Over the last month, I've spent most of my time trying to understand how America's electric grid is changing.
Here's what I learned:
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1/ Solar’s growth appears to be slowing.
After years of double digit growth rates, annualized utility-scale solar capacity additions have actually fallen by 6% since the end of 2024.
The battery market continues to boom.
Battery storage hasn’t seen the same slowdown that solar has. Instead, annualized battery capacity additions have grown by 284% in the last three years and 38% in the last year alone.
For the last few months I've been going through public documents, permits, and satellite images to track the largest data centers in the US.
Today I published the first story about what I've learned.
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Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, tech companies have spent huge sums of money building data centers.
In just three years, spending on data centers in the US has gone from $13.8 billion to $41.2 billion per year—an increase of 200%.
I’ve been skeptical of the AI power demand story at times.
But in the years since I first started writing about it, many AI infrastructure projects have gone from the realm of press releases to actual operating projects.
The growth of grid-scale batteries in the US continues to explode.
Over the last 12 months, the country added 13.2 GW of battery capacity—50% more than a year ago.
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The main reason for the growth of grid batteries in the US is the falling cost of the technology in recent years.
In the last decade batteries have become really cheap. In 2010 the average lithium-ion battery cost $1200 per kilowatt-hour. Today they cost $115 on average.
As prices have fallen, batteries have also been able to compete with natural gas peaker plants.
These traditional fossil fuel power plants are expensive to build and uneconomic in many cases given they are designed to only run 10-20% of the year when demand is highest.
"A better analysis would use the cost of generating power in order to isolate the impact of renewables. We can get a better estimate of that by using the wholesale price of electricity"
And there's no correlation between wholesale electricity prices and renewables in Europe.