America Adds 11.7 GW of New Solar Capacity in Q3 - Third Largest Quarter on Record (electrek.co) 55
America's solar industry "just delivered another huge quarter," reports Electrek, "installing 11.7 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in Q3 2025. That makes it the third-largest quarter on record and pushes total solar additions this year past 30 GW..."
According to the new "US Solar Market Insight Q4 2025" report from Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, 85% of all new power added to the grid during the first nine months of the Trump administration came from solar and storage. And here's the twist: Most of that growth — 73% — happened in red [Republican-leaning] states. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations fall into that category, including Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas...
Two new solar module factories opened this year in Louisiana and South Carolina, adding a combined 4.7 GW of capacity. That brings the total new U.S. module manufacturing capacity added in 2025 to 17.7 GW. With a new wafer facility coming online in Michigan in Q3, the U.S. can now produce every major component of the solar module supply chain...
SEIA also noted that, following an analysis of EIA data, it found that more than 73 GW of solar projects across the U.S. are stuck in permitting limbo and at risk of politically motivated delays or cancellations.
Two new solar module factories opened this year in Louisiana and South Carolina, adding a combined 4.7 GW of capacity. That brings the total new U.S. module manufacturing capacity added in 2025 to 17.7 GW. With a new wafer facility coming online in Michigan in Q3, the U.S. can now produce every major component of the solar module supply chain...
SEIA also noted that, following an analysis of EIA data, it found that more than 73 GW of solar projects across the U.S. are stuck in permitting limbo and at risk of politically motivated delays or cancellations.
US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:5, Informative)
Data centers need power. Do you propose to stop construction or shut them down? China certainly won't - they're moving full-speed ahead.
The sensible solution is to require that those data center construction projects add capacity to the grid, preferably from renewable sources.
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seems entirely reasonable, probably wont get done. smh.
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No, the sensible solution is that every polluter pays for the cost of its pollution. Why make a special case for data centers while the coal plant next door continue to run with 0 intensive to reduce emissions?
Let say there are two possible sources of electricity, coal and solar. If coal is 1% cheaper but pollutes 100x, that's what "the market" will always choose. The pollution cost has to be internalized. Then, data centers and every other consumer will be able to make a rational decision on whether its wo
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes. But they won't, so *please* do enjoy *your* personal electric bill going up.
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That will stop in a few years and the workloads will mostly evaporate. Because either they can do it much, much cheaper and on much lower power or they will never find that sorely needed and still unknown business model that will generate enough revenue to keep LLMs going.
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Enough people have already thrown so much money into it that they'll keep throwing even more. They just need any one person to find a winning move and they can ride the wave. If you think it's really g
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The new AI datacenters will mostly go away. There is no realistic way to keep them running. None at all. yes, they can continue to burn heaps of money for a few more years, but there is a limit to that and then things collapse.
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"All it takes is for one use of LLMs to be successful and every data center will start doing that or something related to it. "
I think you are correct. Also, if I could find a pink unicorn, I'd be rich.
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...and yet LLM inferencing is being measured (ny pathological liars) in gigawatts, as though reducing power consumption is inherently impossible.
Re: US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:1)
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Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Informative)
If you want fast and cheap energy added to the grid, go Solar and Wind.
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" Solar is better than burning coal, but it's not well suited to all problems and trying to force it into areas where it's not well suited is foolish and only breeds resentment."
What "problems" is solar not "well suited" and who is trying to "force" solar onto those problems? I suspect that "resentment" you refer to isn't what you say.
The beauty of electric is that any source of electric and any consumer of electric are well "suited". There aren't different "kinds" better or worse for certain uses. Sure
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What "problems" is solar not "well suited"
Keeping the lights on at night springs immediately to mind.
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Re: US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:1)
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Keeping the lights on at night springs immediately to mind.
OK. I remember back when a "solar powered flashlight" was a joke too. Back in my childhood. These days though, I own several. I can't tell if you're actually trying to be funny or not, but the simple fact is that the energy required to produce a given amount of light has dropped by about an order of magnitude and the solar cells have become more efficient, and the batteries have become lighter, cheaper, and rechargeable. If I step outside at night I can literally see several gardens lit up by mass produced
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If that's a requirement of a solar generating system, and you don't install some load-shifting technology (like a battery) with it, then you are installing a system that doesn't meet the stated requirements.
That tells us far more about the people who are doing the work than it does about the tech. They are stupid people that shouldn't be designing electrical systems that don't meet the stated needs.
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Informative)
Nuclear and solar are actually similar sources of electricity. They're classed as non-dispatchable. which means they cannot change with demand. They're just on opposite ends of the same.
Nuclear takes hours to ramp up and down - you have to plan for increases and decreases in consumption hours ahead of time. Solar and wind just suddenly start and stop generating. So you under-run a nuclear plant (it only supplies most of the current demand), while your curtail renewable production (i.e., solar/wind always produce too much for current demand). The grid gets destabilized if you cannot turn down nuclear production, or you cannot ramp up production should solar/wind falter.
Coal, geothermal, hydro, natural gas plants are dispatchable in that their output takes minutes to change - you can ramp them up and down even from cold within 15 minutes or so, which is sufficient. Batteries are even faster since they can respond in under a second.
Datacenters while most of their demand is static, do have variable amounts of demand as well - it's why your laptop can go from a day's worth of battery life to 3 hours if you play a game or something. Likewise, an idle server may consume maybe 100W, while one fully loaded jumps up to 1.5kW.
The key with AI loads is nuclear can work, but you have to schedule it. If you know you have a major processing load to do, you can tell your nuclear plant to prepare for it in advance and have it ready hours later to run your task. And as it completes, it can ramp down as well.
But datacenters powering things like cloud computing are much less predictable - you can tell the plant that Black Friday to expect higher loads as instances are spun up to deal with the influx of demand, but it's a lot more variable and if demand spikes you might not be able to handle it. Or if demand fails to materialize it can be devastating (and expensive). .
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Informative)
Wind and solar don't suddenly stop producing. It's extremely predictable.
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Coal, geothermal, hydro, natural gas plants are dispatchable in that their output takes minutes to change
The time to ramp output can vary wildly depending on the design. One utility in California is mothballing some its natural gas turbines that take hours to come up to full output because they're not nimble enough to handle the wild swings in daily demand because of solar. Their design maximizes efficiency while sacrificing agility. Likewise, a coal plant in New England is closing this year because it has a somewhat sluggish response time, which on top of all its other issues, meant that it was only operat
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Coal doesn't ramp up from cold in minutes. It's typically four to eight hours for a 1GW coal plant to go from cold to full power.
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Coal, [...] are dispatchable in that their output takes minutes to change
Please show us these magical thermal power plants that can get their boilers from ambient to steam instantly without exploding.
It takes hours for a coal plant, burning fuel, to get to temperature. During those hours of burning fuel at full pace, the plant is making absolutely no electricity because the boiler isn't making steam yet to drive turbines.
Natgas is a little closer, but a combined-cycle turbine still takes the better part of an hour to go from not-spinning to grid-synced and generating.
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Which turbine?
The steam turbine or the gas turbine?
The gas turbine is synched to the grid in 30seconds or less and on full output in 90sec.
Re:US also used ~21GW for data-centers in 2024... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah but that was happening regardless of whether the USA was building solar or not.
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And despite government at all levels opposing renewable technology. In the end, economics win out. People wanting energy independence, seeing one of the best investments they can make.
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Exactly.
It's very noticeable how many replies we don't have to this article telling us how expensive solar is all of a sudden. Probably because nowhere near this amount would have been installed, if it were even remotely true.
Even with the headwinds from the shitbag-in-chief opening his big fat mouth and saying shit that doesn't even make any kind of sense, it's still increasing.
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Okay, so you want to bring AI into it. Let's see if AI can add some Funny to a discussion that is so far lacking Funny... Oh oh. Already stalled out. I don't know if any of the generative AIs are any good at humor.
Anyone have a recommendation on which AI's electricity I should waste in an attempt to tell a joke? Probably DeepSeek if the wind is blowing now? (That could apply in Germany, too, except that I'm guessing a German genAI will not be so good for jokes.)
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actual Terawatt-hours harvested.
It will be here. The sunlight is just on back order.
Let's work with ballpark figures (Score:2)
Yeah, a good ball-park figure is that you'll have about an eights of peak power on average. This can, of course, vary widely, but it's an order of magnitude.
So we could have those 21 GW of average power in roughly 14 quarters or three and a half years (give or take some years). Which is likely after the burst of the bubble. So those power plants will then displace a lot of fossil fuel plants because of their somewhat lower costs. Sure it'll take time, but only some years, not some decades. It's less than th
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So, based on your numbers and those cited in the summary, we are increasing our generation capacity 2x faster than it's being absorbed by data centers.
- Data centers - 21 GW in a year
- New solar - 11.7 GW in a quarter * 4 = 46.8 GW in a year
That seems sustainable.
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So glad we installed solar in 2022. I'm laughing at the utility rate increases, and we calculated an RoI of about 8 years, which only gets shorter each year.
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... and is on a trajectory to absorb way more than those 11.7GW for "AI" very quickly [pewresearch.org]. And that is before translating the very theoretical peak power of the new "solar capacity" into actual Terawatt-hours harvested
I am trying to figure out how your link possibly supports your assertions. Frankly, your source makes me feel a little dumber for having read it, mainly for the information technology for grade schoolers primer on what a data center is at the start. What I can glean from it is that it seems to be projecting that power usage from data centers will grow by 2.32X by 2030 (linearly, I'll note) So, if it was ~21GW in 2024, then it will grow by 4.62 GW per year. Now, the 11.7 GW noted is just for a single quarte
political attacks (Score:4, Informative)
... and we know which political party is doing the attacking.
"Political attacks on America’s solar and storage industry are threatening over 500 projects totaling 117 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. These projects represent half of all new planned power capacity in the United States.
Solar power and storage are the quickest and most affordable way to add new power to the grid, representing 72% of new capacity in the pipeline.
Without this power, Americans’ electricity bills will spike, manufacturing will move overseas, and the United States will cede AI dominance to China."
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Without this power, Americans electricity bills will spike, manufacturing will move overseas, and the United States will cede AI dominance to China."
And when that happens Trump will blame it all on The Woke Democrats and his idiot followers will cheer as he continues to fuck them.
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... and we know which political party is doing the attacking.
Did you notice where the summary said "Most of that growth — 73% — happened in red [Republican-leaning] states. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations fall into that category, including Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas..."
Turns out that "We think solar is stupid but there's land here if you morons want to build it" is much less of an impediment to clean energy than "Oh we loooooove solar let's start the 10-year environment impact review process righ
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Did you see the part that said "more than 73 GW of solar projects across the U.S. are stuck in permitting limbo"?
"The administration is using every tool at its disposal to slow down solar and storage projects. They’ve slowed federal permitting to a halt, developed standards that prioritize their preferred energy sources at the expense of your energy bill, cancelled grid upgrades, and injected uncertainty into the American energy markets"
Tax credits ending (Score:3)
There's a huge crush of residential installations happening right now as people rush to install before the tax credits end at the end of the month. Just like there was a rush to buy EV's.
Funny business decisions (Score:1)
Are they actually going for the economically best solutions? May these be (gasp!) capitalists making capitalist decisions that make sense financially?
Naaa, that cannot be! The demented felon claims solar is the road to hell!
Good! (Score:2)
Keep going. Update your grid and work on improving storage. You'll finish way faster than any molten salt fission pipe-dream, that's for sure.
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Molten salt may well be a viable answer to many problems. But, yeah, it needs development...and it's not clear that it would be cheaper for grid based power.
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It's not clear that when you include all externalities fission power is the cheapest way to power the grid. But there are places where it probably is the cheapest way to power something. (Or if not cheapest, has other overriding benefits.)
OTOH, including all externalities is tricky. I'm always dubious when I read a claim that it's been done.
Hey Gemini, count to three for me. (Score:2)
Great Scott! (Score:2)
This is almost 10x of what is required for time travel!
Was this funded by the prior administration? (Score:1)
I recall there being some large funding bills that were disproportionately targeted at red states, but I don't know whether one of them supported solar rollout.
I don't recall the current administration being fans of solar.