On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released a full year of data on how the country generated electricity through 2025. It’s a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is that total demand increased significantly, and a large part of it was met by the use of additional coal. The good thing is that solar power continued its amazing growth, generating 35 percent more electricity than a year ago and overtaking hydroelectric power for the first time.
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Overall, electricity consumption in the US increased by 2.8 percent, or about 121 terawatt-hours. Consumption has been largely flat for several decades, with efficiency and the decline of industry outweighing the effects of population and economic growth. However, there were a lot of changes year-to-year, driven by factors ranging from heating and cooling demand to the global pandemic. Given that history, the increase in demand in 2025 is a bit worrying, but it is not yet a clear sign that the factors that essentially drive growth have come into play.
(These factors include things like switches to heat pumps, electrification of transportation, and an increase in data centers. While the first two of them involve more efficient use of energy overall, they involve electricity replacing the direct use of fossil fuels, and therefore will increase demand on the grid.)
The story of the year is how that demand was met. If demand grows slowly, an additional 85 terawatt-hours generated by expanded utility-scale and small solar installations could easily meet it. As it was, the growth of utility-scale solar power was only enough to cover about two-thirds of growing demand (or 73 percent if you include wind power). Since there were no new nuclear plants on the horizon, the alternative was to supplement it with fossil fuels.
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