To put this in perspective, China installs around 3x that every single day https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
Still, an order of magnitude less new capacity than China - but not two orders.
It’s OK to celebrate small wins. The US doesn’t have to be #1 in everything. We also seem to have a curious diseconomy of scale on mega infrastructure projects for complex reasons, so maybe slow growth is the right approach.
Energy heavy use cases with little to no energy costs will lap western industries.
In order to keep growing, the US power grid is going to need big, coordinated projects. Solar, wind, transmission lines, and batteries.
I think with political interest from Dems who like renewables, and big business who need energy, there's will in the US to do it, but of course it's the US, so we'll do the right thing after every possible alternative has been exhausted.
I agree that eventually there's going to be no choice but to start investing in renewables. That's going to be the only way to meet the demand, and renewables are already becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. But it is going to take time. Building stuff in the physical world takes years, and that requires sustained commitment at the political level.
In many ways this mirrors the way America walked into the housing crisis with its eyes closed.
> That same Bloomberg analysis found that areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over the past five years.
> director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative and co-author of a March 2025 paper exploring how the public is funding Big Tech’s power-intensive facilities. “Utilities are building infrastructure, and then we all pay for it because that’s how the utility business model has always worked,” he says.
> Residential electricity costs are also rising because the rush of new hyperscale data centers wanting to draw power from the grid is spiking demand. That drives up prices for everyone, Peskoe says
This Dept. of Energy analysis, which was recently updated, makes a lot more sense. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...
> In some cases, spikes in load growth can result in significant, near-term retail price increases. Results from recent capacity auctions in the mid-Atlantic region prove this point, with sizable impacts on retail pricing beginning in 2025 (e.g., Howland, 2025). The duration of such impacts remains unclear, however, and will depend on the ability to build new cost-effective infrastructure to serve new loads. In other cases, utilities have argued that load growth will reduce average retail prices, consistent with our analysis of recent impacts (e.g., PG&E, 2025). Overall, our results cast doubt on the simple view that load growth will necessarily increase prices over the medium- to longer-term. Emerging evidence from 2025 suggests near-term impacts that can be either positive or negative; medium- to longer-term effects are uncertain.
Basically says “Maybe it makes retail more expensive, maybe it doesn’t”
And quite frankly I no longer fully trust the DoE. Politically captured by the trump administration, and directed to lie about renewables. Probably the folk writing this study are still trustworthy, but sadly I have a seed of doubt now.