A recent story by The New Yorker dove into the astonishing growth of solar energy over the past few years. Among other extensive data, the magazine notes that renewables made up 96 percent of demand for new energy throughout the globe in 2024; In the United States, 93 percent of new energy capacity came from solar and wind.
But while renewables writ large are having their day, the speed at which solar energy in particular is growing blows everything else out of the water.
For example, it’s now estimated that the world is now installing one gigawatt worth of solar energy infrastructure every 15 hours — or about the output of a new coal plant.
For some historical context, the New Yorker notes that it took 68 years since the invention of the first photovoltaic solar cell in 1954 to construct a single terawatt’s worth of solar power. It took just two years to hit the second terawatt in 2024, and the third is expected within mere months.
This explosive growth has been fueled by huge efficiency gains in solar energy output, breakthroughs in manufacturing, and streamlined installation processes. There’ve also been huge developments in panel recycling, meaning the darker side of solar energy — mineral extraction and panel fabrication — might one day be a thing of the past.
We are looking to add solar to our roof this year, and even if wet do not add batteries we will still generate enough to run our ac during the hottest parts of the day. And hopefully the added shade from the panels will require the AC to run a little less.
I can tell you after doing it on a house in Colorado, it’s a satisfying thing. It covers the sunniest hours, and we have batteries enough to get us past peak hours. I do wish we built it bigger and put more batteries in it, but that seems always true.
Solar and AC is a great combo. Almost by definition, when you need AC you know the sun is shining and so the energy to run the AC is therefore free
I live in the UK so no AC and tbh not really worth bothering with it. What really could excess solar energy be used for in summer? Also don’t drive so no car charging, got a heat pump for heating and hot water but heating is unused in summer and hot water isn’t used much either. Just a little for showering but even then not very much as I go for cool showers.
Dehumidifier if it’s wet or you have a basement. Washing machine. Clothes dryer on a timer if you don’t hang dry. Dishwasher if you have one (uses more power than you think - they start with cold water and electrically heat it even if you have a water heater). Pump water to a cistern if you have a well (or lake if you’re on a bit of land - good for irrigation and even pumped hydro). Any tool that uses a universal motor. EV charging (including bikes).
Look around your house - anything that you only do once a day or less is fair game.
Sadly I think none of those options really apply to me. We don’t usually have basements here and dehumidifiers are more commonly used in winter rather than summer. Washing machine I do have but run it on a low temperature so while that would work it isn’t going to be making much difference. Clothes dry outside, don’t have a dishwasher, water is from the mains, no EV to charge.
A well could be nice for garden water rather than using the mains but I live in the middle of a town and my back garden is only around 50m², that said I just looked it up and apparently you don’t need permission if you extract less than 20m³ a day. So from a legal standpoint I could do it and there is no way you could use that much water for a residential property unless you have a large pool that you are regularly filling and emptying for some reason.
On our forever home, I want to install solar panels and a redundant AC system, or maybe just a backup AC system in a single room. We’re in the US PNW. Here, heat waves are becoming more and more a threat to human life. Where we’re at, we can get rare heat waves that go up to 112F, and that’s in an area where historically AC wasn’t common. It’s only in the last decade or two that it’s started to be viewed as a necessity. But thankfully when we get more of a dry heat, and the highest temp days are win the Sun is shining brightly. So I would like to have a setup where our home was essentially equipped as a lethal heat wave survival shelter, where we would be fine even if the grid fails. And part of that would likely just be keeping a duplicate AC, maybe just for a single room to shelter in, in the event of a lethal heatwave.
My parents have solar panels, A/C, and a heat pump pool heater and their electric bill is practically nothing in the summer.
This sounds like a level of rich I was previously unaware of. Pool heater?
It’s not uncommon in the Northeast. It lets you get more use of the pool earlier and later in the season. You can start swimming in mid May and go right through to the end of September.
I live in the UK and have been swimming in the sea since April, main limitation I find is if it’s a warm day or not as getting out to cold wind is pretty miserable. Water temperature is just a suggestion - double digits is optional. Though yeah 8°c usually means it will be a short swim.
Currently the water is 19c in the sea where I live, never seen it this warm, so I guess thanks global warming?
It’s about a six hour drive to get to the ocean from here, and we only have rivers full of agricultural runoff or ice-cold mountains streams to swim in.