winter temperatures swing more than earlier.
Toronto/Vancouver areas are both well within the temp range for heat pumps (e.g. ~50% of Canada's population). The further norther areas are a bit cold for air source heat pumps, but are still well within ground based heat pump temp ranges.
Better is subjective here. Vancouver will be a bit different with it's warmer weather, but for the week or two at -30C to -40C(like I get) it provides a lot more heat at a lower price and in Canada, at least Ontario, it is still much cheaper to heat a home and water with. I'll probably go heat pump if my boiler goes as I can avoid the cost of adding ductwork(really expensive these days and more than furnace for install) and get A\C too.
Induction is better in some ways and worse in others. It's so efficient and boils water like crazy but at low settings it's almost always pulsed rather than continuous and I've never liked that. I have both in my kitchen.
Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off.
It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something during the first long outage in their area.
TIL. Never used a modern gas stove, so I had not considered that without a pilot light, there must be a way to disable the flow or constantly spew gas into the house. Then again, I have had a pilot light go out for some amount of time without obvious ill effect, so the volume of gas must be low.
Pilot lights stay lit all the time so no igniter is required. My range has electric spark igniters. They don't work when the power is out but there is also no pilot light expelling gas. I just manually light the burner when the power is out.
My gas stove has spark ignitors for the burners and the oven has an incandescent ignitor. The oven has safety interlocks so the gas valve won't open if the ignitor is not hot. The oven cannot be lit manually, but the stovetop burners can. So in a power outage, I can cook in pots and pans but not bake.
You could get a small propane burner or a lot of people have propane grills (sometimes with burners) in their backyards. Gas burners and stoves aren't bad but expanding the gas network to new homes is a huge expense.
I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).
I have gas-cooked since I was a kid (living in an area with a lot of natural gas, so houses were connected to gas since the 50ies), but induction is so much nicer that I'm happy to not be able to cook during a once in a ~10-20 year outage. Also a lot safer (it still happens quite frequently that a house blows up because of a gas leak, just this week there was a huge explosion in Utrecht what was presumably a gas leak).
Of course, the equation may change for countries with less stable power.
It's very local here. I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in one of the highest income counties in the state, two blocks from a major hospital, one block from a suburban downtown. Despite that, I've experienced one or two 4-6 hour long power outages per year the past few years. (Mostly correlated with weather.) One outage in June 2025 was 50 hours long!
Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.
Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.
Sadly one of those countries is the United States.
Here in Colorado they've started pre-emptively shutting off power during wind storms when it's hot and dry because there have been multiple instances of wind blowing down power lines which then start big fires. We had one instance in December where the power was out 2-3 days for tens of thousands of people, and over a week for some people.
Of course the problem is that nobody wants to pay to bury the lines. They'd need all new equipment for digging, to retrain all of the technicians, and get permission from a million different entities to dig up their land. We're effectively locked in to overhead cables.
North America generally has more extreme weather (everything from tornadoes to hurricanes and usually a much larger temperature range) and more above-ground electrical distribution than Europe.
I live in downtown Toronto and we get ice rain that occasionally knocks out power in portions of the city, though I live downtown where most of the lines are buried and I'm on the same electrical sub-block as several hospitals. The last time I lost power was the massive North American blackout of 2003.
In the central USA my power is out up to 3 or 4 times a year for an hour or more, and momentarily maybe once every month or two. It's due to our power distribution being mostly overhead lines which are vulnerable to falling trees, squirrels, ice accumulation, storm and wind damage, etc. Even though my neighborhood has buried lines, that's just the last mile. The incoming power is all overhead lines.
On an island, in a rainforest with regular storms. The power goes out multiple times a year due to trees falling on power lines. We also don't have municipal gas lines piped everywhere. Delivery only. If you have a leak they won't deliver until its fixed.
> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time...
Here in SE Michigan (USA) I have quite a few friends who've totaled more than 15 days without power in the past couple years. Most of that in multi-day outages.
Sure, as long as you size the system to expected loads.
An 8kW generator suitable for occasional use is only ~1,000$. A Powerwall 3 does 11kW continuous and peaks at 30kW for transitory loads like starting heavy equipment.
The most convenient solution where a generator automatically kicks in during a power outage requires an electrician and extra equipment, but there’s also real tradeoffs to having gas lines going to your home.
There is a good technology connections video about building backup batteries into the actual stove.
I think part of the problem with whole home backups is that they tend to be sized to a maximum load that is unusual or could be avoided with some effort. And that providing a backup for the essentials you actually need is relatively cheap and uncomplicated if you make some modest sacrifices.
There are models that include a battery to reduce the input power requirement. That's not quite the same as the question, but it answers it, you just need a big enough battery and they are fine.
Natural gas is good for when the power goes out. I've never seen natural gas go out in my life. If you have an electric stove and the power goes out, you simply can't cook stovetop meals until the power is restored. Oh, and if you're thinking of using a generator to power your house if the grid is out, know that most generators run on natural gas.
Power went out in my area at night the other day. It was easy to spot the guy with the solar panels and home battery. His was a fountain of light in the darkness.
Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster" or "heats with a better distribution of heat".
It is foolish, but many still think so. I personally believe that the only kind of cooking that benefits from NG are round-bottom woks. But they can be substituted by flat-bottom pans without problems.
> Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster"
It’s almost entirely about heat _control_, especially when you turn the heat down or off. Non-induction electric stoves can take minutes or longer for a burner to cool down. When you cut the heat on a NG stove, it’s essentially immediate.
This matters quite a bit for heat-sensitive dishes like omelettes.
Induction doesn’t have this problem, but also hasn’t been widely available until maybe recently and won’t work on a lot of aluminum cookware. So you’re asking people to change their cookware along with their range. That can be a bridge too far for many.
They are mostly Nouvelle & Haute Cuisine french dishes: omelettes, holandaise/bernaise sauces, custards (Crème Anglaise, Pots de Crème), melted chocolate, caramel, generally poached stuff, etc.
For the lower temperatures, a lot of that temperature control can be made with bain marie (warm water).
And the remaining ones aren't made in aluminum cookware, anyway. And people that cook such sophisticated food probably will have a lot of non-aluminum cookware, already.
Flat bottom woks need a lot more oil to stir fry properly, due to the lack of pooling. Flat bottom woks on electric cooktops (radiant or induction) also tend to have essentially nonexistent heating of the side slopes, preventing you from using the technique of splashing soy sauce (and other cooking sauces, as well as cooking wines) in a wide arc so that it reduces rapidly to form a sticky coating for the food. Instead, all of the sauce will just run down to the bottom where it joins the rest of the liquids coming out of the food, contributing to boiling/steaming rather than stir frying.
I have a duxtop induction burner and I notice it gets hotspots where the coils are. I wonder if the breville control freak is worth the money or it has better granularity of its heating element.
But yeah if I built a new house, I would have an induction top.
I don't know about that. I like my induction cooker but I can't use cast iron on it (I've ruined other ones trying). I will use it for 90% of my cooking though.
To be more precise: mostly CO2 and small amounts of CO. But the actual concentration of CO2 in your house can be affected by a lot of other factors (ventilation, urban environment, weather, etc).
Backup generator for power outages. NG usually still works during electric outages. A generator that you do not need to periodically go out to get more fuel for can be very convenient.
The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)
I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)
We are indeed living in more comfortable homes. Americans are migrating to the sunbelt because of ample AC in the summer and the winters are pleasant. that’s a big part of why we have many fewer heat deaths per capita than Europe: https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2025/08/02/opinion-us-heat-...
You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.
Also the move to electric heat pumps is increasing electricity rates but reducing natural gas usage and improving overall efficient.
The GP comment was trying to do snarky doomerism but accidentally hit upon a lot of truths. It’s amazing how many things are getting better but some people are hell bent on being cynical about it anyway.
> You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.
Most of Europe is poor. AC is expensive. It's actually that simple.
I have lived and worked in Switzerland. My office (shared with 2 other people) was the only space in the entire floor with AC due to some obscure archaic reason.
That air conditioning worked great for years, but a few months before I left that position, the facilities management people suddenly came in and ripped it out. No justification given.
Thank God TPTB didn't notice I had AC for all those years; it really would have been miserable without it. But despite the misery I noted all around me, there was an extremely strong disdain for air conditioning that permeated the culture. When I talked to friends and colleagues about the AC situation I was regularly ribbed for being a gluttonous American wasting electricity on such a triviality. They were legitimately proud to suffer. Baffling.
I've come to the conclusion that most Western and Central Europeans--yes, including Swiss--have a masochistic superiority complex around AC. They see suffering without AC as core to the European identity and sweating it out in unproductive misery (or taking a whole month off of work) as virtuous. They willingly kill thousands of people and leave hundreds of millions more in misery every year simply to feel superior and European.
Not at all, it has one of the lowest rate in Europe along with the UK. It's very hard to get the building permit required to install one.
Portable AC has had a boom those past few years though (because it doesn't require a permit).
Europe is so backwards when it comes to annual heat deaths that they manage to have more heat deaths per year than the US has gun deaths + heat deaths combined. You won't hear about that from Europeans though, it'd make them seem barbaric. 175,000 heat deaths per year in Europe according to the WHO. It's a staggering genocide of technological primitiveness. Imagine having millions of people die because you can't be bothered to adopt 1950s technology (and of course I'm aware of the things the US is backwards on).
I think it is simply because in most of Europe air conditioning is unnecessary for comfort 95% of the year. Here in San Francisco most homes don't have air conditioning either, but there might be a week or two where it gets very hot and we just put up with the barbaric technological primitiveness.
Much of the US is extremely unpleasant without air-conditioning for a substantial portion of the year so of course everyone living in those parts installs it.
Yes in many parts of the US it's not just the heat but the humidity. One summer I tried going without AC as much as possible to see how much it would change my electric bill. I could handle the temperature most of the time but the humidity especially at night started giving me mold problems in the house. Cleaned that up and went back to using the AC and no more mold. Not sure how people controlled this back in the pre-AC days, maybe just a lot more cleaning.
My parents still don’t use AC. The windows stay open all summer unless there is a rainstorm. Whole house fan is turned on at night to draw in cooler air. Much time spent in the cooler basement if you are going to be hanging at home. At night you are basically sleeping naked on top of your fitted sheet with one or two window unit fans circulating air. Maybe another fan pointed directly at you. Basement had some dehumidifiers and afaik that was the only problem moisture area.
You sent me to the books because this is such a fascinating stat. It's true! Heat deaths in the US: 5 per million people. Italy: 500+ per million people. I had no idea.
Figures based on coroners reports are somewhat suspect.
> In September 2022, a vicious heat wave enveloped much of the western U.S., placing tens of millions of people under heat advisories. Temperatures across California soared into the triple digits. Sacramento broke its heat record by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature hit 116 degrees.
> California death certificates showed that 20 people died as a result of heat-related illness from Aug. 31, 2022 to Sept. 9, 2022.
> But a study last year by California’s Department of Public Health found that death rates increased by about 5 percent statewide during the heat wave, causing 395 additional deaths.
Thanks for the paper link, very different figures from the random USA newspaper article :)
I'd love to see an age adjusted figure as well as it's likely Europe has likely more very old people and my guess is that heat/cold mortality is concentrated in the very old people.
I suspect age distributions are part of the story. Also the Eastern US (where most of the population lives) experiences much larger swings in temperature between winter and summer so maybe people are just more prepared for it.
It's not the most convenient format because of their idea of what constitutes a region, but yeah, the US has a pyramid shaped population pyramid, while European regions have a big bulge of old people: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/population...
I do think we'll need to change our view on airconditioning, every home should have airconditioning just like it has heating.
But I'm very sceptical of those numbers. They are apparently even worse for cold, and you can't attribute that to lack of airconditioning. I still think the huge difference can only be attributed to a difference in reporting.
I think it’s common knowledge China never reports numbers that cast them in an unfavorable light, to the point where analysts generally disregard them.
It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. People often go into their basement and think "wow, it's cool down here. If only I could make my house this cool." But, as soon as you moved the air from your basement to your house, the air in your basement would be replaced by ambient air and would take time to be cooled by the Earth. And so you quickly realize you need a lot of thermal mass and an efficient way to move heat in order to keep up with removing the heat from your house.
Yes, but it needs to work both ways. Heat needs to be extracted during the winter. Otherwise the ground would just be heated up to much. That is what a ground source heat pump does.
I think there wasn't a culture of buying ACs, because in most of Europe the climate was much more moderate. The summers are much hotter now than when I was a kid and heat waves are more regular. Many more people are buying air conditioning now.
Much of the US already had warmer summers than Europe when the impact of climate change was smaller, so AC is far more common.
I spoke with two working class people last week who are facing power shutoffs because they got an unexpected $700 power bill. Not sure if it were a sneaky electricity supplier change or if costs have simply gone up.
But the problem of consumer rates just always ratcheting up needs addressed.
Electricity prices are heavily regulated. The largest increase I can find from a short search is around 20% for some customers in New Jersey. The average year over year increase is closer to 6%
Unexpectedly high electricity bills are almost always from actual usage. Unexpectedly high winter electricity bills are usually from resistive electric heating in one way or another.
You didn’t mention their normal December bill in this exact house, which is an important piece of information.
You are part of the PJM. Read into what the "Fuel Adjustment" actually is. Yes, prices are regulated, but if your area is short of power, they can buy it from the PJM, usually from other sources they own, at "market" rate not regulated rate.
The Fuel Adjustment is the legal loophole difference in the regulated rate vs the market rate. A few scheduled maintenance windows and oh look, we are short power.
Can I interject regarding resistive heating? I’ve recently added one for my bedroom using home assistant and PID control, 22.5c during day, 18c at night, shuts off when nobody home (radar presence detector should be next step and likely save another 30%). It cost me 150kwh per month in NZ winter (single glazing, but got decent ceiling insulation).
That happens when people are on variable rate or TOU plans, it's very common. "sneaky" may or not be part of it, since ostensibly there's a contract that defines the terms of the electrical service, so it shouldn't be a surprise. But for a lot of folks it's a lot to keep track of, there can be confusing terminology, and yes, some energy retailers are predatory in their plan marketing or contract terms. It's a double edged sword of free market choice in deregulated markets. People that have choices for their energy supply don't always have the time and knowledge to optimize their plan choices and electricity use to get "optimum" pricing. This is why there's pushback in some areas that have had deregulated energy markets to go back to regulated pricing, the "average consumer" isn't seeing the payoff of the free market (even if that is technically "their fault").
I kind of doubt a single surprise bill that happened to arrive in the winter is a TOU plan change.
If someone changes to a TOU plan and their bill shoots up, they’re smart enough to blame the plan change and cite that
Most surprise winter time bills are just excess electric heater usage, such as after the purchase of a couple space heaters without thinking about the overall cost.
> This is why there's pushback in some areas that have had deregulated energy markets
What areas have deregulated residential electricity?
The “optimum” pricing is one that rips off the customer the most. A deregulated free market for utilities doesn’t work because bad actors will find ways to do so through complex contracts.
A huge bill probably means there were on a plan that charged them a set amount each month based on estimated usage. They probably used more than projected and then had to make up the difference at the end of 12 months. This is how my electricity works. You can end up with a refund as well if it goes the other direction.
Why are you against increasing energy consumption? Increasing energy consumption is what pulled the world out of the feudal, warlord misery of the past. Maybe switch the focus of this feeling towards being against pollution or something that is a negative. Just being against energy consumption is quite regressive and anti-human.
To mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe we must ramp down fossil fuels use and production. As long as there's fossil fuels in the electricity production mix, electricity use is contributes to the problem. This report tells us that fossil energy use is increasing as only 60% of the increase was covered by solar.
The world would much more easily transition to post fossil fuel if all of society was pushing for cleaner and cheaper electricity and a philosophy of using more to make life better. The attitude that we must reduce is just anti-progress and anti-human and is what many people are fighting against when they support more fossil fuels. The split of solar and wind being supported by the reduce camp and fossil fuel use into the growth mindset was a great tragedy.
Accelerating fossil fuel usage and while adding renewables to the mix is not going to pan out well. Accelerating the climate catastrophe is not pro-human. It might be pro-progress for some definition I guess if you don't mind the death toll.
Few people just want to burn fossil fuels, they want to do things with energy. Focus should be on making non-CO2 emitting energy cheap and abundant. Most people against burning fossil fuel are also not promoting more and cheaper energy use.
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.
Some of the economy should be encouraged with heavy subsidy or though DoD purchases.
It's worked out well for us in the past.
Wind and solar, nuclear, EVs, manufacturing, robots, chips, and drones should be helped along by the state.
We would be stupid not to spend in these categories.
We should also build out chemical inputs manufacture, rare earths refining, pharmaceutical manufacture, etc. to support the work that happens downstream and to be less fragile to supply chain disruption.
A multi-polar world is inherently less stable and demands more self-sufficiency.
> China is not a planned economy. If it was, recent electric vehicles and battery technology would exist only to guide missiles and operate industrial machinery...
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.
This just seems like a quibble over wording, given that "planned economy" is generally assumed to refer to economic planning by some governmental authority. Nobody thinks the opposite of a "planned economy" is everyone just going based off vibes, for instance.
The available selection of automobiles available for sale feels like a good example of huge distortion caused by regulatory capture and tariffs imposed for same industries.
Yup take the ford lightning f150. It out sold cybertruck but that wasn’t enough for ford to keep it around. Market makes decisions for you, not the other way around like free market theory posits.
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.
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 your energy you provide.
The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…
If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
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 capability is built in and physically ideal.
Both can work, but one is more complicated. 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. A tree crashing into a power line should result in the power line and tree being fully vaporized if nothing upstream were present to stop the flow of current. A gigantic mass of spinning metal in a turbine hall can eat this up like it's nothing. Semiconductors on a PCB in someone's shed are a different story.
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.
> 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.
The utility side has found that vaporising short circuits is a useful feature, as that includes e.g. twigs hitting a power line.
There are breakers, of course, but they react slowly enough that there will absolutely be a massive overdraw first. Then the breaker will open. Then, some small number of seconds later, it will automatically close.
It will attempt this two to four times before locking out, in case it just needs multiple bursts. It’s called “burning clear”, and it looks just as scary as you’d think… but it does work.
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.
Also, I was not aware that inverters can only handle fault current that is 1.1x the nameplate capacity, that’s a big limitation. I can buy a 20A breaker with 200kaic, which is 10,000x higher than the breaker ampacity, which is extremely helpful for handling fault current.
These do not address the concern of fault current handling. This is a much more localized and severe condition than frequency deviation. Think about dropping a literal crowbar across the output of a solar inverter. This is a situation the grid has to deal with constantly.
I'd argue that nothing that uses semiconductors would be suitable for the task. They get you to maybe 2x rated current capacity for a meaningful duration. A spinning turbine can easily handle 10x or more for a much longer duration.
We could put so many redundant transistors in parallel that we have equivalent fault handling, but then we are into some strong economic issues. There's also no room for error with semiconductors. Once you start to disintegrate, it's all over ~instantly. There is no way to control this. A synchronous machine can trade downstream maintenance schedule for more current right now. The failure is much more gradual over time. A human operator can respond quickly enough if the machine is big enough.
Grid forming inverters provide 1/3 to 1/4 the fault current of a similarly sized generator.
The other trivial solution are synchronous condensers. Or just let the generators and maybe even turbines of future emergency reserve thermal plants spin with the grid without consuming any fuel.
Just ensure the proper margins exist in the grid and call in ancillary services as needed.
Yeah, DC vs AC power. 12v vs 120v or 240v. This isn’t a limitation. All energy sources must be converted to useable energy to the grid somehow. So every power source requires an inverter or a down stepper or a really advanced rectifier or all of the above.
The people you're replying to aren't talking about converting from AC to DC or stepping voltage up or down. Rather, they're talking about grid stability. You can have mechanisms to convert from AC to DC and to step voltage up or down, but still have a unstable grid. We had a notable example of that last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou....
One way to think about this problem is that our electrical grids are giant machines—in many ways, the largest machines that humanity has every constructed. The enormous machine of the grid is comprised of many smaller connected machines, and many of those have spinning loads with enormous mechanical inertia. Some of those spinning machines are generators (prime movers), and some are loads (like large electric motors at industrial facilities). All of those real, physical machines—in addition to other non-inertia generators and loads—are coupled together through the grid.
In the giant machine of the grid, electricity supply and demand have to be almost perfectly in sync, microsecond to microsecond. If they're not, the frequency of the grid changes. Abrupt changes in frequency translate into not only electrical/electronic problems for devices that assume 60 Hz (or 50, depending on where you are), but into physical problems for the machines connected to the grid. If the grid frequency suddenly drops (due to a sudden drop in generation capacity or sudden drop in load), the spinning masses connected to the grid will suddenly be under enormous mechanical stress that can destroy them.
It's obviously not possible to instantaneously increase or decrease explicit generation in response to spikes or drops in load (or alternatively, instantaneously increase or decrease load in response to spikes or drops in generation). But we don't need to: all of the spinning mass connected to the grid acts as a metaphorical (and literal) flywheel that serves as a buffer to smooth out spikes.
As the generation mix on the grid moves away from things with physical inertia (huge spinning turbines) and toward non-inertial sources (like solar), we need to use other mechanisms to ensure that the grid can smoothly absorb spikes. One way to do that is via spinning reserves (e.g. https://www.sysotechnologies.com/spinning-reserves/). Another way to do it is via sophisticated power electronics that mimic inertia (such as grid-forming inverters, which contrast with the much more common grid-following inverters).
Great explanation about the grid being a giant machine that couple smaller machines with each other. About your last point, the buffer, I think batteries (chemical and also physical) seems to be the main key going forward.
I actually have a patent in this space for demand response. I know. I was being a bit cheeky. Stability is still a concern as unstable loads and generation needs to be mitigated as well as properly phased.
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 required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
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 meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
Here in Ireland, night-time power prices are much lower than daytime.
I’m happy enough that a battery will serve me equally well in both modes, but there’s definitely going to be a period where all it does is support self-consumption.
This only happens if a small percentage of people have live pricing. If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes - for example by turning the heating off in unused rooms to save money.
In turn, that means that at times of crisis, prices will be high, but not 1000x high.
Gasoline is another resource with live pricing, and suggesting "I want a subscription where I pay $3 per gallon fixed for a year, no matter how much I use and no matter what happens to the price of oil" wouldn't be something a fuel station would entertain, because they know that when the price was under $3 you'd buy elsewhere, and when the price was over $3 you'd buy millions of gallons and resell at a profit.
> If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes
It's not latency free to act on price changes. If they spike while people are asleep, what do you expect would happen?
And would people get a notification everytime the price changed at all. The logistics are hard.
Some solar inverter systems already have a data connection to get live pricing information from the grid operator. It’s not that big of a problem to implement, although it definitely isn’t pervasive yet.
Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.
There's a neat way to do this that is super simple... The electricity company publishes an equation that determines the price based on the AC frequency. Ie. price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2)).
Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.
All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:
The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...
But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
In reality most people will buy "smart" appliances which turn on and off based on price - eg. a water heater which picks the cheapest hour to reheat the tank for the day, or a fridge/freezer which cools everything more in cheap hours, an EV charger which starts selling rather than buying power at the highest priced hours, etc. It's all fairly simple software as soon as energy companies do live pricing, so pretty much every wifi gadget will do it.
People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".
It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.
Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.
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.
My (very-)local utility will give you an overall rate discount if you send them a screen shot of your car charging app showing it's only charging in a certain range of hours. Surprisingly, this works fine, though supposedly they've got eventual integration plans, "nah, we'll trust you for now" is a viable MVP...
> 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.
They could still have a price limit, paid for by charging a bit more when prices are lower, it doesn't have to be priced directly to the grid to have impact on usage.
A max price guarantee would also give the supplier an incentive to have their planning in order.
It's hard for people to really understand this because utilities and grid operators are using this is a headline justification for electric capital projects. In New York, they've deferred capital projects for decades and we're absorbing a massive distribution charge increase. I think my electric delivery portion of the bill is up 40%.
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.
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.
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.
This is not the problem. The problem is that everyone moves to solar for most of the year not using or paying for the infrastructure, then in cold winter nights everyone expects the grid to be able to supply as normal.
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 gas generator instead.
Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%.
So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
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 where I live to be off-grid during the winter, but I can use the battery to hedge against grid outages which are common here in the winter due to storms (eg heavy ice taking down power lines).
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:
We do the same in Pennsylvania - I have about 10 kwh of battery. I can't put solar on my roof, so I only have a very small 800w array on top of my garden. I run it as an off grid system that can recharge from shore power, so I have to use all of the energy it produces or it goes to waste. But it saves some money and is enough battery to let me time shift to take advantage of time of use power rates, and it gives me very good run time for refrigerators and internet during outages.
There seem to be a few sweet spots in solar - a tiny array that you use all of without having to grid tie it is really cost effective. (The cost of grid tied solar adds 5-10k to the system cost). Otherwise go big. :)
There was an article that described that in UK one needs 1 megawhat-hour battery over the winter to be grid independent. Judging by current trends in few years that will be below 40K USD. While this is indeed very expensive in most of US due to much more sun available the required battery would cost below 20k. One can also have a backup generator that can run constantly at maximum efficiency to replenish the battery. Then the whole system can already be below 20K. While expensive, it provides true independence and I suspect grid cost and centralized power is more expensive for society.
This is for a single home off-grid, meaning solar over-production is already implied. You need enough solar available to charge that 1MW battery in time for it to be useful during those seasonal differences which is going to be multiples of your peak summer generation.
No need to go off grid. You getting solar and battery already positions you to be able to ‘exit the grid’. The experience in Australia has been that the major retailers keep charging infrastructure costs to those who still rely on them. The mass of solar adoption grid and off-grid shifts the playing field.
That appears to be true in places in the US that have time-of-use rates. Sadly where I live, there are no time-of-use rates for residential customers, otherwise I would absolutely do this.
> 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.
I do, but I do not find value in rich folks who can afford solar wanting their cake and eating it too.
If you get a solar setup, get batteries. Then disconnect from the grid entirely. You should not be able to use the grid as a free backup energy source for the last 5% of the time you'll need it. Those last digits of reliability are the expensive hard problem to solve. That, or be charged appropriately for adding your potential usage to the capacity market. I understand that this is not legal in many places, and that folks disconnecting from the grid also cause the grid to collapse at some point as well. But at least there would be less of an individual perverse incentive involved.
Home solar folks seem to love their free battery though. Or even worse - getting paid to dump power to the grid when it's value is the smallest. Net metering is not the way to go - home solar should be being paid something around instantaneous wholesale pricing at best, plus fees to manage the more complex management of the grid they cause via being thousands of kilowatt-scale install vs. a single 50MW solar farm.
So far in the US at least, many solar programs have simply been a handout to relatively rich folks subsidized by poorer grid consumers. It's really put a sour taste on something that should be for the greater good. I don't mind that those subsidies were used to jump-start the industry, but that time has long since passed.
tldr; if your total system cost to be fully off-grid and never have to worry about a power outage is not substantially more expensive than being grid-connected, you are likely being highly subsidized by other electricity consumers.
While many rich are benefiting, they are still driving demand, that is funding continuous improvements that funding further efficiencies innovation and driving down the cost per kWh. In a very really way this makes solar cheaper and cheaper, the benefits of this one, unlike the debunked economic namesake do infact trickle down.
I think this was the case when solar panels were much more expensive. But home solar in the US has long ceased to be a useful driver of funding efficiencies and innovation. The cost of panels is now tiny and you are mostly paying for extremely overpriced installation and permitting. The 30% federal subsidy alone is enough to pay for an equivalent amount of utility scale solar outright. Australia has similar labor costs to the US but home solar is 1/3rd the cost to install.
The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view.
That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away.
The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue.
Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.
Australia is lucky, we get hot summers and mild winters, which means our electricity demand is highest precisely when we get the most solar.
That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.
That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.
It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
Temperature has nothing to do with the performance of solar. Solar panels perform better when they are cooled.
Also worth pointing out that much of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Which is south of most of Europe. Washington DC and San Francisco are at a similar latitude (38) as Melbourne (-37). Most of the US is perfectly situated for getting pretty decent solar power around the year. Yes it gets cloudy sometimes. It's usually not continent wide. You can compensate with cables and batteries. The US is far behind because of policy and their local energy monopolists blocking progress. Not because of anything to do with the weather or geography.
Prices have a lot to do with scarcity. Which with monopolists has more to do with the lack of a free market than with a scarcity of resources. Installing solar is about 3-5x more as expensive in the US as in Australia. The permitting process in the US is more expensive than the total cost of buying and installing in Australia. That's a policy problem in the US. All the hand wringing around that topic isn't helping a lot. A bit of pragmatism could improve things a lot and probably very quickly. Australia is showing how to do that. And yes, they have rain there too and you can go skiing pretty close to Melbourne. That isn't stopping them.
I wasn't talking about the performance of solar, only the demand for electricity.
Someone pointed out that the big problem with solar isn't how do we store daytime solar for nighttime use - this is easily solved with batteries. The real unsolved problem is how do we store summer solar for winter use.
Australia doesn't have this problem, not to the extent of other colder places, because we don't need a lot of heating in the winter.
When you say 'Australian grid prices are coming down a lot' I don't think you're talking consumer prices.
I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago.
At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly.
(I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates)
I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar.
It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).
But it's not happening in areas that keep coal on their grid - Wyoming, Texas, Utah, China, etc.
It's primarily the places that try do both solar an fossil fuel retirement that are experiencing high energy prices - California, UK, Europe, Australia, etc.
To be clear: Australia has always had fairly high electricity prices, and Australia is also not specifically doing 'fossil fuel retirement', although there are coal plants closing they're closing because they're reaching the expected end of their natural life.
High energy prices happen when you don't do the basics to be ready for a change before making it. Or when you skip basic maintenance until everything falls apart. I'm sure there are many other complex factors I don't know about.
Texas also has the most coal power of any state. As with China, success with renewables appears to depend on a policy of compatibility with fossil fuels rather than opposition.
(Home) batteries are quickly becoming cheap and per-hour electricity rates can be implemented at a reasonable time. With that, the grid owner can influence the grid stability without having to build capacity or generation itself.
My goal is to do wholly owned solar and batteries at home, only using the grid as backup, if I move out of the city. But I think the big problem with this new demand is that it’s for data centers. I can’t see that working for them.
We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.
This ignores capital and opportunity cost. Building a GPU data center or chemical plant costs a lot. If you only use it 20% of the time, you're effectively paying 5x more for that capital equipment.
The problem is the capital cost of any of that type of equipment sitting around idle or under-capacity, ready to go when the electricity price goes down. It's likely more profitable to run them most of the time, even with positive electric rates, and then only stop using them when rates are exceptionally high ("load shedding").
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.
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.
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!
The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup, which in this case is where the free electricity goes).
The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.
Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.
When the price of a thing is negative, the entity facing the negative price is being paid to consume it.
We don't have enough automatic integration yet to make it happen, but: Residentially, that'd be a great time to charge millions of EVs and raise the temperature of water heaters. It'd be perfect for getting a head start on heating the glass kiln for Monday morning, or to supplement the used railroad ties and other fuels that might be feeding a lime kiln.
It's pretty easy to think of loads that feature scale and/or quantity, and the ability to switch on and off rather quickly. Even if the negative price event only lasts for an hour. (Even if it only lasts 5 minutes.)
The CapEx (and planning/timing) required to actually use it would almost certainly dwarf any actual gains - notably, because we’d already be selling the electricity for a profit if we could use it productively, the negative price is precisely because the equipment just isn’t there yet.
Also, once said capex was spent so we could actually use that electricity - it’s marginal cost/value would no longer be negative.
Weird huh?
Notably, if these kinds of situations do keep occurring (aren’t just random), someone almost always ends up spending the capital to capture it, because this is obvious.
You just don’t see all the finance geeks pulling out their calculators and talking about their plans because they know secrecy is an important strategic and tactical advantage when arranging investment and building out capital equipment.
It does tend to level itself out, yes. With sufficient adoption of cost-oriented controls, negative price conditions cease to exist and money flows in the normal direction.
And no, I don't think that's weird at all -- that seems like just a natural path towards the desirable goal of balancing generation and load, and turning a negative into a positive.
In terms of implementation: There's already lot of low-hanging fruit. It only takes software to get connected things like EVs and hybrid, grid-tied battery+solar systems to be centrally commanded to take advantage of negative price opportunities.
The hardware already exists, and more of it is being built every day. And software, once written, can be copied infinitely for free.
We already have sellers who would like to sell surplus energy, but find themselves in situations where they cannot. We also have avid buyers who would like to buy energy cheaper, but who cannot take advantage of the surplus condition when it exists.
That's not a inescapable curse. It is instead an opportunity for a new market optimization.
If I wake up on some hypothetical future day and find my hypothetical EV charged to 90% instead of the 80% I might normally seek to limit it to, and this 10% increase happened for free and without any action on my part, then: I win a little bit, and the generating station with the surplus also wins a little bit, and the distribution/transmission systems still get paid for their part.
I'm happy with my tiny win. The generating station is happy with many thousands of their own tiny wins. It's good stuff.
If this happens often enough (or for long-enough periods) for me in my region, then I might seek a normal limit of 70% or even less and be able to opportunistically absorb even more of the surplus when it happens.
The advantage that participation offers me does decrease over time as things balance (if they can ever become balanced), and that's OK too: The generating station still wins.
(We already have systems that do exactly the opposite of this in the consumer space, and we've had them for a very long time. The oldest I'm aware of are radio-controlled relays for water heaters, and the newest I'm aware of involve smart thermostats. These are utility-controlled systems that are intended to shed load instead of generate load. But if it works in one direction, then it can also work in the other direction.)
The problem here is that the production of hydrocarbons, ammonia, etc. from electricity can only make back its high upfront investment when it runs basically 24/7. This is a challenge for renewables.
In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
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.
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.
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.
That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter.
> or using high power appliances more during the day
Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home.
The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day.
Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.
I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.
Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.
So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
At least in the US there is a push to make electric appliances smarter already. So for example, the electric hot water heater responding to the strain on the grid. The same could happen for AC, heat, EVs and other higher load appliances. At scale that can help out the grid immensely either in times of peak load or dip in demand.
I do not see a point of smart appliances besides electrical car. 10 KWt-hour battery will cover all the needs to smooth the demand from all home appliances and costs below 1K usd. It will allow also to significantly reduce maximum power that has to be supplied to a house while allow to increase peak consumption while heavy cooking/AC/heating.
At least in the US most of this is still on the research phase but if you can get a standard adopted for all new equipment you can easily adjust these high draw appliances to act as a virtual power plant. It would be a trivial implementation compared to getting batteries in homes.
So your implication that other sources of energy currently do not need scaling coordination somehow? I fail to see how that is true, maybe you can provide some insights?
Wind and solar are not in ur control. I can turn on a generator and get power. Some plants might need weeks to start up - but this is in my control. I have no idea how windy it will be in five days.
My point is that scaling coordination issues exist for everything, including all sources of energy production.
Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
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.
Can you point me to a country-scale implementation of solar+batteries where electricity is affordable? If every country tries to do the same, what do you think will happen with the battery costs given the sheer size of the manufacturing and natural ressources extraction required?
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.
> It’s too bad solar degrades over time... without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.
Google says they degrade to 80-90% capacity over 25-30 years, which is ~double your 15 year time period. I've also previously seen people claiming that they then stabilise around the 80% level, and that we don't really know how long their total possible lifespan is because many extant solar panels are outliving their 25 year rated lifespans.
Capacity reduced to 80% won't work for some high-performance use cases, but is pretty decent for most.
>without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.
Why is this such a dealbreaker like you make it out to be? It's easily fixed by over-provisioning to account for future losses. Not to mention that power grids almost always have more capacity than what's needed, to account for future growth and maintenance downtime.
Ahh yes. France’s investment in replacing carbon free nuclear with… carbon free intermittents. Fortunately that hype-driven waste is not stopping France from building out new EPR2 reactors.
Not all australia is moving g at the same speed. Check south Australia, and it is a massive success. The difference is that the government invested in renewewals, along with solar in rooftops. As SA is smaller they did not had pressure from lobbies. Now, are almost 100% renewal energy all year long.
There is a very funny nuclear power plant in France which is located in such a way to be surrounded on 3 sides by Belgium instead of by France. (EDF Nuclear Power Plant Chooz)
Thanks for sharing, although I don't understand how Saul expects everyone to buy electric cars. They are much too expensive in Australia and the charging infrastructure is not well distributed. Electric cars are also a massive risk in fires (they were a big problem in the LA fires), and Australia has a lot of fires.
Even an electrified kitchen (which Saul also suggests for everyone) is iffy in Australia, because good freestanding ovens with induction cooktops cost about 3x what freestanding ovens with a gas cooktop would cost, not to mention the electrical rewiring costs, which could be substantial especially if a conversion to 3-phase is needed.
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.
First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad - demand should be going down, since there is a need to conserve electricity while much of it is provided by CO2-emitting sources. That said - it is not such a huge "surge" that the fact that 61% of it was covered by an increase in Solar capacity is so impressive.
Second, Solar generation is said to have reached 84 TW. But if the increase in demand was 135 TW, and that's just 3.1% of total demand, then total demand is 4355 TW, and Solar accounts for 1.92% of generation. That is _really_ bad. Since we must get to near-0 emissions in electricity generation ASAP to avoid even harsher effects of global warming; and most of the non-Solar generation in the US is by Natural Gas and Coal [1].
You could nitpick and say that the important stat is "total renewables" rather than just Solar, and that the US has a lot of Nuclear, and that's technically true, but it's not as though Nuclear output is surging, and it has more obstacles and challenges, for reasons. So, the big surge to expect in the US is Solar - and we're only seeing very little of that. If you mis-contextualize it sounds like a lot: "60% of new demand! 27% increase since last year!" but that's not the right context.
It is not bad. Energy usage is the best proxy we have for societal wealth. It's starting to somewhat decouple, but I'd posit that's largely due to financial woo-woo than actual real wealth. Time shall tell. A lot of energy (no pun intended) was put into short-term easy wins on the efficiency side the last couple decades, but those low hanging fruits are largely picked over. In the end, it requires serious capital investment into energy production and distribution.
> demand should be going down
Naw. If we want to actually regain any sort of self-determination as a nation we need to re-industrialize and learn to make things again. This is a multi-generational project that takes decades to even build the foundation for. This all requires energy - preferably as clean and cheap as possible.
We should be looking what what China is doing. Building everything possible as quickly as possible. Spam solar, wind, nuclear, and yes natural gas which enables the former two to exist to begin with. Start spinning up battery plants as well on top of it. Coal I can grant is silly to invest in these days, re-purpose those plants as their useful lifetimes run out into natural gas or nuclear power plant sites.
Then start spamming long distance transmission lines throughout the country to further even out demand vs. supply, so more sunny and windy locations can pick up the slack in other regions of the country. Start telling NIMBYs to go pound sand.
This degrowth stuff is just a way to make poor and working class folks suffer. China and India are building so much energy production capacity it simply doesn't matter anyways. Build or have your grandchildren be left behind.
You seem to be suggesting that we should continue to warm up the planet so as to increase "societal wealth". No, we should not, it is harmful and dangerous.
> Naw. If we want to actually regain any sort of self-determination as a nation
Avoiding global warming is an imperative. Your desire to feel "self-determination as a nation" is at most a nice-to-have.
That said - if the US were able to separate out a 're-importation of production capacity' from another country when estimating energy use, and could show a significant drop with that aside, and a drop relative to the energy use as part of that production activity, then - ok, that would be a legitimate argument that its conduct is better than the numbers suggest.
> This is a multi-generational project
So, you're claiming that it's ok for you to keep warming us all up and have the seas rise, and droughts, and fires, and agriculture failing etc. for at least, say, 50 years because of your multi-generational project.
No way. Now, of course, I'm just a guy on the Internet and the US is a global empire which invades and bombs kidnaps heads-of-state etc. But - that must be resisted. Also, the political elites within the US who subscribe to that view must be resisted internally.
> China ... Building everything possible as quickly as possible.
China's policies are a mixed bag; but they are certainly not building _everything_ as quickly as possible. And a lot of what they're building is non-CO2-emitting energy production capacity. Its official plan (IIRC) is no increase in emissions after 2030, and full neutrality by 2060 - which is absolutely not building everything nor as quick as possibly. Now, that is not good enough, but US policy (and your approach) seems to be "burn, baby, burn".
> This degrowth stuff is just a way to make poor and working class folks suffer.
Ah, yes, US society and economy these days are all about aleviating poverty and promoting working class interests.
The title is disgusting click bait with the hopes to falsely make the reader believe that Solar covered 61% of the total annual power need and not just the YoY delta.
The cognitive dissonance around optimism regarding renewables and the fact that there are multiple military actions going on around the globe right now focused exclusively on extracting more fossil fuels from the ground is a bit much sometimes.
Why do people even pretend like we haven't signed up for "what's worse than the worse case scenario?" as far as climate goes?
The only way to reduce the already severe impacts of global warming are to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It doesn't matter how much energy is generated by solar so long as we continue to dig up and burn fossil fuels. It's quite clear that we have zero intentions of slowing down or even keeping our fossil fuel consumption steady.
If we had record electricity demand, and anything short of 100% of it was covered by renewables, that means we're burning more fossil fuels then we were before.
We have, pretty unequivocally at this point, signed up for seeing what the end game of civilization looks like rather than realistically exploring or even considering any alternatives.
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?
Parts/materials costs in contractor quotes are often padded so they aren't completely overshadowed by the labor portion. In any job where there's specialized knowledge or license restrictions (HVAC) or risk (walking on a roof), the floor for labor rates is usually 2-4x the materials cost.
But, the real issue is that almost nobody pays cash upfront for their solar install. Between incentives, loans, and/or predatory PPAs, the prices lose touch with reality. See healthcare, college tuition, housing prices, etc. for similar scenarios where credit or third-parties distort the market.
You don't really have that many competent solar installers in most locations in the US. I basically gave up trying. I'm sure they exist, but if you don't want some financed/leased/etc. financial-product-as-a-solar-install your options dwindle.
It's entirely obvious that most of these places make money off the financial engineering, not the installation part.
I'd sign a competent contractor today for my quite marginal installation plans if I could find someone I'd trust to build something decent and to my specification.
They also tend to devalue the house as it's more difficult to get insurance, and many potential buyers are used to shitshow level of installs and/or dealing with a more complex close due to the seller needing to pay off loans/leases/etc.
A lot of these plays are also companies setting up complex financial engineering schemes that boil down to government subsidy arbitrage.
Solar doesn't make sense for me financially (yet), due to location and PoCo rates, but I'd be tempted to be my own contractor and sub out the tasks.
Any roofer could do the panel install, and would do a far better job than a solar hack that had 3 days of training. Electrical would be an electrician.
Residential is expensive anyway, larger installations are plenty viable. My town in a northern Michigan is installing solar to help stabilize the rates they offer (I pay about 11 cents per kWh).
It is definitely true that the labor cost of a solar installation is the largest driver of cost. In my area, there are solar incentives to offset this. For example I was able to cover a large portion of the loan with a 0% interest rate through a state program. For the remaining portion my bank had a low(er) interest loan (like 5%) specifically for solar. And neither of these loans were home equity loans which psychologically made me happier to apply for them.
Another thing, if you have the space, is to consider a ground mount. Ground mount hardware adds a little cost, but it is a lot easier for a solar installer to set up, so they finish faster. Since labor is the biggest driver of cost, then it makes sense to build a very big array that doesn’t just offset your operating costs but completely eliminates it (well, net-eliminates it anyway).
Yeah solar viability is highly dependent on your local conditions and electricity costs. Also on your utility’s buyback program.
I have low electricity costs, no time of use pricing, and I don’t think I can sell back. I also live in a very cloudy city. So solar doesn’t make much sense!
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.
So I'm reading it correctly, 39& of "the surge" was covered by traditional energy sources. Which still means use of traditional sources increased. Correct?
I guess the good news is, solar is available when demand is highest. Nonetheless, is it helping to solve a problem or is it serving more as an enabler of the status quo?
Did "demand surge" or was excess peak power sold of for nearly 0 to people that can spin up and turn off load on the turn of a dime (crypto)? We have had negative pricing (they pay you to take the power) to stabilize the grid due to solar/wind peaks.
This 61% figure is a significant milestone for grid resilience. At Storify News, we’ve been tracking how the 2025 surge wasn't just about general demand, but specifically the localized clusters of AI data centers and the electrification of industrial heat. What’s particularly interesting here is the "duck curve" management—solar handled the bulk of the demand surge, but it’s the rapid deployment of BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) that actually made this 61% figure viable without destabilizing the frequency. The question for 2026 is whether the transmission infrastructure can keep up with this pace of interconnection.
The book Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben is a really great read on the changing economics of solar. It came out August 2025 so its fairly up to date too.
What about behind the meter fossil fuel for datacenters? The underlying Ember one [0] is nearly all about the grid, with mention of behind the meter solar data being incomplete.
The delta here between population growth and energy consumption, + solid state storage, + the rate of PV efficiency improvement = FOS and NUC will very soon be the backup system. REN are the future. Dead dinosaurs are not the future.
The delta here between population growth and energy consumption, + solid state storage, + the rate of PV efficiency improvement = FOS and NUC will very soon be the backup system. REN are the future. Dead dinosaurs are not.
It really depends on how you write the headline. "US electricity demand surges in 2025 while new utility-scale solar installations decrease from 2024" is equally accurate. It's unclear what the future holds if the trend remains down or flat.
»US electricity demand jumped by 135 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025, a 3.1% increase, the fourth‑largest annual rise of the past decade. Over that same period, solar generation grew by a record 83 TWh – a 27% increase from 2024 and the biggest absolute gain of any power source. That single jump in solar output covered 61% of all new electricity demand nationwide.«
This article equates generation with consumption which is a fallacy.
Lots of solar and wind generation is actually produced without meeting demand meaning that the generated electricity often has to be wasted.
Not saying this is relevant in solar vs nuclear debate but "eco nerds" are probably not happy about new demand of additional 52TWh or part of it that is not covered by renewables/nuclear.
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 grid frequency deviations and eventually blackouts happen. This is much more likely to happen once undispatchable resources climb past a certain threshold in our generation mix.
To fix this we need massive storage and transmission investment, like moon landing and WW2 put together. We desperately need to do that before we add more non-dispatchable generation.
Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied.
> Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied.
Solar creates the economic incentive for storage. Without solar coming first, storage cannot occur.
You can see this in California. In the beginning, it made sense to install only solar, because energy developers are compensated at the margin. Once the grid is saturated with solar, then the marginal economics changes in response to the duck curve, and storage starts to make economic sense.
If you block solar, you block storage. To believe otherwise is to be ignorant of the temporal aspect of the economics.
Huh? You don't need solar to build storage. Lots of generation sources become much, much better with storage. Storage is what you use to compensate for bad transmission, and we have plenty of bad transmission.
You really don't understand. There is likely some foundational gap in your understanding of microeconomics and marginal decision making. Put my initial reply into ChatGPT and ask it to spell it out.
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 needed for maintenance or safety. Which is one of the main factors why nuclear energy is not economical anymore in a modern grid that values flexibility over constant generation.
I know, that's why I said it's basically never done. And it's usually not even done even if the price is zero or below, because a lot of nuclear power plants have fixed prices that are guaranteed by the government. Also, operating costs of nuclear power plants stay the same even if you curtail it 100%, so it's more economical to curtail something else.
But respectfully isn't the crisis more in the American political system and regulation? And surely large scale solar farms/batery storage connected to a supergrid (or whatever they are called) are a relatively good fit for this kind of legacy grid.
I mean..yes? Megaprojects are always political. But that's exactly the issue. No politician gets interest when they talk about building transmission towers and battery plants. They get fawning well meaning but inherently ignorant attention when they build renewable generation. The incentive is to support generation and avoid the politically less popular, more expensive, and ultimately much more important transmission and storage.
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.
I think it's incredibly fishy. If I add a 1MW coal plant to the grid, I can pretty much run it at nominal capacity all year round, so 1MW * hours in the year is afair calculation.
If I add the same 1MW for solar, needless to say even assuming perfect weather, I'm lucky to get 1/3rd of that. Under real circumstances, the numbers are probably much worse.
When looking at marketing, I think it's always safe to assume they picked the most flattering numbers when they didn't specify how they made the calculation.
That's why it's very meaningful to talk about adding kWh - 1 kWh peak solar means more in Texas than in Chicago. It's even less meaningful for batteries - they can sustain incredible currents, to the point it's very rarely the meaningful bottleneck.
Yet that's exactly that what the cited 'global think-tank' Ember did, which the article cites as source. So they either misled on purpose, or like a lot of people, they confused GWh and GW, which is such a grave error for a supposed expert, that their whole analysis should be disregarded.
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.
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 should be installed on unproductive land. Buildings should be covered in panels. Carparks should have solar roofs. If i were king of zoning, every new construction would be required to cover say 50% of thier footprint in panels. That is the direction to go. We should not continue to convert farmland.
A total parody, but on point. "Can I Beat Farming Sim WITHOUT FARMING?" - The Spiffing Brit
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.
But there are also millions of acres of corn being grown solely for the purpose of ethanol. A lot of that acreage could be better off utilized as solar farms
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.
Ya, but that isnt as widespread as fields being rededicated from crops generally to solar exclusively. And mixed use doesnt mesh well in a world of crop rotation and crop-specific harvesting equipment. I have yet to see a combine that can drive over solar panels without touching them.
While 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 electricity for, right?
> That is what we're using this electricity for, right?
Yes, amongst others.
> 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).
Over the last 25 years, we've the seen the following change across the dimensions you picked:
Energy consumption: +15%
Population: +21%
Hospitals (hospital sector size as a function using employment as proxy): +45-50%
Homes: +27-30%
Food production: +23-25%
Transportation (vehicle miles travelled): +14-16%
------
Some take-aways:
Population grew faster than energy and transportation, implying major efficiency gains.
Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households.
Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity.
Food production grew roughly in line with population, but without proportional land expansion productivity gains.
Transportation growth lagged housing growth, suggesting more remote work, urbanization, and efficiency.
You have a lot of assumptions in your takeaways.
> Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households.
Or rich people owning more vacation homes.
> Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity.
What? It could easily be the population getting older and/or sicker. Even if it was a structural shift, it could be in the negative direction ie less efficiency.
> Food production grew roughly in line with population, but without proportional land expansion productivity gains.
What land expansion? You didn't include that in your stats. And no source to verify.
> Or rich people owning more vacation homes.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
Home ownership rates have a 6 percent variance over the last ~50 years.
We dont have a housing problem in America, we have a utilization problem:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... as an example.
There is a conversation that needs to be had about housing, but no one is going to LIKE the medicine that comes with that.
There's some historical stuff happening in that graph that it's easy for young people to not have context for, like the fact that the peak home ownership around 2005 was caused by a subprime mortgage fiasco.
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There is a push to switch from fossil fuel to electricity across the board, and that’s a good thing.
Cars are the big one. However even heating is going electric (heat pumps, not resistive). Induction stovetops outperform residential gas cooktops. Some cities are even experimenting with phasing out natural gas hookups for new construction.
It all adds up, and it a good thing. It doesn’t explain 100% of the growth but it’s a lot of it.
> 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).
Trying to put concepts like “better healthcare” on to the growth of electricity demand is unrealistic but generally speaking we’re putting electricity to good use. It’s not being wasted.
In Vancouver, Canada natural gas was completely phased out as of the beginning of 2025 in most new construction.
What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.
Perform better as in more efficient electrically, not necessarily more pleasant or efficient in the cooking process.
For example, when cooking an omelette, a recommended technique is to angle the pan so the liquid part flows towards the hot part of the pan touching the flame as you slowly scrape the curds up to rest at the cooler part of the pan. AFAIK an induction cooktop is unable to simulate this technique. Now maybe there are similar ways of getting this, but there’s centuries of experience informing cooking on top of a fire in some form or another. The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.
> not necessarily more pleasant or efficient in the cooking process.
For amateurs, I find that the gain of control from using induction far outweighs everything else--especially at low heats. If I put a newbie on an induction with a temperature sensor, they generally do great. Over time they start to correlate the behavior of the food with the temperature, but, even if they don't, they still can maintain control over the food via the temperature sensor.
> The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.
And, sometimes, those old techniques are just a pain in the ass and only exist because of the lack of control. Caramelizing onions requires a lot less attention when I can set the pan to a specific temperature and don't have to worry about thermal runaway as the water cooks off. There are all manner of directions for thickening custards that aren't required if you can set the pan at exactly 180F and know that it isn't going above that. Tempering chocolate is stupidly easier when you can set the pan for 115F-81F-88F rather than having to swish it on a marble slab or put it on a double boiler and risk seizing the chocolate because of water. On an electric or gas stove, I plan for two batches of caramel because I almost always screw up my first batch if I haven't done it in a while; on induction I almost never miss. etc.
I used to be a gas snob for ages but after moving, first to a place with an induction stove, then to one with a regular electric one, I have to say the supposed advantages are overblown. You can cook perfectly well on either. Induction/gas are slightly nicer if you want to use very high heat but even my current electric stove puts out a lot of power on the highest setting.
And then there's the downsides of gas:
They're a complete mess to clean. Tons of nooks and crannies where stuff might get into. They suck for low heat simmering. There's iron plates you can put below the pot to distribute the heat but that's cumbersome. Low heat flames also go out more easily if there's a draft. Not even talking about air quality and fire risks.
So I'm never going back to gas if I can help it. If I have a choice I'll probably get an induction stove next time around.
I've been cooking eggs on induction cooktops for something like a decade now; while it's true that you can't tilt the pan (the induction won't work, and the cooktop is likely to just say "nope, not operating without a pan on me"), I've had no trouble with getting either scrambled eggs or omelettes to be softly and evenly cooked.
Perhaps it helps that I had never had that particular advice for cooking on gas/electric!
I have an old but still perfectly functional high-end gas cooktop. I have no plans to replace it. Sturdy cast-iron trivets are bulletproof. You get visual feedback about heat intensity. I use enough heavy Dutch ovens and stainless and cast-iron pans that a glass cooktop under them seems like an added risk.
You can find induction wok stove tops on alibaba (China obviously has more vested in electric transition than we do), but ya, standard western stove tops are flat.
How is filling your living space with poisonous gas pleasant at all?
P.S. basting works on induction if I crank up to boost mode.
I own an induction stove, and overall really enjoy it. But there are certain types of cooking it's not nearly as well suited to (still possible, but not as good). One of those is cooking on a wok.
But really it comes down to heating. Heat pumps are not universally better. We are currently sitting at -25C or so which is pretty common in the winter (it can even get a fair bit colder at times). Hardly any of the contractors around here work with heat pumps, and even the ones that do aren't aware of the latest tech. That said even if you could get a cutting edge system through sheer money/will I am not sure how it would perform without at least a gas backup. At least from an efficiency standpoint.
Not to mention we have had electricity go out in the winter which can be life threatening or at least cause substantial damage to property. I can't remember ever having the gas go out. (we have generator backup but that couldn't run an electric furnace for very long).
Lastly we have a gas water heater (tankless) and damn that thing is efficient. A few therms a month...
I also own an induction range and love it, but I keep a portable butane stove around for random things gas is better for like woks or cooking that involves a lot of lifting the frying pan. Just make sure things are well ventilated (which should be the case with gas stoves, too).
Lifting the frying pan is fine if you don't mind the fucker beeping at you.
Wok induction cook tops are a thing you can buy also. It’s just not something that westerners are going to build in.
If you're really hampered by not having a wok behavior for your induction stove, good news! There are plugin induction woks! From what I hear they work great. Technology Connections on YouTube did a great video about them
Heat pumps do not do well when it's -40 outside. You can say "fine, but how often does it get that cold?" but consumers are not going to be happy with a heat pump if their pipes freeze during an extended cold snap.
I live in Southern Ontario and I have a heat pump with an auxiliary natural gas furnace for emergency heating. The heat pump shoulders most of the heating load but the thermostat does kick on the furnace when the heat pump starts falling behind.
It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree, so the thermostat usually calls for the furnace to start up before things get that bad.
Canada's climate is really different when it comes to the extreme cold.
Heat pumps are getting better at lower temperatures, but in an environment like Canada you still want auxiliary heat to be safe.
> It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree
That would be an undersized heat pump in any regard. The installer would be at fault for screwing up that badly.
You're right that efficiency falls off at lower temperatures, 8 hours to move 1 degree would be from the installer sizing the unit wrong.
It's not just the efficiency of the heat pump that is at issue, it's the insulation of the house. As the outside temperature plunges, the house begins cooling off much more rapidly. This means the reduced efficiency of the heat pump (operating in cold outdoor temperatures) needs to produce more heating than it would at higher temperatures, and it's just not capable of that. My house was built in the 1980s and its insulation has always been more than adequate for the original natural gas furnace to be able to heat.
The heat pump I have is only a few years old and cost $12,000 installed (before tax credits). To be able to rapidly heat the house when it's -40 outside would require a system costing several times that! Much cheaper just to use a furnace for those few days per year.
air source heat pumps, though they're improving won't do well in extreme cold; even if they can operate they'll still be running at much lower efficiency.
For temperatures significantly into negative territory a ground source heat pump would perform far better, where it can draw on a source of heat that will always be at least above freezing.
A hybrid system doesn't seem like a bad trade-off though..
I think NG outperforms in high efficiency heaters when the outside temperature is around 1-4 degrees Celsius with humidity as it causes ice buildup on the external unit which then has to be cleared using resistive heating. Also if only little hot water is required sporadically, heating it just in time with gas is more efficient than keeping a buffer heated for long times.
Also, heat pumps do best when the temperature differential is lower. So in older housing without floor heating or duct heating, it is typically not as efficient to use a heat pump when the water to heat has to be above 55 degrees Celsius.
For any new residential construction I think there is very little value in natural gas.
Heat pumps do fine down to -20C or so. The modern ones have all sorts of tricks to avoid icing. (mostly they run the cycle in reverse which is extremely efficient since you are heating the ice on the compressor with the warmer inside air)
That is awesome to hear. I noticed that mine does fine sub 0, but when it is moist and around 1-4 degrees Celsius a lot of ice forms and it needs the resistive heating.
I didn’t see it reverse cycle yet. But I have air-air with one outside unit connected to three inside units. It’s a Mitsubishi Heavy from 2023.
Methane has lots of value in colder climates, especially much of Canada. Methane is cheap and does not lose heating capacity as temperature falls. Across most of Canada, the median construction year for a typical house is in the 1980. Half were built before that, meaning insulation standards were lower.
The #1 problem with heat pumps in Canada is low temperature performance. The heat output drops but the rate of heat loss from the house also increases. This is the precise situation where even backup resistive heat cannot keep up. Methane is excellent at filling this gap, especially now when winter temperatures swing more than earlier.
Toronto/Vancouver areas are both well within the temp range for heat pumps (e.g. ~50% of Canada's population). The further norther areas are a bit cold for air source heat pumps, but are still well within ground based heat pump temp ranges.
Toronto and Vancouver have completely different climates.
Toronto regularly has ten days per year where the high temperature is below -15 C.
Even cold climate heat pumps struggle at those temperatures. I would know, i have one.
Better is subjective here. Vancouver will be a bit different with it's warmer weather, but for the week or two at -30C to -40C(like I get) it provides a lot more heat at a lower price and in Canada, at least Ontario, it is still much cheaper to heat a home and water with. I'll probably go heat pump if my boiler goes as I can avoid the cost of adding ductwork(really expensive these days and more than furnace for install) and get A\C too.
Induction is better in some ways and worse in others. It's so efficient and boils water like crazy but at low settings it's almost always pulsed rather than continuous and I've never liked that. I have both in my kitchen.
Gas cooktops are good for still being able to cook when the power is out.
Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off.
It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something during the first long outage in their area.
TIL. Never used a modern gas stove, so I had not considered that without a pilot light, there must be a way to disable the flow or constantly spew gas into the house. Then again, I have had a pilot light go out for some amount of time without obvious ill effect, so the volume of gas must be low.
Pilot lights stay lit all the time so no igniter is required. My range has electric spark igniters. They don't work when the power is out but there is also no pilot light expelling gas. I just manually light the burner when the power is out.
My gas stove has spark ignitors for the burners and the oven has an incandescent ignitor. The oven has safety interlocks so the gas valve won't open if the ignitor is not hot. The oven cannot be lit manually, but the stovetop burners can. So in a power outage, I can cook in pots and pans but not bake.
Usually the pilot energizes a thermocouple+solenoid that is used to hold the gas valve open, so the valve shuts if the pilot goes out.
> Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out.
Huh, I did not know that. The natural gas stove that I grew up with has a good ol' fashioned pilot light, so it's fine even when the power goes out.
Gas stoves need electricity for the starter these days. Maybe you can get a really old one with a pilot light.
It's far easier to provide a backup for electric appliances using a generator, than it is to store CNG onsite for gas interruption.
Matches work fine to light burners.
A lighter works wonders if your spark igniters ever get shorted by your wife dumping water on the stove.
You could get a small propane burner or a lot of people have propane grills (sometimes with burners) in their backyards. Gas burners and stoves aren't bad but expanding the gas network to new homes is a huge expense.
I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).
I have gas-cooked since I was a kid (living in an area with a lot of natural gas, so houses were connected to gas since the 50ies), but induction is so much nicer that I'm happy to not be able to cook during a once in a ~10-20 year outage. Also a lot safer (it still happens quite frequently that a house blows up because of a gas leak, just this week there was a huge explosion in Utrecht what was presumably a gas leak).
Of course, the equation may change for countries with less stable power.
It's very local here. I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in one of the highest income counties in the state, two blocks from a major hospital, one block from a suburban downtown. Despite that, I've experienced one or two 4-6 hour long power outages per year the past few years. (Mostly correlated with weather.) One outage in June 2025 was 50 hours long!
Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.
Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.
Sadly one of those countries is the United States.
Here in Colorado they've started pre-emptively shutting off power during wind storms when it's hot and dry because there have been multiple instances of wind blowing down power lines which then start big fires. We had one instance in December where the power was out 2-3 days for tens of thousands of people, and over a week for some people.
Of course the problem is that nobody wants to pay to bury the lines. They'd need all new equipment for digging, to retrain all of the technicians, and get permission from a million different entities to dig up their land. We're effectively locked in to overhead cables.
North America generally has more extreme weather (everything from tornadoes to hurricanes and usually a much larger temperature range) and more above-ground electrical distribution than Europe.
I live in downtown Toronto and we get ice rain that occasionally knocks out power in portions of the city, though I live downtown where most of the lines are buried and I'm on the same electrical sub-block as several hospitals. The last time I lost power was the massive North American blackout of 2003.
In the central USA my power is out up to 3 or 4 times a year for an hour or more, and momentarily maybe once every month or two. It's due to our power distribution being mostly overhead lines which are vulnerable to falling trees, squirrels, ice accumulation, storm and wind damage, etc. Even though my neighborhood has buried lines, that's just the last mile. The incoming power is all overhead lines.
On an island, in a rainforest with regular storms. The power goes out multiple times a year due to trees falling on power lines. We also don't have municipal gas lines piped everywhere. Delivery only. If you have a leak they won't deliver until its fixed.
> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time...
Here in SE Michigan (USA) I have quite a few friends who've totaled more than 15 days without power in the past couple years. Most of that in multi-day outages.
> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).
I guess you don't live in Berlin.
I recommend a backup butane stove, which is what I have for outages where my induction stove doesn't work.
Also an outdoor camp chef stove. Both are cheap and work great. My camp chef doubles as an outdoor pizza oven.
Batteries or Generators don’t just let you cook and stay warm when the power is out but do everything else such as keep food cold as well.
Do induction cooking tops work well on batteries (or generators)? IIRC our induction plate has two-phase power because it can pull more than 3.6kW.
Sure, as long as you size the system to expected loads.
An 8kW generator suitable for occasional use is only ~1,000$. A Powerwall 3 does 11kW continuous and peaks at 30kW for transitory loads like starting heavy equipment.
The most convenient solution where a generator automatically kicks in during a power outage requires an electrician and extra equipment, but there’s also real tradeoffs to having gas lines going to your home.
There is a good technology connections video about building backup batteries into the actual stove.
I think part of the problem with whole home backups is that they tend to be sized to a maximum load that is unusual or could be avoided with some effort. And that providing a backup for the essentials you actually need is relatively cheap and uncomplicated if you make some modest sacrifices.
There are models that include a battery to reduce the input power requirement. That's not quite the same as the question, but it answers it, you just need a big enough battery and they are fine.
Natural gas is good for when the power goes out. I've never seen natural gas go out in my life. If you have an electric stove and the power goes out, you simply can't cook stovetop meals until the power is restored. Oh, and if you're thinking of using a generator to power your house if the grid is out, know that most generators run on natural gas.
Power went out in my area at night the other day. It was easy to spot the guy with the solar panels and home battery. His was a fountain of light in the darkness.
You can use bbq.
If the power goes out I can still cook and heat with gas.
*this is a regular occurence in some countries
> What is NG good for?
Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster" or "heats with a better distribution of heat".
It is foolish, but many still think so. I personally believe that the only kind of cooking that benefits from NG are round-bottom woks. But they can be substituted by flat-bottom pans without problems.
> Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster"
It’s almost entirely about heat _control_, especially when you turn the heat down or off. Non-induction electric stoves can take minutes or longer for a burner to cool down. When you cut the heat on a NG stove, it’s essentially immediate.
This matters quite a bit for heat-sensitive dishes like omelettes.
Induction doesn’t have this problem, but also hasn’t been widely available until maybe recently and won’t work on a lot of aluminum cookware. So you’re asking people to change their cookware along with their range. That can be a bridge too far for many.
They are mostly Nouvelle & Haute Cuisine french dishes: omelettes, holandaise/bernaise sauces, custards (Crème Anglaise, Pots de Crème), melted chocolate, caramel, generally poached stuff, etc.
For the lower temperatures, a lot of that temperature control can be made with bain marie (warm water).
And the remaining ones aren't made in aluminum cookware, anyway. And people that cook such sophisticated food probably will have a lot of non-aluminum cookware, already.
Flat bottom woks need a lot more oil to stir fry properly, due to the lack of pooling. Flat bottom woks on electric cooktops (radiant or induction) also tend to have essentially nonexistent heating of the side slopes, preventing you from using the technique of splashing soy sauce (and other cooking sauces, as well as cooking wines) in a wide arc so that it reduces rapidly to form a sticky coating for the food. Instead, all of the sauce will just run down to the bottom where it joins the rest of the liquids coming out of the food, contributing to boiling/steaming rather than stir frying.
I have a duxtop induction burner and I notice it gets hotspots where the coils are. I wonder if the breville control freak is worth the money or it has better granularity of its heating element.
But yeah if I built a new house, I would have an induction top.
The control freak (commercial one) is worth every penny.
I don't know about that. I like my induction cooker but I can't use cast iron on it (I've ruined other ones trying). I will use it for 90% of my cooking though.
Burning gas also releases a lot of pollutants — we’ve a gas hob but always switch the extractor on when we use it because of this
> Burning gas also releases a lot of pollutants
To be more precise: mostly CO2 and small amounts of CO. But the actual concentration of CO2 in your house can be affected by a lot of other factors (ventilation, urban environment, weather, etc).
It also releases NO2, PM2.5 and VOCs
You should have the hood on while cooking no matter the type of stove top.
Backup generator for power outages. NG usually still works during electric outages. A generator that you do not need to periodically go out to get more fuel for can be very convenient.
> heat pumps do better than gas heaters
Well, unless the inverter valve breaks and you've got an air conditioner for two and a half months of winter.
Ask me how I know.
> What is NG good for?
The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)
I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)
We are indeed living in more comfortable homes. Americans are migrating to the sunbelt because of ample AC in the summer and the winters are pleasant. that’s a big part of why we have many fewer heat deaths per capita than Europe: https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2025/08/02/opinion-us-heat-...
You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.
Also the move to electric heat pumps is increasing electricity rates but reducing natural gas usage and improving overall efficient.
The GP comment was trying to do snarky doomerism but accidentally hit upon a lot of truths. It’s amazing how many things are getting better but some people are hell bent on being cynical about it anyway.
I’m not from Europe but those sentiments I think are changing with the recent intensity and frequency of heat waves.
> You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.
Most of Europe is poor. AC is expensive. It's actually that simple.
There's AC in Switzerland.
I have lived and worked in Switzerland. My office (shared with 2 other people) was the only space in the entire floor with AC due to some obscure archaic reason.
That air conditioning worked great for years, but a few months before I left that position, the facilities management people suddenly came in and ripped it out. No justification given.
Thank God TPTB didn't notice I had AC for all those years; it really would have been miserable without it. But despite the misery I noted all around me, there was an extremely strong disdain for air conditioning that permeated the culture. When I talked to friends and colleagues about the AC situation I was regularly ribbed for being a gluttonous American wasting electricity on such a triviality. They were legitimately proud to suffer. Baffling.
I've come to the conclusion that most Western and Central Europeans--yes, including Swiss--have a masochistic superiority complex around AC. They see suffering without AC as core to the European identity and sweating it out in unproductive misery (or taking a whole month off of work) as virtuous. They willingly kill thousands of people and leave hundreds of millions more in misery every year simply to feel superior and European.
> There's AC in Switzerland.
Not at all, it has one of the lowest rate in Europe along with the UK. It's very hard to get the building permit required to install one. Portable AC has had a boom those past few years though (because it doesn't require a permit).
Europe is so backwards when it comes to annual heat deaths that they manage to have more heat deaths per year than the US has gun deaths + heat deaths combined. You won't hear about that from Europeans though, it'd make them seem barbaric. 175,000 heat deaths per year in Europe according to the WHO. It's a staggering genocide of technological primitiveness. Imagine having millions of people die because you can't be bothered to adopt 1950s technology (and of course I'm aware of the things the US is backwards on).
I think it is simply because in most of Europe air conditioning is unnecessary for comfort 95% of the year. Here in San Francisco most homes don't have air conditioning either, but there might be a week or two where it gets very hot and we just put up with the barbaric technological primitiveness.
Much of the US is extremely unpleasant without air-conditioning for a substantial portion of the year so of course everyone living in those parts installs it.
Yes in many parts of the US it's not just the heat but the humidity. One summer I tried going without AC as much as possible to see how much it would change my electric bill. I could handle the temperature most of the time but the humidity especially at night started giving me mold problems in the house. Cleaned that up and went back to using the AC and no more mold. Not sure how people controlled this back in the pre-AC days, maybe just a lot more cleaning.
My parents still don’t use AC. The windows stay open all summer unless there is a rainstorm. Whole house fan is turned on at night to draw in cooler air. Much time spent in the cooler basement if you are going to be hanging at home. At night you are basically sleeping naked on top of your fitted sheet with one or two window unit fans circulating air. Maybe another fan pointed directly at you. Basement had some dehumidifiers and afaik that was the only problem moisture area.
If you are OK with the heat maybe a dehumidifier would be able to address the humidity problem while still saving electricity compare to the AC.
A dehumidifier is basically an air conditioner that exhausts its heat back into the room. It will make the air warmer (but dryer).
You sent me to the books because this is such a fascinating stat. It's true! Heat deaths in the US: 5 per million people. Italy: 500+ per million people. I had no idea.
Figures based on coroners reports are somewhat suspect.
> In September 2022, a vicious heat wave enveloped much of the western U.S., placing tens of millions of people under heat advisories. Temperatures across California soared into the triple digits. Sacramento broke its heat record by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature hit 116 degrees.
> California death certificates showed that 20 people died as a result of heat-related illness from Aug. 31, 2022 to Sept. 9, 2022.
> But a study last year by California’s Department of Public Health found that death rates increased by about 5 percent statewide during the heat wave, causing 395 additional deaths.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-deaths-from-h...
Excess mortality studies seem to show about 24 per 100,000 excess deaths from heat in Europe vs 6 in US/Canada.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34245712/
Thanks for the paper link, very different figures from the random USA newspaper article :)
I'd love to see an age adjusted figure as well as it's likely Europe has likely more very old people and my guess is that heat/cold mortality is concentrated in the very old people.
I suspect age distributions are part of the story. Also the Eastern US (where most of the population lives) experiences much larger swings in temperature between winter and summer so maybe people are just more prepared for it.
It's not the most convenient format because of their idea of what constitutes a region, but yeah, the US has a pyramid shaped population pyramid, while European regions have a big bulge of old people: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/population...
I do think we'll need to change our view on airconditioning, every home should have airconditioning just like it has heating.
But I'm very sceptical of those numbers. They are apparently even worse for cold, and you can't attribute that to lack of airconditioning. I still think the huge difference can only be attributed to a difference in reporting.
Which way? For all we know the numbers are much worse and under-reported by Europe. China made the playbook for that a long time ago.
Cuts both ways.
What has China to do with this?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence doesn't cut both ways.
I think it’s common knowledge China never reports numbers that cast them in an unfavorable light, to the point where analysts generally disregard them.
For example: https://www.nber.org/digest/aug19/official-statistics-overst...
The temperature a few metres below ground level is consistently cool (approx. 15 celcius) year round.
Could this be made the basis of an efficient cooling system?
It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. People often go into their basement and think "wow, it's cool down here. If only I could make my house this cool." But, as soon as you moved the air from your basement to your house, the air in your basement would be replaced by ambient air and would take time to be cooled by the Earth. And so you quickly realize you need a lot of thermal mass and an efficient way to move heat in order to keep up with removing the heat from your house.
Yes, but it needs to work both ways. Heat needs to be extracted during the winter. Otherwise the ground would just be heated up to much. That is what a ground source heat pump does.
It's not so easy in dense urban environments where power cables are buried, along with ancient sewer systems, subways/metros, etc.
You are starting to see a lot more external AC (heat pump?) units jerry-rigged into the sides of multi-unit dwellings, though.
I think there wasn't a culture of buying ACs, because in most of Europe the climate was much more moderate. The summers are much hotter now than when I was a kid and heat waves are more regular. Many more people are buying air conditioning now.
Much of the US already had warmer summers than Europe when the impact of climate change was smaller, so AC is far more common.
Can their pension system afford A/C?
I spoke with two working class people last week who are facing power shutoffs because they got an unexpected $700 power bill. Not sure if it were a sneaky electricity supplier change or if costs have simply gone up.
But the problem of consumer rates just always ratcheting up needs addressed.
Electricity prices are heavily regulated. The largest increase I can find from a short search is around 20% for some customers in New Jersey. The average year over year increase is closer to 6%
Unexpectedly high electricity bills are almost always from actual usage. Unexpectedly high winter electricity bills are usually from resistive electric heating in one way or another.
You didn’t mention their normal December bill in this exact house, which is an important piece of information.
You are part of the PJM. Read into what the "Fuel Adjustment" actually is. Yes, prices are regulated, but if your area is short of power, they can buy it from the PJM, usually from other sources they own, at "market" rate not regulated rate.
The Fuel Adjustment is the legal loophole difference in the regulated rate vs the market rate. A few scheduled maintenance windows and oh look, we are short power.
Texas is really different, it could be from there.
Can I interject regarding resistive heating? I’ve recently added one for my bedroom using home assistant and PID control, 22.5c during day, 18c at night, shuts off when nobody home (radar presence detector should be next step and likely save another 30%). It cost me 150kwh per month in NZ winter (single glazing, but got decent ceiling insulation).
One of the families mentioned heats their home with natural gas.
I suspect they got slammed with an alternative energy supplier that charges abusively high rates.
With that said, the total cost to the consumer of electricity is 3X what it was 20 years ago, and I am in one of the cheapest markets.
That happens when people are on variable rate or TOU plans, it's very common. "sneaky" may or not be part of it, since ostensibly there's a contract that defines the terms of the electrical service, so it shouldn't be a surprise. But for a lot of folks it's a lot to keep track of, there can be confusing terminology, and yes, some energy retailers are predatory in their plan marketing or contract terms. It's a double edged sword of free market choice in deregulated markets. People that have choices for their energy supply don't always have the time and knowledge to optimize their plan choices and electricity use to get "optimum" pricing. This is why there's pushback in some areas that have had deregulated energy markets to go back to regulated pricing, the "average consumer" isn't seeing the payoff of the free market (even if that is technically "their fault").
I kind of doubt a single surprise bill that happened to arrive in the winter is a TOU plan change.
If someone changes to a TOU plan and their bill shoots up, they’re smart enough to blame the plan change and cite that
Most surprise winter time bills are just excess electric heater usage, such as after the purchase of a couple space heaters without thinking about the overall cost.
> This is why there's pushback in some areas that have had deregulated energy markets
What areas have deregulated residential electricity?
> What areas have deregulated residential electricity?
17 states in the U.S, plus D.C.
The “optimum” pricing is one that rips off the customer the most. A deregulated free market for utilities doesn’t work because bad actors will find ways to do so through complex contracts.
Prices only go one way. Without inflation, debt has to be repaid in more expensive $'s than it was created in and the whole system goes boom.
A huge bill probably means there were on a plan that charged them a set amount each month based on estimated usage. They probably used more than projected and then had to make up the difference at the end of 12 months. This is how my electricity works. You can end up with a refund as well if it goes the other direction.
Why are you against increasing energy consumption? Increasing energy consumption is what pulled the world out of the feudal, warlord misery of the past. Maybe switch the focus of this feeling towards being against pollution or something that is a negative. Just being against energy consumption is quite regressive and anti-human.
To mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe we must ramp down fossil fuels use and production. As long as there's fossil fuels in the electricity production mix, electricity use is contributes to the problem. This report tells us that fossil energy use is increasing as only 60% of the increase was covered by solar.
The world would much more easily transition to post fossil fuel if all of society was pushing for cleaner and cheaper electricity and a philosophy of using more to make life better. The attitude that we must reduce is just anti-progress and anti-human and is what many people are fighting against when they support more fossil fuels. The split of solar and wind being supported by the reduce camp and fossil fuel use into the growth mindset was a great tragedy.
Accelerating fossil fuel usage and while adding renewables to the mix is not going to pan out well. Accelerating the climate catastrophe is not pro-human. It might be pro-progress for some definition I guess if you don't mind the death toll.
Few people just want to burn fossil fuels, they want to do things with energy. Focus should be on making non-CO2 emitting energy cheap and abundant. Most people against burning fossil fuel are also not promoting more and cheaper energy use.
And slavery is what pushed certain empires and colonies to riches, that doesn't mean we keep doing it forever expecting positive returns
Moving electrons around isn't inherently immoral like slavery is. It's odd to compare the two!
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.
Some of the economy should be encouraged with heavy subsidy or though DoD purchases.
It's worked out well for us in the past.
Wind and solar, nuclear, EVs, manufacturing, robots, chips, and drones should be helped along by the state.
We would be stupid not to spend in these categories.
We should also build out chemical inputs manufacture, rare earths refining, pharmaceutical manufacture, etc. to support the work that happens downstream and to be less fragile to supply chain disruption.
A multi-polar world is inherently less stable and demands more self-sufficiency.
> China is not a planned economy. If it was, recent electric vehicles and battery technology would exist only to guide missiles and operate industrial machinery...
The US was a planned economy during wwii fwiw
It is now, haven't you heard? Computers are reserved for LLMs only.
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.
>Its not a planned economy by the government
This just seems like a quibble over wording, given that "planned economy" is generally assumed to refer to economic planning by some governmental authority. Nobody thinks the opposite of a "planned economy" is everyone just going based off vibes, for instance.
The available selection of automobiles available for sale feels like a good example of huge distortion caused by regulatory capture and tariffs imposed for same industries.
Yup take the ford lightning f150. It out sold cybertruck but that wasn’t enough for ford to keep it around. Market makes decisions for you, not the other way around like free market theory posits.
…and I wouldn’t have to read this kind of drivel. Sounds like a blessing.
It’s a political imperative to get rid of everybody who thinks increasing energy consumption is a bad thing.
I’m guessing there’s a strong “/S” after this post..
Better: advertising!
> That is what we're using this electricity for, right?
Ok, I'll say it: it's for AI datacenters to train chat bots.
You know, we don't have any choice! We need more power. It's getting so tough to get something to tell Trump he isn't totally fucking up America.
Is that sarcastic? I'm not sure. Healthcare, food, transportation, and housing are becoming much more expensive and less affordable.
Forgot /s
That’s what I was thinking, clearly sarcasm because none of that is true.
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.
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 your energy you provide.
The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…
If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
> 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 capability is built in and physically ideal.
Both can work, but one is more complicated. 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. A tree crashing into a power line should result in the power line and tree being fully vaporized if nothing upstream were present to stop the flow of current. A gigantic mass of spinning metal in a turbine hall can eat this up like it's nothing. Semiconductors on a PCB in someone's shed are a different story.
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.
The utility side has found that vaporising short circuits is a useful feature, as that includes e.g. twigs hitting a power line.
There are breakers, of course, but they react slowly enough that there will absolutely be a massive overdraw first. Then the breaker will open. Then, some small number of seconds later, it will automatically close.
It will attempt this two to four times before locking out, in case it just needs multiple bursts. It’s called “burning clear”, and it looks just as scary as you’d think… but it does work.
So, solar suppliers need to also survive this.
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.
Also, I was not aware that inverters can only handle fault current that is 1.1x the nameplate capacity, that’s a big limitation. I can buy a 20A breaker with 200kaic, which is 10,000x higher than the breaker ampacity, which is extremely helpful for handling fault current.
Look into GFM’s and FRT’s. You can arc it away.
Or just grid forming inverters?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-inverter-2667719615
These do not address the concern of fault current handling. This is a much more localized and severe condition than frequency deviation. Think about dropping a literal crowbar across the output of a solar inverter. This is a situation the grid has to deal with constantly.
I'd argue that nothing that uses semiconductors would be suitable for the task. They get you to maybe 2x rated current capacity for a meaningful duration. A spinning turbine can easily handle 10x or more for a much longer duration.
We could put so many redundant transistors in parallel that we have equivalent fault handling, but then we are into some strong economic issues. There's also no room for error with semiconductors. Once you start to disintegrate, it's all over ~instantly. There is no way to control this. A synchronous machine can trade downstream maintenance schedule for more current right now. The failure is much more gradual over time. A human operator can respond quickly enough if the machine is big enough.
Grid forming inverters provide 1/3 to 1/4 the fault current of a similarly sized generator.
The other trivial solution are synchronous condensers. Or just let the generators and maybe even turbines of future emergency reserve thermal plants spin with the grid without consuming any fuel.
Just ensure the proper margins exist in the grid and call in ancillary services as needed.
No need to make it harder than it needs to be.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/baltic-power-grid-2666201539
If this becomes a big enough problem, surely we can add artificial rotational inertia to the grid, right?
Yeah, DC vs AC power. 12v vs 120v or 240v. This isn’t a limitation. All energy sources must be converted to useable energy to the grid somehow. So every power source requires an inverter or a down stepper or a really advanced rectifier or all of the above.
The people you're replying to aren't talking about converting from AC to DC or stepping voltage up or down. Rather, they're talking about grid stability. You can have mechanisms to convert from AC to DC and to step voltage up or down, but still have a unstable grid. We had a notable example of that last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou....
One way to think about this problem is that our electrical grids are giant machines—in many ways, the largest machines that humanity has every constructed. The enormous machine of the grid is comprised of many smaller connected machines, and many of those have spinning loads with enormous mechanical inertia. Some of those spinning machines are generators (prime movers), and some are loads (like large electric motors at industrial facilities). All of those real, physical machines—in addition to other non-inertia generators and loads—are coupled together through the grid.
In the giant machine of the grid, electricity supply and demand have to be almost perfectly in sync, microsecond to microsecond. If they're not, the frequency of the grid changes. Abrupt changes in frequency translate into not only electrical/electronic problems for devices that assume 60 Hz (or 50, depending on where you are), but into physical problems for the machines connected to the grid. If the grid frequency suddenly drops (due to a sudden drop in generation capacity or sudden drop in load), the spinning masses connected to the grid will suddenly be under enormous mechanical stress that can destroy them.
It's obviously not possible to instantaneously increase or decrease explicit generation in response to spikes or drops in load (or alternatively, instantaneously increase or decrease load in response to spikes or drops in generation). But we don't need to: all of the spinning mass connected to the grid acts as a metaphorical (and literal) flywheel that serves as a buffer to smooth out spikes.
As the generation mix on the grid moves away from things with physical inertia (huge spinning turbines) and toward non-inertial sources (like solar), we need to use other mechanisms to ensure that the grid can smoothly absorb spikes. One way to do that is via spinning reserves (e.g. https://www.sysotechnologies.com/spinning-reserves/). Another way to do it is via sophisticated power electronics that mimic inertia (such as grid-forming inverters, which contrast with the much more common grid-following inverters).
To learn more about this topic, look up ancillary services (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services). This Shift Key podcast episode is also a great introduction: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spains-blackout-and-th...
Great explanation about the grid being a giant machine that couple smaller machines with each other. About your last point, the buffer, I think batteries (chemical and also physical) seems to be the main key going forward.
I actually have a patent in this space for demand response. I know. I was being a bit cheeky. Stability is still a concern as unstable loads and generation needs to be mitigated as well as properly phased.
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 required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
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 meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
We already do this. Charging different rates for different times of day.
It’s called TOU pricing.
Here in Ireland, night-time power prices are much lower than daytime.
I’m happy enough that a battery will serve me equally well in both modes, but there’s definitely going to be a period where all it does is support self-consumption.
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.
This only happens if a small percentage of people have live pricing. If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes - for example by turning the heating off in unused rooms to save money.
In turn, that means that at times of crisis, prices will be high, but not 1000x high.
Gasoline is another resource with live pricing, and suggesting "I want a subscription where I pay $3 per gallon fixed for a year, no matter how much I use and no matter what happens to the price of oil" wouldn't be something a fuel station would entertain, because they know that when the price was under $3 you'd buy elsewhere, and when the price was over $3 you'd buy millions of gallons and resell at a profit.
> If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes
It's not latency free to act on price changes. If they spike while people are asleep, what do you expect would happen? And would people get a notification everytime the price changed at all. The logistics are hard.
Some solar inverter systems already have a data connection to get live pricing information from the grid operator. It’s not that big of a problem to implement, although it definitely isn’t pervasive yet.
Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.
I think pulling for live pricing by inverters and appliances is not realistic on a grand scale. Using time of day pricing is much simpler imo.
There's a neat way to do this that is super simple... The electricity company publishes an equation that determines the price based on the AC frequency. Ie. price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2)).
Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.
All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:
price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency + published_offset) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2))
The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...
But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
In reality most people will buy "smart" appliances which turn on and off based on price - eg. a water heater which picks the cheapest hour to reheat the tank for the day, or a fridge/freezer which cools everything more in cheap hours, an EV charger which starts selling rather than buying power at the highest priced hours, etc. It's all fairly simple software as soon as energy companies do live pricing, so pretty much every wifi gadget will do it.
People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".
It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.
Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.
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.
My (very-)local utility will give you an overall rate discount if you send them a screen shot of your car charging app showing it's only charging in a certain range of hours. Surprisingly, this works fine, though supposedly they've got eventual integration plans, "nah, we'll trust you for now" is a viable MVP...
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.
They could still have a price limit, paid for by charging a bit more when prices are lower, it doesn't have to be priced directly to the grid to have impact on usage.
A max price guarantee would also give the supplier an incentive to have their planning in order.
TX is its own energy grid so - that’s what you get for being “The Lone Star”
Seriously though this was a huge issue a couple years ago with the freezing and blizzards that hit Texas.
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It's hard for people to really understand this because utilities and grid operators are using this is a headline justification for electric capital projects. In New York, they've deferred capital projects for decades and we're absorbing a massive distribution charge increase. I think my electric delivery portion of the bill is up 40%.
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.
Grid frequency can also be regulated with batteries and grid forming inverters.
https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-are-number-one-at-...
https://arena.gov.au/blog/australias-grid-forming-battery-re...
Yeah, as I said it's a solvable problem. It just needs solutions to be implemented
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.
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.
> their centralised options become redundant
This is not the problem. The problem is that everyone moves to solar for most of the year not using or paying for the infrastructure, then in cold winter nights everyone expects the grid to be able to supply as normal.
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 gas generator instead.
Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%.
So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
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 where I live to be off-grid during the winter, but I can use the battery to hedge against grid outages which are common here in the winter due to storms (eg heavy ice taking down power lines).
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.
We do the same in Pennsylvania - I have about 10 kwh of battery. I can't put solar on my roof, so I only have a very small 800w array on top of my garden. I run it as an off grid system that can recharge from shore power, so I have to use all of the energy it produces or it goes to waste. But it saves some money and is enough battery to let me time shift to take advantage of time of use power rates, and it gives me very good run time for refrigerators and internet during outages.
There seem to be a few sweet spots in solar - a tiny array that you use all of without having to grid tie it is really cost effective. (The cost of grid tied solar adds 5-10k to the system cost). Otherwise go big. :)
There was an article that described that in UK one needs 1 megawhat-hour battery over the winter to be grid independent. Judging by current trends in few years that will be below 40K USD. While this is indeed very expensive in most of US due to much more sun available the required battery would cost below 20k. One can also have a backup generator that can run constantly at maximum efficiency to replenish the battery. Then the whole system can already be below 20K. While expensive, it provides true independence and I suspect grid cost and centralized power is more expensive for society.
These studies tend to always rely on a perfectly balanced grid without any extra capacity to find these massive seasonal differences.
Add a bit of extra capacity to the wind/solar installations and the battery figures usually plummet.
This is for a single home off-grid, meaning solar over-production is already implied. You need enough solar available to charge that 1MW battery in time for it to be useful during those seasonal differences which is going to be multiples of your peak summer generation.
No need to go off grid. You getting solar and battery already positions you to be able to ‘exit the grid’. The experience in Australia has been that the major retailers keep charging infrastructure costs to those who still rely on them. The mass of solar adoption grid and off-grid shifts the playing field.
From what I’ve been reading, sodium ion batteries are about to land later this year and look set to drop costs upwards of 60%.
That and they can be cold booted and stand much more temperature diversity bitter and into frozen temps too.
Just saying, the tech and solar expansion is at run away global growth right now, despite American centric machinations.
Weirdly in the UK it seems to be best to charge battery overnight from the grid and sell back during the day alongside any solar generated.
That appears to be true in places in the US that have time-of-use rates. Sadly where I live, there are no time-of-use rates for residential customers, otherwise I would absolutely do this.
Wouldn’t it be better to fill any shortfall from solar before selling back to the grid?
> 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.
I do, but I do not find value in rich folks who can afford solar wanting their cake and eating it too.
If you get a solar setup, get batteries. Then disconnect from the grid entirely. You should not be able to use the grid as a free backup energy source for the last 5% of the time you'll need it. Those last digits of reliability are the expensive hard problem to solve. That, or be charged appropriately for adding your potential usage to the capacity market. I understand that this is not legal in many places, and that folks disconnecting from the grid also cause the grid to collapse at some point as well. But at least there would be less of an individual perverse incentive involved.
Home solar folks seem to love their free battery though. Or even worse - getting paid to dump power to the grid when it's value is the smallest. Net metering is not the way to go - home solar should be being paid something around instantaneous wholesale pricing at best, plus fees to manage the more complex management of the grid they cause via being thousands of kilowatt-scale install vs. a single 50MW solar farm.
So far in the US at least, many solar programs have simply been a handout to relatively rich folks subsidized by poorer grid consumers. It's really put a sour taste on something that should be for the greater good. I don't mind that those subsidies were used to jump-start the industry, but that time has long since passed.
tldr; if your total system cost to be fully off-grid and never have to worry about a power outage is not substantially more expensive than being grid-connected, you are likely being highly subsidized by other electricity consumers.
While many rich are benefiting, they are still driving demand, that is funding continuous improvements that funding further efficiencies innovation and driving down the cost per kWh. In a very really way this makes solar cheaper and cheaper, the benefits of this one, unlike the debunked economic namesake do infact trickle down.
I think this was the case when solar panels were much more expensive. But home solar in the US has long ceased to be a useful driver of funding efficiencies and innovation. The cost of panels is now tiny and you are mostly paying for extremely overpriced installation and permitting. The 30% federal subsidy alone is enough to pay for an equivalent amount of utility scale solar outright. Australia has similar labor costs to the US but home solar is 1/3rd the cost to install.
You are not wrong.
The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view.
That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away.
The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue.
Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.
Australia is lucky, we get hot summers and mild winters, which means our electricity demand is highest precisely when we get the most solar.
That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.
That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.
It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
Temperature has nothing to do with the performance of solar. Solar panels perform better when they are cooled.
Also worth pointing out that much of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Which is south of most of Europe. Washington DC and San Francisco are at a similar latitude (38) as Melbourne (-37). Most of the US is perfectly situated for getting pretty decent solar power around the year. Yes it gets cloudy sometimes. It's usually not continent wide. You can compensate with cables and batteries. The US is far behind because of policy and their local energy monopolists blocking progress. Not because of anything to do with the weather or geography.
Prices have a lot to do with scarcity. Which with monopolists has more to do with the lack of a free market than with a scarcity of resources. Installing solar is about 3-5x more as expensive in the US as in Australia. The permitting process in the US is more expensive than the total cost of buying and installing in Australia. That's a policy problem in the US. All the hand wringing around that topic isn't helping a lot. A bit of pragmatism could improve things a lot and probably very quickly. Australia is showing how to do that. And yes, they have rain there too and you can go skiing pretty close to Melbourne. That isn't stopping them.
I wasn't talking about the performance of solar, only the demand for electricity.
Someone pointed out that the big problem with solar isn't how do we store daytime solar for nighttime use - this is easily solved with batteries. The real unsolved problem is how do we store summer solar for winter use.
Australia doesn't have this problem, not to the extent of other colder places, because we don't need a lot of heating in the winter.
Seems like there are lots of approaches that are technically viable for seasonal storage, hard to work out which one is better cost wise.
When you say 'Australian grid prices are coming down a lot' I don't think you're talking consumer prices.
I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago.
At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly.
(I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates)
I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar.
It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).
That’s just the stickiness of prices, not a problem with solar.
Inflationary money is basically an ugly hack to allow prices to fall without falling.
But it's not happening in areas that keep coal on their grid - Wyoming, Texas, Utah, China, etc.
It's primarily the places that try do both solar an fossil fuel retirement that are experiencing high energy prices - California, UK, Europe, Australia, etc.
To be clear: Australia has always had fairly high electricity prices, and Australia is also not specifically doing 'fossil fuel retirement', although there are coal plants closing they're closing because they're reaching the expected end of their natural life.
Texas has the most wind power of any us state.
High energy prices happen when you don't do the basics to be ready for a change before making it. Or when you skip basic maintenance until everything falls apart. I'm sure there are many other complex factors I don't know about.
Texas also has the most coal power of any state. As with China, success with renewables appears to depend on a policy of compatibility with fossil fuels rather than opposition.
(Home) batteries are quickly becoming cheap and per-hour electricity rates can be implemented at a reasonable time. With that, the grid owner can influence the grid stability without having to build capacity or generation itself.
My goal is to do wholly owned solar and batteries at home, only using the grid as backup, if I move out of the city. But I think the big problem with this new demand is that it’s for data centers. I can’t see that working for them.
We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.
Mine bitcoin, run LLM inference, smelt aluminum, make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.
This ignores capital and opportunity cost. Building a GPU data center or chemical plant costs a lot. If you only use it 20% of the time, you're effectively paying 5x more for that capital equipment.
The problem is the capital cost of any of that type of equipment sitting around idle or under-capacity, ready to go when the electricity price goes down. It's likely more profitable to run them most of the time, even with positive electric rates, and then only stop using them when rates are exceptionally high ("load shedding").
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.
> make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.
that would actually be my preferred solution (if only it was less energy inefficient, sigh).
If the marginal value of electricity is negative, what matters if it is energy inefficient?
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!
Yep, exactly this.
The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup, which in this case is where the free electricity goes).
The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.
Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.
When the price of a thing is negative, the entity facing the negative price is being paid to consume it.
We don't have enough automatic integration yet to make it happen, but: Residentially, that'd be a great time to charge millions of EVs and raise the temperature of water heaters. It'd be perfect for getting a head start on heating the glass kiln for Monday morning, or to supplement the used railroad ties and other fuels that might be feeding a lime kiln.
It's pretty easy to think of loads that feature scale and/or quantity, and the ability to switch on and off rather quickly. Even if the negative price event only lasts for an hour. (Even if it only lasts 5 minutes.)
The CapEx (and planning/timing) required to actually use it would almost certainly dwarf any actual gains - notably, because we’d already be selling the electricity for a profit if we could use it productively, the negative price is precisely because the equipment just isn’t there yet.
Also, once said capex was spent so we could actually use that electricity - it’s marginal cost/value would no longer be negative.
Weird huh?
Notably, if these kinds of situations do keep occurring (aren’t just random), someone almost always ends up spending the capital to capture it, because this is obvious.
You just don’t see all the finance geeks pulling out their calculators and talking about their plans because they know secrecy is an important strategic and tactical advantage when arranging investment and building out capital equipment.
It does tend to level itself out, yes. With sufficient adoption of cost-oriented controls, negative price conditions cease to exist and money flows in the normal direction.
And no, I don't think that's weird at all -- that seems like just a natural path towards the desirable goal of balancing generation and load, and turning a negative into a positive.
In terms of implementation: There's already lot of low-hanging fruit. It only takes software to get connected things like EVs and hybrid, grid-tied battery+solar systems to be centrally commanded to take advantage of negative price opportunities.
The hardware already exists, and more of it is being built every day. And software, once written, can be copied infinitely for free.
We already have sellers who would like to sell surplus energy, but find themselves in situations where they cannot. We also have avid buyers who would like to buy energy cheaper, but who cannot take advantage of the surplus condition when it exists.
That's not a inescapable curse. It is instead an opportunity for a new market optimization.
If I wake up on some hypothetical future day and find my hypothetical EV charged to 90% instead of the 80% I might normally seek to limit it to, and this 10% increase happened for free and without any action on my part, then: I win a little bit, and the generating station with the surplus also wins a little bit, and the distribution/transmission systems still get paid for their part.
I'm happy with my tiny win. The generating station is happy with many thousands of their own tiny wins. It's good stuff.
If this happens often enough (or for long-enough periods) for me in my region, then I might seek a normal limit of 70% or even less and be able to opportunistically absorb even more of the surplus when it happens.
The advantage that participation offers me does decrease over time as things balance (if they can ever become balanced), and that's OK too: The generating station still wins.
(We already have systems that do exactly the opposite of this in the consumer space, and we've had them for a very long time. The oldest I'm aware of are radio-controlled relays for water heaters, and the newest I'm aware of involve smart thermostats. These are utility-controlled systems that are intended to shed load instead of generate load. But if it works in one direction, then it can also work in the other direction.)
The problem here is that the production of hydrocarbons, ammonia, etc. from electricity can only make back its high upfront investment when it runs basically 24/7. This is a challenge for renewables.
In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
Storage exists? Now down to $50/kWh.
Same method. Massive scale, trivial to deploy, works with barely any maintenance.
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.
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.
Disagree. Taking 3-5 years to get new plants online is a huge issue, renewable or otherwise
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
This is already a reality with smart chargers in the UK. Your electric car can be charged when the electricity rates are lower (night usually)
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.
> idk like turning the heat way up during the day
That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter.
> or using high power appliances more during the day
Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home.
The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
I've got solar. We switched things like pool pump, hot water and so on (things already on timers) from night to day.
Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.
I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.
Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.
So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
At least in the US there is a push to make electric appliances smarter already. So for example, the electric hot water heater responding to the strain on the grid. The same could happen for AC, heat, EVs and other higher load appliances. At scale that can help out the grid immensely either in times of peak load or dip in demand.
I do not see a point of smart appliances besides electrical car. 10 KWt-hour battery will cover all the needs to smooth the demand from all home appliances and costs below 1K usd. It will allow also to significantly reduce maximum power that has to be supplied to a house while allow to increase peak consumption while heavy cooking/AC/heating.
At least in the US most of this is still on the research phase but if you can get a standard adopted for all new equipment you can easily adjust these high draw appliances to act as a virtual power plant. It would be a trivial implementation compared to getting batteries in homes.
This is good for water heaters for example. I wonder if storing chilled water for air conditioning would be a feasible strategy to do the same.
So your implication that other sources of energy currently do not need scaling coordination somehow? I fail to see how that is true, maybe you can provide some insights?
Wind and solar are not in ur control. I can turn on a generator and get power. Some plants might need weeks to start up - but this is in my control. I have no idea how windy it will be in five days.
It's easier to coordinate N electricity suppliers when N is small.
My point is that scaling coordination issues exist for everything, including all sources of energy production.
Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
If you go up the thread, this is the context we're in:
"Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy."
N>100000 is a lot harder to coordinate than the ~15,000 established power plants, which have come online over the last hundred or so years.
> Solar can be deployed... with almost no bureaucracy.
It can be.
Unless existing bureaucracy doesn't want that.
Yes, great feature. Unfortunately, to the status quo, it's a bug.
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
It's really a shame, a damned shame, that we haven't invented batteries yet.
Can you point me to a country-scale implementation of solar+batteries where electricity is affordable? If every country tries to do the same, what do you think will happen with the battery costs given the sheer size of the manufacturing and natural ressources extraction required?
California, while not a country, is basically the size of one and they have made significant progress with this strategy.
Why is this any different than the sheer size of manufacturing and natural resources to extract other forms of energy?
Oil, natural gas, coal also all take vast amounts of capital investment and resource extraction to implement.
I think that a nuclear power plant is vastly more efficient on this aspect.
And California has the most expensive electricity prices in the US.
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
Combined with batteries it is also very resilient
A lot of the opposition to it is vibes based at this point.
Big industrial projects. Big power plants. Big finance. Real men.
It’s silly. If you want a real men trip get into body building and MMA or something and use solar power.
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.
> It’s too bad solar degrades over time... without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.
Google says they degrade to 80-90% capacity over 25-30 years, which is ~double your 15 year time period. I've also previously seen people claiming that they then stabilise around the 80% level, and that we don't really know how long their total possible lifespan is because many extant solar panels are outliving their 25 year rated lifespans.
Capacity reduced to 80% won't work for some high-performance use cases, but is pretty decent for most.
>without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.
Why is this such a dealbreaker like you make it out to be? It's easily fixed by over-provisioning to account for future losses. Not to mention that power grids almost always have more capacity than what's needed, to account for future growth and maintenance downtime.
After 15 years you can just replace them
Here's a good podcast (with written transcript) about what's happening in Australia.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian
The difference in the permitting process between Australia and US is staggering.
Australia is still highly dependent on coal. They’re not a prime example of how to decarbonize an electricity grid.
If you want a good example, rather look at France!
Since 2005 France has deployed as much solar and wind generation as they've removed nuclear, about 10-15%.
You probably meant late 20th Century France, when better renewable alternatives didn't exist, not current 21st century France.
Ahh yes. France’s investment in replacing carbon free nuclear with… carbon free intermittents. Fortunately that hype-driven waste is not stopping France from building out new EPR2 reactors.
Not all australia is moving g at the same speed. Check south Australia, and it is a massive success. The difference is that the government invested in renewewals, along with solar in rooftops. As SA is smaller they did not had pressure from lobbies. Now, are almost 100% renewal energy all year long.
It can be done.
There is a very funny nuclear power plant in France which is located in such a way to be surrounded on 3 sides by Belgium instead of by France. (EDF Nuclear Power Plant Chooz)
Thanks for sharing, although I don't understand how Saul expects everyone to buy electric cars. They are much too expensive in Australia and the charging infrastructure is not well distributed. Electric cars are also a massive risk in fires (they were a big problem in the LA fires), and Australia has a lot of fires.
Even an electrified kitchen (which Saul also suggests for everyone) is iffy in Australia, because good freestanding ovens with induction cooktops cost about 3x what freestanding ovens with a gas cooktop would cost, not to mention the electrical rewiring costs, which could be substantial especially if a conversion to 3-phase is needed.
Curiously, TFA doesn't raise the question of why demand surged, it spends its 8 microparagraphs only praising solar.
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.
Granted, that wee bit 3.1% increase corresponds to an extra 135 TWh of demand.
T for tera. The mind boggles.
All that work and we still have a broken economy, go figure.
What's broken about it?
Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
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Jevons paradox in action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Also known as induced demand (as more is available)
> the fourth‑largest annual rise of the past decade
Really doesn't sound like much of a surge then!
Hey, that still means it's higher than the median annual rise AND higher than most years!
> higher than the median annual rise
Of that we cannot be sure... Because maybe 6 years saw a fall - so there would only be 4 rises, of which this is the smallest!
The title is somewhat misleading.
First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad - demand should be going down, since there is a need to conserve electricity while much of it is provided by CO2-emitting sources. That said - it is not such a huge "surge" that the fact that 61% of it was covered by an increase in Solar capacity is so impressive.
Second, Solar generation is said to have reached 84 TW. But if the increase in demand was 135 TW, and that's just 3.1% of total demand, then total demand is 4355 TW, and Solar accounts for 1.92% of generation. That is _really_ bad. Since we must get to near-0 emissions in electricity generation ASAP to avoid even harsher effects of global warming; and most of the non-Solar generation in the US is by Natural Gas and Coal [1].
You could nitpick and say that the important stat is "total renewables" rather than just Solar, and that the US has a lot of Nuclear, and that's technically true, but it's not as though Nuclear output is surging, and it has more obstacles and challenges, for reasons. So, the big surge to expect in the US is Solar - and we're only seeing very little of that. If you mis-contextualize it sounds like a lot: "60% of new demand! 27% increase since last year!" but that's not the right context.
[1] : https://www.statista.com/statistics/220174/total-us-electric...
Gonna fully admit I skipped reading the article when I saw a confusing title, and now I'm leaving instead of trying to figure out what it meant.
> First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad
It is not bad. Energy usage is the best proxy we have for societal wealth. It's starting to somewhat decouple, but I'd posit that's largely due to financial woo-woo than actual real wealth. Time shall tell. A lot of energy (no pun intended) was put into short-term easy wins on the efficiency side the last couple decades, but those low hanging fruits are largely picked over. In the end, it requires serious capital investment into energy production and distribution.
> demand should be going down
Naw. If we want to actually regain any sort of self-determination as a nation we need to re-industrialize and learn to make things again. This is a multi-generational project that takes decades to even build the foundation for. This all requires energy - preferably as clean and cheap as possible.
We should be looking what what China is doing. Building everything possible as quickly as possible. Spam solar, wind, nuclear, and yes natural gas which enables the former two to exist to begin with. Start spinning up battery plants as well on top of it. Coal I can grant is silly to invest in these days, re-purpose those plants as their useful lifetimes run out into natural gas or nuclear power plant sites.
Then start spamming long distance transmission lines throughout the country to further even out demand vs. supply, so more sunny and windy locations can pick up the slack in other regions of the country. Start telling NIMBYs to go pound sand.
This degrowth stuff is just a way to make poor and working class folks suffer. China and India are building so much energy production capacity it simply doesn't matter anyways. Build or have your grandchildren be left behind.
> is the best proxy we have for societal wealth.
You seem to be suggesting that we should continue to warm up the planet so as to increase "societal wealth". No, we should not, it is harmful and dangerous.
> Naw. If we want to actually regain any sort of self-determination as a nation
Avoiding global warming is an imperative. Your desire to feel "self-determination as a nation" is at most a nice-to-have.
That said - if the US were able to separate out a 're-importation of production capacity' from another country when estimating energy use, and could show a significant drop with that aside, and a drop relative to the energy use as part of that production activity, then - ok, that would be a legitimate argument that its conduct is better than the numbers suggest.
> This is a multi-generational project
So, you're claiming that it's ok for you to keep warming us all up and have the seas rise, and droughts, and fires, and agriculture failing etc. for at least, say, 50 years because of your multi-generational project.
No way. Now, of course, I'm just a guy on the Internet and the US is a global empire which invades and bombs kidnaps heads-of-state etc. But - that must be resisted. Also, the political elites within the US who subscribe to that view must be resisted internally.
> China ... Building everything possible as quickly as possible.
China's policies are a mixed bag; but they are certainly not building _everything_ as quickly as possible. And a lot of what they're building is non-CO2-emitting energy production capacity. Its official plan (IIRC) is no increase in emissions after 2030, and full neutrality by 2060 - which is absolutely not building everything nor as quick as possibly. Now, that is not good enough, but US policy (and your approach) seems to be "burn, baby, burn".
> This degrowth stuff is just a way to make poor and working class folks suffer.
Ah, yes, US society and economy these days are all about aleviating poverty and promoting working class interests.
The title is disgusting click bait with the hopes to falsely make the reader believe that Solar covered 61% of the total annual power need and not just the YoY delta.
The cognitive dissonance around optimism regarding renewables and the fact that there are multiple military actions going on around the globe right now focused exclusively on extracting more fossil fuels from the ground is a bit much sometimes.
Why do people even pretend like we haven't signed up for "what's worse than the worse case scenario?" as far as climate goes?
The only way to reduce the already severe impacts of global warming are to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It doesn't matter how much energy is generated by solar so long as we continue to dig up and burn fossil fuels. It's quite clear that we have zero intentions of slowing down or even keeping our fossil fuel consumption steady.
If we had record electricity demand, and anything short of 100% of it was covered by renewables, that means we're burning more fossil fuels then we were before.
We have, pretty unequivocally at this point, signed up for seeing what the end game of civilization looks like rather than realistically exploring or even considering any alternatives.
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?
PV is wildly expensive in the US.
Apparently you even need a permit from the grid operator for it.
Here in NL they come to your house a week after you call and your panels are up and connected in 4 hours or so.
Labor for anything is expensive in the US.
Parts/materials costs in contractor quotes are often padded so they aren't completely overshadowed by the labor portion. In any job where there's specialized knowledge or license restrictions (HVAC) or risk (walking on a roof), the floor for labor rates is usually 2-4x the materials cost.
But, the real issue is that almost nobody pays cash upfront for their solar install. Between incentives, loans, and/or predatory PPAs, the prices lose touch with reality. See healthcare, college tuition, housing prices, etc. for similar scenarios where credit or third-parties distort the market.
Over here installation takes 4 hours or so, probably less.
How much more expensive can that be?
It's probably much more in the planning process and tariffs on Chinese PV.
You don't really have that many competent solar installers in most locations in the US. I basically gave up trying. I'm sure they exist, but if you don't want some financed/leased/etc. financial-product-as-a-solar-install your options dwindle.
It's entirely obvious that most of these places make money off the financial engineering, not the installation part.
I'd sign a competent contractor today for my quite marginal installation plans if I could find someone I'd trust to build something decent and to my specification.
They also tend to devalue the house as it's more difficult to get insurance, and many potential buyers are used to shitshow level of installs and/or dealing with a more complex close due to the seller needing to pay off loans/leases/etc.
A lot of these plays are also companies setting up complex financial engineering schemes that boil down to government subsidy arbitrage.
Solar doesn't make sense for me financially (yet), due to location and PoCo rates, but I'd be tempted to be my own contractor and sub out the tasks.
Any roofer could do the panel install, and would do a far better job than a solar hack that had 3 days of training. Electrical would be an electrician.
Residential is expensive anyway, larger installations are plenty viable. My town in a northern Michigan is installing solar to help stabilize the rates they offer (I pay about 11 cents per kWh).
It is definitely true that the labor cost of a solar installation is the largest driver of cost. In my area, there are solar incentives to offset this. For example I was able to cover a large portion of the loan with a 0% interest rate through a state program. For the remaining portion my bank had a low(er) interest loan (like 5%) specifically for solar. And neither of these loans were home equity loans which psychologically made me happier to apply for them.
Another thing, if you have the space, is to consider a ground mount. Ground mount hardware adds a little cost, but it is a lot easier for a solar installer to set up, so they finish faster. Since labor is the biggest driver of cost, then it makes sense to build a very big array that doesn’t just offset your operating costs but completely eliminates it (well, net-eliminates it anyway).
Yeah solar viability is highly dependent on your local conditions and electricity costs. Also on your utility’s buyback program.
I have low electricity costs, no time of use pricing, and I don’t think I can sell back. I also live in a very cloudy city. So solar doesn’t make much sense!
I’m in Canada, in a tight valley with tons of snow. The panels on my roof make $1000 a year, and over their lifetime I’ll save around $20,000.
Complete no brainer.
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.
So I'm reading it correctly, 39& of "the surge" was covered by traditional energy sources. Which still means use of traditional sources increased. Correct?
I guess the good news is, solar is available when demand is highest. Nonetheless, is it helping to solve a problem or is it serving more as an enabler of the status quo?
Did "demand surge" or was excess peak power sold of for nearly 0 to people that can spin up and turn off load on the turn of a dime (crypto)? We have had negative pricing (they pay you to take the power) to stabilize the grid due to solar/wind peaks.
This 61% figure is a significant milestone for grid resilience. At Storify News, we’ve been tracking how the 2025 surge wasn't just about general demand, but specifically the localized clusters of AI data centers and the electrification of industrial heat. What’s particularly interesting here is the "duck curve" management—solar handled the bulk of the demand surge, but it’s the rapid deployment of BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) that actually made this 61% figure viable without destabilizing the frequency. The question for 2026 is whether the transmission infrastructure can keep up with this pace of interconnection.
The book Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben is a really great read on the changing economics of solar. It came out August 2025 so its fairly up to date too.
What about behind the meter fossil fuel for datacenters? The underlying Ember one [0] is nearly all about the grid, with mention of behind the meter solar data being incomplete.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-met-61-of-us-...
The delta here between population growth and energy consumption, + solid state storage, + the rate of PV efficiency improvement = FOS and NUC will very soon be the backup system. REN are the future. Dead dinosaurs are not the future.
The delta here between population growth and energy consumption, + solid state storage, + the rate of PV efficiency improvement = FOS and NUC will very soon be the backup system. REN are the future. Dead dinosaurs are not.
It really depends on how you write the headline. "US electricity demand surges in 2025 while new utility-scale solar installations decrease from 2024" is equally accurate. It's unclear what the future holds if the trend remains down or flat.
The USA had a pull forward effect in 2024 because some tariffs applied to anything completed after the end of that year.
This pumps the numbers for 2024 and depresses them for 2025.
»US electricity demand jumped by 135 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025, a 3.1% increase, the fourth‑largest annual rise of the past decade. Over that same period, solar generation grew by a record 83 TWh – a 27% increase from 2024 and the biggest absolute gain of any power source. That single jump in solar output covered 61% of all new electricity demand nationwide.«
This article equates generation with consumption which is a fallacy.
Lots of solar and wind generation is actually produced without meeting demand meaning that the generated electricity often has to be wasted.
I'm a luddite so forgive me when I ask this. How does the grid "waste" electricity to avoid overfilling?
Thank god it's not those pesky windmills...
Don 'Quixote' Trump
So, where's the emissions graph?
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> Where are all the "without nuclear power we're dooooooomed" people at the moment?
I haven't seen any on HN across multiple submissions discussing both solar and nuclear power (or both at once).
I have, however, seen people unreasonably characterized as such.
Not saying this is relevant in solar vs nuclear debate but "eco nerds" are probably not happy about new demand of additional 52TWh or part of it that is not covered by renewables/nuclear.
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 grid frequency deviations and eventually blackouts happen. This is much more likely to happen once undispatchable resources climb past a certain threshold in our generation mix.
To fix this we need massive storage and transmission investment, like moon landing and WW2 put together. We desperately need to do that before we add more non-dispatchable generation.
Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied.
> Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied.
Solar creates the economic incentive for storage. Without solar coming first, storage cannot occur.
You can see this in California. In the beginning, it made sense to install only solar, because energy developers are compensated at the margin. Once the grid is saturated with solar, then the marginal economics changes in response to the duck curve, and storage starts to make economic sense.
If you block solar, you block storage. To believe otherwise is to be ignorant of the temporal aspect of the economics.
Huh? You don't need solar to build storage. Lots of generation sources become much, much better with storage. Storage is what you use to compensate for bad transmission, and we have plenty of bad transmission.
You really don't understand. There is likely some foundational gap in your understanding of microeconomics and marginal decision making. Put my initial reply into ChatGPT and ask it to spell it out.
> 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 needed for maintenance or safety. Which is one of the main factors why nuclear energy is not economical anymore in a modern grid that values flexibility over constant generation.
Nuclear can be curtailed, it's just uneconomic to do so unless the price is literally close to zero or negative.
> Nuclear can be curtailed
I know, that's why I said it's basically never done. And it's usually not even done even if the price is zero or below, because a lot of nuclear power plants have fixed prices that are guaranteed by the government. Also, operating costs of nuclear power plants stay the same even if you curtail it 100%, so it's more economical to curtail something else.
But respectfully isn't the crisis more in the American political system and regulation? And surely large scale solar farms/batery storage connected to a supergrid (or whatever they are called) are a relatively good fit for this kind of legacy grid.
I mean..yes? Megaprojects are always political. But that's exactly the issue. No politician gets interest when they talk about building transmission towers and battery plants. They get fawning well meaning but inherently ignorant attention when they build renewable generation. The incentive is to support generation and avoid the politically less popular, more expensive, and ultimately much more important transmission and storage.
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.
No, you are reading the article wrong. It is indeed 60% of new electricity generation that is from solar, not capacity
Then shy doesn't the article literally say that? Why does it take three carefully-crafted sentences to say it? Because they're fooling you.
electrik is notoriously pretty horrible and not real journalism
I think it's incredibly fishy. If I add a 1MW coal plant to the grid, I can pretty much run it at nominal capacity all year round, so 1MW * hours in the year is afair calculation.
If I add the same 1MW for solar, needless to say even assuming perfect weather, I'm lucky to get 1/3rd of that. Under real circumstances, the numbers are probably much worse.
When looking at marketing, I think it's always safe to assume they picked the most flattering numbers when they didn't specify how they made the calculation.
That's why it's very meaningful to talk about adding kWh - 1 kWh peak solar means more in Texas than in Chicago. It's even less meaningful for batteries - they can sustain incredible currents, to the point it's very rarely the meaningful bottleneck.
Yet that's exactly that what the cited 'global think-tank' Ember did, which the article cites as source. So they either misled on purpose, or like a lot of people, they confused GWh and GW, which is such a grave error for a supposed expert, that their whole analysis should be disregarded.
electrik publishes misleading stuff more often than not
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.
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 should be installed on unproductive land. Buildings should be covered in panels. Carparks should have solar roofs. If i were king of zoning, every new construction would be required to cover say 50% of thier footprint in panels. That is the direction to go. We should not continue to convert farmland.
A total parody, but on point. "Can I Beat Farming Sim WITHOUT FARMING?" - The Spiffing Brit
https://youtu.be/MaJvrGHJoAQ
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
that ethanol leaves leftovers that are used for other things so your numbers are misleading.
But there are also millions of acres of corn being grown solely for the purpose of ethanol. A lot of that acreage could be better off utilized as solar farms
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.
Ya, but that isnt as widespread as fields being rededicated from crops generally to solar exclusively. And mixed use doesnt mesh well in a world of crop rotation and crop-specific harvesting equipment. I have yet to see a combine that can drive over solar panels without touching them.
Vertical solar panels allows combines to drive unmodified.
Agrivoltaics are a thing.