Comment by einpoklum
9 hours ago
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...
> 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.
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.
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.