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Power Earth

Solar and Wind are Covering All New Power Demand in 2025 (electrek.co) 88

Posted by EditorDavid from the answer-is-blowing-in-the-wind dept.
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember.

The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generation won't increase. Solar and wind aren't just expanding; they're outpacing global electricity demand itself. Solar generation jumped 498 TWh (+31%) compared to the same period last year, already topping all the solar power produced in 2024. Wind added another 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they supplied 635 TWh of new clean electricity, beating out the 603 TWh rise in global demand (+2.7%). That lifted solar and wind to 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of the year, up from 15.2% year-over-year. That brought the total share of renewables in global electricity -solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy, and geothermal — to 43%. Fossil fuels slid to 57.1%, down from 58.7%.

For the first time in 2025, renewables collectively generated more electricity than coal. And fossil generation as a whole has stalled. Fossil output slipped slightly by 0.1% (-17 TWh) through the end of Q3. Ember expects no fossil-fuel growth for the full year, driven by clean power growth outpacing demand.
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Solar and Wind are Covering All New Power Demand in 2025 More

Solar and Wind are Covering All New Power Demand in 2025

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  • It has here (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday November 16, 2025 @08:30AM (#65798711)
    For some time now. Wild wet and wonderful PA, one of the cloudier area, has been using Wind and solar very effectively for some time now.

    Solar has an unexpected use. End of line extensions. When there isn't enough ugga-duggas left to meet demand at the last sub-station, solar comes to the rescue.

    Placing panels is so much less expensive than getting new right of ways, running new lines, maybe even moving the substation, when new housing developments and businesses need their electricity. And please people, storage batteries are no longer science fiction. There are even bolt on solutions for arrays that don't have tehm now.

    Then there is wind. There are places where the wind never stops, the Allegheny Front for instance. At this point, our new wind installs are less than before. The reason? At the moment, what we have now are supplying the power we need at the moment.

    • Then there is wind. There are places where the wind never stops, the Allegheny Front for instance.

      Pennsylvania has been getting high winds for the past two months. Sometimes as high as 30+ mph sustained gusts. They should be producing enough electricity for the surrounding states.

      • Then there is wind. There are places where the wind never stops, the Allegheny Front for instance.

        Pennsylvania has been getting high winds for the past two months. Sometimes as high as 30+ mph sustained gusts. They should be producing enough electricity for the surrounding states.

        You aren't kidding. We just had another windstorm last night. The good part is it blew a lot of leaves from my yard to the neighbors yard. 8^)

    • Placing panels is so much less expensive than getting new right of ways, running new lines, maybe even moving the substation, when new housing developments and businesses need their electricity.

      I got modded as a Troll for suggesting that dispersed solar would reduce the need for grid expansion. Obviously another way of accomplishing the same thing is to include solar in the new construction and install it for existing users to reduce the demand on the grid. That may not entirely eliminate the need for adding larger arrays at the end of the grid in places, but would reduce the number and size required. It would also make the power system far more resilient.

  • ALI? This is happening frequently around here. We're being led around by AI summaries now?

    Back to on topic: So I guess we don't need all that power that the hyperscalers are building?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      They hyperscalers are building out (or re-activating) grid-level power supplies for DCs that are not online yet, so are essentially not included in the 2025 figures. All Electrek (a pro-green energy site with a very obvious bias to that effect) are saying is that we collectively built out enough solar and wind to exceed the overall global increase in demand during 2025. Sure, that's a good thing, but it says nothing about how much excess non-green capacity was decomissioned last year (relatively speaking,

  • Suspicious (Score:4, Informative)

    by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Sunday November 16, 2025 @09:28AM (#65798787) Homepage
    Read the article, couple pretty graphs from a group called Ember which I never heard of. Why am I suspicious. Well here https://www.texastribune.org/2... [texastribune.org] is an actual buildout of a 1.2GW fossil plant for A data center. Lets do the numbers. 1.2GW x 24 x 365 = 10.5TWh. As another example, we also know musk added temp gen's for the memphis DC and some are still running. We also know turbines are back ordered and in fact several are using old jet engines to spin generators for power. So while the graphs are pretty, other on the ground facts tell me the graphs are not accurate. I just am not hearing of gas plants being retired but I have heard of coal plants coming back to you guessed it, power data centers.

    • Just because they need the fossil plants for 100% uptime doesn't tell you how often they run.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      The average uptime for a coal power plant is between 70% and 90%. Your example should be closer to 8 TWh/year. That means that you would need about 80 of them to provide the same power as Wind and Solar.

      • Re:Suspicious (Score:5, Informative)

        by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Sunday November 16, 2025 @11:18AM (#65798857) Homepage
        Its nat gas, not coal. There is a reason DC's are going up like weeds in west tx and PA. Both have nat gas. Easy access to power. And to add to that, no one seems to be explaining why the those gas turbines are backordered for years. https://www.publicpower.org/pe... [publicpower.org] If there is no demand for more fossil, why can't I(well not me obviously) buy a turbine? From the article from Nextra "He said that “if we want to build a new gas-fired generation facilitywe can’t get it online until 2032.”

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          They wear out and need to be replaced. Demand was low, AI increased demand, but the manufacturers see it as a bubble and aren't going to massively ramp out output to meet it.

          This reminds me of when Germany built new coal plants and there was much hand wringing. In fact they closed more than they opened, and the new ones were designed to fit better into a heavily renewable grid.

          • I think you are in the EU, which is decreasing some turbines. However EU is outlier according to https://www.powermag.com/gas-p... [powermag.com] And note the para from the article, "So far, all three major OEMs—GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, and Mitsubishi Power—have reported record backlogs. “For the full year, we built approximately 20 GW of gas orders, double last year’s level, and secured 9 GW of slot reservation agreements for new turbines,” GE Vernova’s Strazik said in January. Stra
    • I share your suspicions that this is industry propaganda. I think it worked since people are drawing conclusions that have nothing to do with the information provided. What the story seems to indicate is that despite all the investment in sustainable energy, electricity and emissions from fossil fuel plants have continued to increase until now. We have finally reached a point for the first time where sustainable energy has matched the increase in demand. Hopefully that will continue to be the case. But that

    • You didn’t “raise concerns.” You ran the full fossil-fuel-shill playbook: swap global system-level data for isolated anecdotes, misstate the claims in the articles, throw in some turbine panic, and hope nobody notices the pivot. Nobody compresses this many logical fallacies and misdirections into one post by accident.

      Read the article, couple pretty graphs from a group called Ember which I never heard of.

      Not knowing a research group is not a rebuttal. Ember is literally one of the main global electricity-market data aggregators used by IEA, IRENA, and multiple national regula

      • with all that text you failed to capture the concept of if turbine manufacturers are backlogged 7 years, the demand is clearly there. I've also read stories about pipeline capacity is another issue, which is why they are planting these dc's near gas wells. No pipeline needed. Lastly, have you seen the numbers for AI? Seriously. Nvidea is dropping a new system out ina little over a year. A single rack will consume 600kw. https://www.tomshardware.com/p... [tomshardware.com] I thought I read a single datacenter has between 15000
  • the emissions curve stops looking like a parabola with a positive second derivative. Theres basically only one way that carbon is getting in the atmosphere - humans burning fermented dino in mountain-sized quantities. Until that curve changes, articles like this are like a toddler denying they were in the cookie jar while their mouth is smeared with crumbs and bits of chocolate chip. Uh huh. Sure.

    • The second derivative on emissions has been negative for a while.

      China had massive surpluses of PV to get rid off internally, I could see that compensating for India in 2025 and everyone else relevant is flat or declining.

      • PS. assuming the Trump effect won't kick in for the US over 2025.

      • Hm. Here's one source of data.

        https://ourworldindata.org/co2... [ourworldindata.org]

        If you look at some of the curves, squint, and believe in the power of positive thinking, there MIGHT have been an inflection point a few years ago. I sincerely hope you're right. But I'm pretty skeptical.

        Here's a plot from a .gov website. Archived, from before the Trump administration, so I'm more inclined to believe this stuff than whatever's being blessed for public release nowadays. No downwards movement in this data, that's for sur

  • Wind plus solar installations are 3000 MW here. The output is represented by the green line.

    https://transmission.bpa.gov/b... [bpa.gov]

    What do you think the capacity factor might be?

    9 hours 16 minutes of daylight expected today, skies partly cloudy, current wind speed is 8 mph.

  • How long will this lie prevail? Solar and wind doesn't cover all new power demand. The do if you look at how much is installed and theoretically possible on an ultimate day. However, it always comes up short when demand is there

    • Solar and wind doesn't cover all new power demand

      This article would seem to indicate that is a lie. Do you have some evidence that contradicts that or are you just refusing to change your mind in when facts contradict your previous world view?

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