Aerial view of the Oberon Solar O&M farm on March 24, 2024 in Ector County, Texas. In 2023, Texas led the nation in solar installations on its power grid, surpassing California for its second consecutive year.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Solar is booming in the United States as power demand surges, outpacing the growth of any other electricity source and disproving claims that the energy transition is a failure.
The energy transition from fossil fuels has faced substantial criticism from leaders in the oil and gas industry, who have argued that renewables still represent a fraction of power generation despite decades of investment. Renewables also face reliability problems, they say, when the sun is not shining or the wind not blowing.
To be sure, solar remains a small portion of total electricity generation in the U.S., standing at just 3.9% of the nation’s power mix in 2023 compared to the 43% share held by natural gas, according to the Energy Information Administration, the statistical unit within the Department of Energy.
And renewables face substantial logistical challenges in connecting to an aging power grid that is not prepared for the level of new demand the U.S. is facing after a long period of little growth.
But leaders in the clean energy industry argue that the sector is reaching a turning point, particularly as Big Tech firms such as Amazon and Microsoft seek clean energy to power data centers that are the backbone of the Internet and artificial intelligence applications. The economic argument for renewables has also strengthened, they say, as the price of solar modules and batteries has fallen.
“They are cheaper, they are clean and quite frankly easier to site, so the future is going to be renewable energy,” said Andrés Gluski, CEO of AES Corporation, a power company that has signed large power agreements with the likes of Alphabet’s Google unit and Amazon. AES operates both renewable and gas-powered plants.
Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Google alone represented 40% of the demand for large, utility-scale solar projects in the U.S. over the past five years, according to a May research note from investment bank UBS. Renewable demand from these companies, which are all committed to 100% clean energy, is poised to climb — artificial intelligence requires 10 times more electricity than the typical Google search, according to UBS.
Solar is forecast to make up 58% of new electricity generation installed in the U.S. in 2024, according to an estimate from the Department of Energy. A record 36 gigawatts of solar is scheduled to be added to the grid this year, nearly double last year’s increase, while battery storage will more than double to 14.3 gigawatts.
Just 2.5 gigawatts of natural gas, by contrast, is expected to be installed in the U.S. in 2024, coming in at just 4% of the 62.8 gigawatts of total planned power additions and the lowest number in 25 years.
“We’re seeing this kind of surge in demand for clean power,” said Joseph Rand, energy policy researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We’ve seen the economics of wind and solar, for example, become very competitive and very attractive to the point where in many parts of the U.S., those are the cheapest forms that … can generate a unit of electricity.”
Historic power usage
The U.S. is facing a historic wave of electricity demand. As geopolitical tensions encourage protectionism, manufacturing is moving back to the U.S. with the support of the CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to increase domestic semiconductor production, the building block of the digital economy.
Though electric vehicle adoption slowed at the end of 2023, a record 1.2 million car buyers went electric last year, 7.6% of the U.S. vehicle market — up from 5.9% in 2022, according to Kelley Blue Book.
And Big Tech is building out energy intensive data centers to support the artificial intelligence revolution. In 2023, data centers representing three gigawatt hours of electricity were under construction in the top eight U.S. markets, a 46% increase over 2022, according to real estate services firm CBRE.
As these trends collide, electricity demand could surge 20% by 2030 after more than a decade of stagnation, according to an April analysis by Wells Fargo. Data centers are expected to make up 8% of U.S. electricity consumption by the end of the decade — more than double their current share, Goldman Sachs said in April.
Explosive power demand poses a challenge to the Biden administration’s goal of converting the U.S. power grid to 100% clean electricity by 2035.
“The demand growth and the electrification is all kind of a Catch 22 because the more demand you have, the harder it is to decarbonize,” said Ryan Sweezey, principal analyst for North America power and renewables at the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
Solar vs. natural gas
Natural gas producers are betting that they are better positioned than renewables to meet the demand, particularly from data centers. They argue that gas is cheap, abundant, quickly deployable and above all reliable. Though a fossil fuel, gas is also playing a role in the energy transition by displacing dirtier coal plants, according to the gas industry.
“The primary use of these data centers is big tech and I believe they’re beginning to recognize the role that natural gas and nuclear must play,” Richard Kinder, executive chairman of Kinder Morgan, one of the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline operators, told analysts on the company’s first quarter earnings call in April.
“They, like the rest of us, realize that the wind doesn’t blow all the time, the sun doesn’t shine all the time, that the use of batteries to overcome the shortfall is not practically or economically feasible,” Kinder said.
Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser effectively declared the transition away from fossil fuels a failure during a March energy conference in Houston, saying wind and solar supply under 4% of the world’s energy. Two-thirds of emissions reductions in the U.S. were due to the transition to gas from coal, Nasser said.
Massive backlog
Dan Shugar, the CEO of Nextracker, pushed back against the argument that natural gas will be the biggest beneficiary of data center power demand. Nextracker is a leading U.S. solar firm, building systems that allow panels to track to the position of the sun, improving the efficiency of solar power plants.
Shugar pointed to the massive number of renewable projects in the U.S. seeking connection to the power grid. Nearly 2,500 gigawatts of solar, wind and battery projects were requesting connection in 2023, almost double the entire installed capacity of the current U.S. power plant fleet, according to an analysis by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
There were just over 1,000 gigawatts of solar power seeking grid connection last year, nearly 14 times more than the 79 gigawatts of natural gas that is in the power queue, according to Lawrence Berkeley.
Solar demand is rising as the power source has become cost competitive with natural gas in areas. Solar for large utility projects costs $29 to $92 per megawatt hour of electricity, while combined cycle gas plants cost between $45 to $108, according to a June analysis by financial advisory firm Lazard.
The costs rise for solar with battery storage, however, to between $60 to $210 per megawatt hour, though tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act can push those prices down to $38 to $171, the Lazard analysis found.
“There’ll be some gas, but we believe based especially on the data published by the DOE, the predominant energy source for these data centers is going to be renewable energy,” Nextracker’s Shugar told CNBC in an interview. The tech companies developing data centers have “very serious sustainability goals and don’t want their power coming from fossil,” the CEO said.
“The short story is we see data centers becoming an increasingly significant demand driver for renewables both from [an] aggregate demand standpoint as well as an environmentally preferred source of energy,” Shugar said.
The grid isn’t ready
The U.S. could achieve 90% clean electricity by 2035 if about 1,400 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity are deployed, according to a series of reports published by the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and GridLab.
While the current backlog of renewables would surpass that threshold, getting those projects authorized for connection to the grid and building out the physical transmission lines pose substantial challenges. Only 20% of projects seeking connection to the grid between 2000 and 2018 were actually completed, according to Lawrence Berkeley.
The rate by which renewables are deployed would need to at least triple to achieve 90% clean electricity over the next decade, said Amol Phadke, senior scientist at the Goldman School and Lawrence Berkeley.
But it is taking longer to build power plants after their initial application. For plants that came online in 2023, it took about five years from the initial application for grid connection until construction was finished, said Rand, the Lawrence Berkeley analyst. In 2008, it took just two years, he said.
The bottleneck for projects applying to connect to the grid should ease later this decade, said Sweezey, the Wood Mackenzie analyst. Building out transmission, on the other hand, is more challenging because the infrastructure requires complex permitting across multiple state, local and federal agencies, he said.
“It’s kind of a maze, a labyrinth of a process,” Sweezey said. “We need to start proactively planning to deliver large scale transmission lines” to demand centers, he said. Historically, most utilities haven’t done this type of planning, focusing instead on near-term reliability issues, the analyst said.
Batteries are essential
The other challenge that renewables face is generating enough power to meet demand when sun and wind conditions are not at their peak. Batteries are key to solving this problem by collecting power during peak weather conditions and dispatching the energy later in the day when it is most needed.
Right now, most lithium ion batteries on the market typically store four hours of power though this varies depending on the project. This is not enough to provide reliable power for the entire day, analysts say. Batteries that can store eight hours or more of power are needed on a commercial scale, they say.
A fully renewable electric grid is not possible today because banks of longer duration batteries are not currently cost effective, said Reid Ramdathsingh, senior renewables and power analyst at the consulting firm Rystad Energy.
“You’re going to have so much downtime on the batteries that it’s a lot of wastage in terms of the cost,” Ramdathsingh said. “It all comes down to the actual pricing and getting that return on the investment.”
But executives at Fluence, one of the leading battery providers for utility-scale projects in the U.S., see the economics becoming more favorable as energy demand rises. Fluence was launched by AES Corporation and Siemens in 2018.
John Zahurancik, president of Fluence’s Americas region, said batteries are about 20 times cheaper than they were in the early 2000s. Batteries face a declining value curve in which each hour of storage is less valuable than the previous hour, Zahurancik said. But as energy demand increases, the value of each additional hour should rise, eventually making longer duration batteries more cost effective, he said.
“A lot of this is not so much a technology breakthrough needed, it’s been the economics of scale,” Zahuranick told CNBC. “We’ve been steadily driving costs out of systems that we’ve deployed.”
In California, for example, solar energy represented more than 50% of the state’s power supply from 7:45 a.m. until 5:25 p.m., peaking at about 18 gigawatts or 64% of supply around 1 p.m., according to Grid Status, which tracks major U.S. grids in real time. Batteries were a top three energy source from 7:25 p.m. until shortly before 9:20 p.m., peaking at about 6 gigawatts or 20% of supply at 8:25 p.m.
“You can do it 100% with renewables, you just need a whole lot more renewables,” AES CEO Gluski said of meeting power demand. “I do agree that we’re going to need natural gas to shore up … renewables until batteries become ubiquitous and cheap enough to make up for that,” he added.
AES has signed agreements to provide renewable power around the clock to some tech companies running data centers.
One example is an agreement AES signed with Google in 2021 to power its Virginia data center campus with 90% carbon-free energy on an hourly basis using wind, solar, hydro and battery storage resources.
While natural gas will act as a bridge fuel, the CEO said he’s not seeing tech companies, for example, asking for new fossil fuel plants to power data centers.
“All of them want to be part of an energy transition,” Gluski said. “I don’t see anybody saying build me gas and coal plants to power my data centers.”
That network of dependable high-speed chargers, paired with solid app integration that makes it easy for Tesla drivers to find available chargers just about anywhere in the US, gave the brand a leg up – but no more. By opening up the Supercharger network to brands like Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and others, Tesla has given away its biggest competitive advantage.
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Add in charging and route-planning apps like Chargeway, that make navigating the transition from CCS to NACS easier than ever with its intuitive colors and numbers and easy on/off switch for vehicles equipped with NACS adapters, and it feels like the time is right to start suggesting alternatives to the old EV industry stalwarts. As such, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Here, then, are my picks for the best Tesla S3XY (and Cybertruck) alternatives you can buy.
Less Model S, more Lucid Air
Lucid Air sedans; via Lucid.
Developed by OG Tesla Model S engineers with tunes from Annie Get Your Gun playing continuously in their heads, the Lucid Air promises to be the car Tesla should and could have built, if only Elon had listened to the engineers.
With panel fit, material finish, and overall build quality that’s at least as good as anything else in the automotive space, the Lucid Air is a compelling alternative to the Model S at every price level – and I, for one, would take a “too f@#king fast” Lucid Air Sapphire over an “as seen on TV” Model S Plaid any day of the week. And, with Supercharger access reportedly coming later this quarter, Air buyers will have every advantage the Supercharger Network can provide.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Less Model 3, more Hyundai IONIQ 6
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 6 Limited; via Hyundai.
Hyundai has been absolutely killing it these days, with EVs driving record sales and new models earning rave reviews from the automotive press. Even in that company the IONIQ 6 stands out, with up to 338 miles of EPA-rated range and lickety-quick 350 kW charging available to make road tripping easy – especially now that the aerodynamically efficient IONIQ 6 has Supercharger access through a NACS adapter (the 2026 “facelift” models get a NACS port as standard).
Once upon a time, Mrs. Jo Borrás and I were shopping three-row SUVs and found ourselves genuinely drawn to the then-new Model X. Back then it was the only three-row EV on the market, but it wasn’t Elon’s antics or access to charging, or even the Model X’s premium pricing that squirreled the deal. It was the stupid doors.
We went with the similarly new Volvo XC90 T8 in denim blue, and followed up the big PHEV with a second, three years later, in Osmium Gray. When it’s time to replace this one, you can just about bet your house that the new 510 hp EX90 with 310 miles of all-electric range will be near the top of the shopping list.
The sporty EV6 GT made its global debut by drag racing some of the fastest ICE-powered cars of the day, including a Lamborghini, Mercedes-AMG GT, a Porsche, even a turbocharged Ferrari – and it beat the pants off ’em. Combine supercar-baiting speed with an accessible price tag, NACS accessibility, $10,000 in customer cash on remaining 2024 models ($3,000 on 2025s) and just a hint of Lancia Stratos in the styling, the EV6 is tough to beat.
If you disagree with that statement and feel like driving a new Tesla Cybertruck is the key to happiness, I’m not sure an equally ostentatious GMC Hummer EV or more subtle Rivian R1T will help you scratch that particular itch – but maybe therapy might!
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BYD Shenzhen, the world’s largest car transport ship (Source: BYD)
Republicans launched multiple attacks against EVs, clean air and American jobs this week, at the behest of the oil industry that funds them. These attacks won’t be successful, and EVs will continue to grow regardless, and inevitably take over for outdated gasoline vehicles.
However, these republican attacks on EVs will still have some effect: they will diminish the US auto industry globally, leading to job losses and surrendering one of the jewels in the crown of American industry to China, where there is no similar effort to destroy its own domestic EV industry.
But they should inspire worry for Americans, because they will only harm the country’s domestic manufacturing base in the face of a changing auto industry.
Republicans keep trying to kill clean cars
The last time a republican occupied the the White House, we saw similar efforts to try to raise fuel and health costs for Americans, and to block superior EV technology from flourishing. That didn’t work in the end, and EVs continued to grow both during that period and after.
All the while, fossil fuels have maintained their privileged policy position, being allowed to pollute with impunity and costing the US $760 billion per year in externalized costs. Much of that subsidy is accounted for in the cost of pollution from gas cars, which are one of the primary uses of fossil fuels, which means that, in fact, gasoline vehicles receive much more subsidy than EVs do.
And yet, EVs still managed to grow substantially, despite these headwinds. EV sales have continued to grow, both in the US and globally, even as headlines incorrectly say otherwise. The republican party’s attempts to kill them were futile, and will continue to be.
It didn’t work, but it did delay progress
However, anti-EV actions from Mr. Trump and the republican party did manage to delay progress from where it could have been if America actually instituted smart industrial policy earlier.
Surely the American auto industry would be ahead of where it is now if those investments had had time to come online. But instead, republicans are currently trying to kill those jobs, which has already led to several manufacturing projects being cancelled this year, depriving Americans of the economic boost they need right now.
Meanwhile, there’s one place that this sort of stumbling isn’t happening: China.
China is taking advantage
China has spent more than a decade focusing on securing material supply, building refining capacity, developing their own battery technology, and encouraging local EV manufacturing startups.
This has paid off recently, as Chinese EVs have been rapidly scaling in production in recent years. It took a lot of the auto industry by surprise how rapidly Chinese companies have scaled, and how rapidly Chinese consumers have adopted them, after having an initially slow start.
But that adoption hasn’t just been local, it’s also global. Last year, China became the largest auto exporter in the world, taking a crown that Japan had held for decades. But the change was even more dramatic than that – as recently as 2020, China was the sixth-largest auto exporter in the world, just behind the US in 5th place.
China’s dramatic turn upward started in 2020, and now it’s in first place. Meanwhile, because of all the faffing about, the US remains exactly where it was in 2020 – still in fifth place. Well, sixth now, since China eclipsed us (and everyone else).
But tariffs have been tried before, and they didn’t work. When Japan had a similarly meteoric rise to global prominence as an auto manufacturer in the 1970s and 80s, largely due to their adoption of new technology, processes, and different car styles which incumbents were ignoring, the US tried to stop it with tariffs.
All this did was make US manufacturers complacent, and Japan still managed to seize and maintain the crown of top auto exporter (occasionally trading places with Germany) from then until now.
Then as now, the true way to compete is to adapt to the changing automotive industry and take EVs seriously, rather than giving the auto industry excuses to be complacent. But instead, republicans aren’t doing that, and in fact are working to ensure the American auto industry doesn’t adapt, by actively killing the incentives that were leading to a boom in domestic manufacturing investment.
US auto industry jeopardized by republicans
Make no mistake about it: destroying EV incentives, and allowing companies to pollute more and innovate less, will not help the US auto industry catch up with a fast moving competitor.
As we at Electrek have said for years, you cannot catch up to a competitor that is both ahead of you and moving faster than you.
It also applies to nations, which could have spent the last decade doing what the Chinese auto industry has been doing, but instead non-Chinese automakers have been begging their governments for more time, even though it’s not the regulations that threaten them, it’s competition from a new and motivated rival that is moving faster and in a more determined manner towards the future.
The way that we get around this should be clear: take EVs seriously.
But that’s not what republicans are doing, and in doing so, they are signing the death warrant for an important US industry in the long term.
Another thing republicans are trying to kill is the the rooftop solar credit, which means you could have only until the end of this year to install rooftop solar on your home before the cost of doing so goes up by an average of ~$10,000. So if you want to go solar, get started now, because these things take time and the system needs to be active before you file for the credit.
To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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International equipment manufacturer Vermeer has unveiled a full-scale prototype of its Interlune excavator, a machine designed to ingest 100 metric tons of rocks and dirt per hour, extracting valuable helium as it makes its way across the surface … of the Moon.
Helium plays a critical role in the manufacturing of semiconductors, chips, optics, and all the other stuff that makes EVs, autonomy, the Internet, and the rest of twenty-first century life possible. The problem is that, despite being the second-most common element in the universe, helium is pretty rare on Earth – and we are rapidly running out. As such, there are intense economic and political pressures to find new and reliable sources of helium somewhere, anywhere else, and that demand has sparked a new modern space race focused on harvesting helium on the Moon and getting it back home.
To that end, companies like American lunar mining startup Interlune and the Iowa-based equipment experts at Vermeer are partnering on the development of suite of interplanetary equipment assets capable of digging up lunar materials like rocks and sand from up to three meters below the surface, extract helium-3 (a light, stable isotope of helium believed to exist in abundance on the Moon), then package it, contain it, and ship it back to Earth.
“When you’re operating equipment on the Moon, reliability and performance standards are at a new level,” says Rob Meyerson, Interlune CEO. “Vermeer has a legacy of innovation and excellence that started more than 75 years ago, which makes them the ideal partner for Interlune.”
The company showed a scaled prototype of the machine at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (above), emphasizing the need to develop new ways to operate equipment assets in the extreme temperatures of extraplanetary environments beyond diesel or even hydrogen combustion.
On the airless surface of the moon, it would be impossible for an internal combustion engine to operate on the moon’s surface because there is no oxygen for combustion. Electrically powered machines seem the obvious solution with solar power generation supplying the electricity. But the answer is not that simple.
Temperature changes on the surface of the moon are extreme. They can soar to 110° C and plummet to -170° C. Developing electric construction machinery to perform in this environment is no easy task, but Komatsu is tackling issues one by one as they appear. Using thermal control and other electrification technologies, we are engineering solutions.
Despite Komatsu’s apparent head start, however, Vermeer seem to pulled ahead – not just in terms of machine development, but in terms of extraction potential as well.
“The high-rate excavation needed to harvest helium-3 from the Moon in large quantities has never been attempted before, let alone with high efficiency,” said Gary Lai, Interlune co-founder and CTO. “Vermeer’s response to such an ambitious assignment was to move fast. We’ve been very pleased with the results of the test program to date and look forward to the next phase of development.”
Interlune is funded by grants from the US Department of Energy and NASA TechFlights. In 2023, the company received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research award to develop the technology to size and sort lunar regolith (read: dirt). Interlune has raised $18 million in funding so far, and is planning its first mission to the Moon before 2030.
Electrek’s Take
Interlune helium harvester concept; via Interlune.
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